There is much accumulated evidence (see e.g. recent findings of PEt - positron emission tomogrpahy) that there is a strong correlation between the brain activity and the contents of our consciousness. (Some recent results suggest that even certain dream contents can be identified). Nevertheless nobody knows how to find a one-to-one relation between thoughts, emotions etc. and brain activity patterns. For me the main question is whether one accepts the existence of the "self" who is the subject of all sensations or considers the "self" only as a mental construct, the result of processes. I think that there is no chance for structured and rational discussion on such matters between two persons who disagree at this point. For one group the only reality is the brain and its activites and they larely disregard the subjective sensations of the test subject. Others would cocentrate on the states of conscisuousness. EEG also detects characteritsic differences in trance or in hypnosis (the so-called theta waves). But it dose not really help to understand the porcesses behind them. And thos who look for altered states of conscoiusness are not after brain awes but after the experience itself.

Thank you for your response. I do however think that even subjective experience does require some neural correlate, how else would it exist? Maybe those who look for altered states of consciousness are not after brain waves, this does however not prevent us from trying to understand whether there is an objective, measurable mechanism underlying the subjective experience. What you say (and I agree), namely that there are differences in brain waves in hypnosis or trance, suggests that there is indeed a neural correlate to those states of consciousness, just like there is a change in brain waves when we sleep.

I still wonder however, what this change in brain waves actually mirrors or causes and whether the induced state of relaxation is the cause of the feeling of a widened consciousness, or whether these phenomena are unrelated?

Michele, I would submit that sudies in child psychology provide some clues. Observable behavior changes seem to precede detectable changes in brain wave activity. For instance, infants at about 7 months of age exhibit noticable changes in behavior, just ask any parent of small ones, yet the changes in brain wave activity are most often recorded around 12 months. Likewise changes in how long term memory seems to be stored, becoming far more efficient, occurs around age 10, yet the next change in brain wave activity occurs around age 12.

These points suggest to me that consciousness influences brain wave/neoronal activity, not brain wave/neoronal activity consciousness.

Hi Michelle,

I'd say there are several questions within what you have asked. First, because consciousness itself has not been defined in many ways that are operationally useful, it is hard to say what "widened" consciousness might be. Second, when consciousness is not operationally defined, it is hard to specify its biological correlates accurately.

My own approach, which is in development, is to focus instead on attention as a somatic phenomenon. In this context, attention is not defined by what it is pointed at, but at where it arises from within the lived experience of the body. For example, if I ask someone, Where is your attention? they might say, Oh, it's on that couple over there on the bench. That is defining attention in the language of its object. But as a phenomenon within the lived experience of the body, it is possible to notice that the sense of "me" from which that attention is being directed is actually in my head. In the dominant cultures of the West, this "little person in the head" seems to be quite the norm. However, my somatic phenomenological inquiry into meditative states suggests to me that what meditation involves is precisely the movement of this felt sense of self, this source of the experience of attention, out of the head and into the body, resulting in what Eugene Gendlin (he of Focusing) calls the "felt sense." This is, in fact, a quite different sort of engagement with the world, in which one's connection with others and with nature seems to be felt in a much more immediate way. One could consider this shift to be a widening of consciousness.

If this sort of answer is of any interest to you, I would direct you to my 2007 paper in Journal of Consciousness Studies entitled, Quantitative Somatic Phenomenology: Toward an Epistemology of Subjective Experience--it is available on my ResearchGate page.

I'm not an authority on meditation, I believe what matters is what one is thinking about. So, this kinda sesame seed, west coast, Yoga method is a mystery to me. Nonetheless, I am interested in broadening my Western mind. This is what first comes to mind when I think of major Eastern philosophies and stress:

1)A major part of meditation, from what I know of is to see the cosmos as one organism. This would help one organize the chaos within, but also outside, so there would be a symmetry with one's inner-self and outer-self. Would this be important, would though have a +/- effect on one's life? Stress, which leads to the activation of the sympathetic (fight/flight) system is known to be related to fat storage issues. From weight gain it's a slippery slope to all sorts of other health issues. So here is an effect meditation may have biologically.

2)There have been studies on noise and concentration. For example, many people prefer a relatively quieter setting to contemplate than a relatively noisy setting. The noisy setting may raise one's blood pressure and add to stress levels. Whereas the low noise setting has the opposite effects most often. I think this may relate to "widened consciousness" because when contemplating one's own navel, while meditation, one's senses are usually at a low stress level. Low stress levels coming from the external world may impede on harmonizing the chaos within. This may be an effect that may not just be biological, but also the cognitive and affective dimensions to life, too.

