Mindfulness meditation (MM) did not reduce the perceived duration of experimental pain. In a two-session experiment, participants verbally estimated the duration of painful, non-painful tactile, and neutral visual stimulations before and after a one-week MM or control intervention. Contrary to expectations, the results showed no evidence that MM alters the temporal dimension of pain. The effects of MM on pain experience do not appear to extend to how long pain is perceived to last.
Encoding an event during an out-of-body illusion increases the likelihood that it will later be recalled from a third-person perspective. Participants experienced a social interaction under an out-of-body illusion, viewing the event and their own body from an external perspective. In recall sessions approximately one week later, events encoded in the out-of-body condition were significantly less likely to be recalled from a first-person perspective compared to a control condition. The finding suggests that the perspective adopted at encoding, not only reconstructive processes at recall, contributes to whether a memory is recalled from a third-person perspective.
Autonoetic consciousness, the sense of self that allows mentally traveling back in time to re-experience personal memories, may be linked to visual perspective. This review examines whether recalling an event from a first-person perspective enhances the subjective feeling of reliving it. It covers current measures of autonoetic consciousness, work on visual imagery and memory, and evidence relating visual perspective to autonoetic consciousness. Neural evidence points to the parietal cortex, especially the angular gyrus, as playing a role in these processes, as shown by experimental manipulations of perspective in episodic memory.