What’s wrong with “the mindful brain”? Moving past a neurocentric view of meditation
Casting Light on the Dark Side of Brain Imaging January 1, 2019 M. Lifshitz, Evan Thompson
Meditation is widely promoted as a brain-training tool for improving happiness, productivity, and inner peace, but this perspective overlooks its social and embodied dimensions. The work argues that reducing meditation to neural patterns ignores the richness of these practices and what they reveal about subjective experience. Meditation is better understood as a deeply social, culturally embedded set of embodied practices, not merely a technique for shaping private mental life.