How Meditation Transforms Experience: Towards a Computational Mechanistic Understanding
Timothy Shawn Gadsby Prest
Monash University November 10, 2026 DOI: 10.26180/34963732 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key points | Proposes that active inference can explain how meditation produces its experiential effects, with "letting go" driving experiential deconstruction and thereby increasing positive affect and wellbeing. Argues that long-term practice alters selfhood and thus perception and action, and that nature experience can produce meditation-like effects through the structuring of our models of the world. |
Abstract
This thesis addresses the question of how transformative meditation practices produce their experiential effects. It develops specific computational-mechanistic proposals for how this occurs using a computational framework called active inference. It makes empirically informed proposals about how experiential deconstruction occurs in meditation and how "letting go" drives this process, and how the process increases positive affect and wellbeing. It explores how selfhood changes with long-term meditative practice, altering perception and action, and how nature experience can produce meditation-like effects due to the structuring of our models of the world.
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 |