Developing Attention and Decreasing Affective Bias: Towards a Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science of Mindfulness

After being excluded from mainstream science during the behaviorist era, the study of consciousness returned to cognitive science in the 1980s and has since generated extensive research on the neurophysiological basis of conscious experience and the roles of attention and emotion. This research climate offers valuable but underused resources for understanding mindfulness meditation, which in Buddhist tradition is part of a process of awakening. Advances in the cognitive science of consciousness can deepen understanding of how contemplative attention-training practices function in both traditional and modern clinical contexts.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The study of consciousness was banished from respectable science with the rise of behaviorism in the early 20th century. Beginning in the 1980s, however, researchers in cognitive science began to return to the topic (e.g., Baars, 1988; Chalmers, 1996; Crick & Koch, 1990; Dennett, 1991), In recent decades, there has been an explosion of research on the neurophysiological processes underlying conscious experience (Tononi & Koch, 2008), as well as the ways in which attention (Mole, Smithies, & Wu, 2011) and emotion (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007) shape conscious experience. We think that this research climate is beneficial for understanding the nature and benefits of mindfulness meditation because advances in the cognitive science of consciousness provide an important but as yet underused resource for deepening our understanding of how contemplative attentiontraining practices function in traditional Buddhist and modern clinical contexts. Mindfulness meditation is traditionally said to be part of a process of “awakening” (bodhi). In keeping with this idea, many teachers characterize mindfulness as involving one’s becoming more conscious of subtle bodily stimuli and emotional C H A P T E R 3