The music of what happens:mind, meditation, and music as movement
Ansuman Biswas
Oxford University Press eBooks July 28, 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553792.003.0040 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Citations | 6 |
| Key points | Argues that first-person data, as accessed through artistic and meditative practices like vipassana, are essential for describing the subjective experience of consciousness, which third-person scientific methods cannot capture. |
Abstract
A significant lacuna in academic and scientific studies of consciousness is a description of how it actually feels to be here. The study of consciousness has proved to be extremely elusive when using the traditional third-person methodology of science. Any description of qualia — by definition lived, subjective experience — seems to necessitate the admission of first-person data, which has hitherto been the province of the arts. If the problem of consciousness is nothing more than the attempt to capture the mechanism and experience of being a person, then each of us can appeal to only one authority for an answer. This chapter speaks from the personal perspective of a multidisciplinary artist-researcher, drawing on the experience of a praxis that inhabits a space between art, science, and religion. It offers a richly personal account of music and consciousness that is at every stage informed by the practice and principles of vipassana meditation.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |