Both concentrative and mindfulness meditators outperformed non-meditators on a test of sustained attention, with long-term meditators performing better than short-term meditators. Mindfulness meditators were superior to concentrative meditators when the stimulus was unexpected, but no difference emerged when the stimulus was expected. The findings suggest that different attentional mechanisms underlie the two types of meditation, with implications for mental health.
The author recounts an intellectual journey from childhood religious interests through adolescent fascination with mystical experience to the 1956 publication of a paper arguing that consciousness is a brain process. That paper, which proposed the thesis as a reasonable scientific hypothesis not dismissible on logical grounds alone, is described as a watershed in philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem. Its impact, though limited to professional philosophers in the English-speaking world, is compared in magnitude to Descartes's Meditations.