There are many methods of meditation and interpretations of those meditations. I would like to see more scientific evidence also. I think that there could be scientific evidence of this even though part of the puzzle of such a study would be of a qualitatively subjective matter. However, that wouldn't stop us from "asking" people how there lives are and also taking a look into their past, present, and prospective futures. So, one may look at the "widened consciousness" techniques through a Darwinian-like approach, using something like the natural history method. In other words, Look at groups, families, and societies and see how they have evolved, reproduced, and live. Do you think this would work?

Hi Stephen,

I appreciate your thoughts. Just for context, phenomenology is not just a "sesame seed, west coast, Yoga method," and it is unfortunate that processes well-grounded in continental phenomenology and Francisco Varela's neurophenomenology are perceived in this way. In fact, I would argue that, following Charles T. Tart's (1972) proposition for state-specific sciences (which Varela, his students, and I are all arguably attempting to implement), a rational-empirical science is state-bounded within the assumption that the sort of thinking state that is normative in much of dominant Western culture is the only state of mind that can be employed for critical, systematic empirical work. When what Varela termed "phenomenological consciousness" is employed, then common-sense assumptions about the subject-object nature of the world begin to be challenged by experience, and one has the opportunity to see that the Cartesian dualism unconsciously assumed within the standard scientific approach is not itself part of science, but a philosophical variable that, for the most part, is not controlled for in psychological research.

The sort of qualitative work that you propose is, of course, already well established within the social sciences, a new division of qualitative research also just being approved (through name-change) within APA (Div. 5). I appreciate your other suggestions for research. Having some grounding in meditative processes, I would offer that these probably do not hone in on the sort of experience of widened consciousness that meditation seems to offer. You are absolutely right that more scientific work is needed in this area.

Hi Glenn,

Thank you for your reply and the interesting approach you raise. From a phenomenological point of view your description of widened consciousness as an attentional focus onto the body is very accurate and indeed many (sophrology, yoga nidra, progressive muscle relaxation aso.) start off by focussing our attention on the body in order to totally relax it.

Do you think that this switch of the attentional focus from the outside (external focus) to the inside (internal focus) does have a correlate on the localisation of neural activity? Clearly brain waves measured by EEG do vary between sleep and resting states and also between awake and meditation states, so basically there is a neural correlate to the different states of consciousness. However I wonder whether differential brain activation could also be observed using spatial localization methods like fMRI.

Dear Michele Pisani,

My guess is the notion of 'widened consciousness' is a poorly defined term. (1) Personally, I do not see any evidence in neuroscience brain imaging for a single neural substrate for consciousness. As Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens) shows, there are multiple levels of neural substrates for consciousness, from Thalamus to Medial Frontal cortex. Philosophically, I find the notion of a singular concept of consciousness one of the great errors in the history of philosophy and theology. This same error is found in the notion of the 'univocity of being' which Deleuze is so adamant to assert, and Heidegger, and Christian theology. It is an illusion.

(2) I have never seen the term 'widened consciousness' used in any neuroscience study. As you are probably aware there are 50-100 brain imaging studies of subjects engaged in various meditation techniques, yoga, mentalizing religious beliefs, unio mystica practice, etc. Such research has been supported by the Dalai Lama and researchers around the world. There are several research institutes focused on this. Several books in English language written on this subject. I do not know how many in other languages. Some of the research is on the relaxation response, but much is on virtues, such as compassion.

(3) Consciousness is also 'essentially dyadic' if I may speak in terms that others may consider an oxymoron. For the notion of dyad and trans-subjectivity read the currently most exciting philosopher--in my judgment--in the world, Bracha Ettinger.

(4) As for dreaming, I have since the late 1990's, and as practicing psychotherapist wanted to write a book on this, but have not found the time. There are about 6 neuroscience brain imaging studies on dreaming. They show a pattern overlooked by Hobson and other dream researchers, namely there are 6 limbic areas of the brain that are the predominant sites of REM dreaming, from the hypothalamus to the medial Frontal. These are also areas activated by studies of religious experiences. The limbic areas belong to the 'subconscious' and the 'unconscious', ahd these six parallel the six levels of consciousness.

To my mind this highlights the state of neuroscience research with respect to the question of so-called consciousness, sub/pre-consciousness and the unconscious.

For those involved in active research into this area I might note that for either my wife or I, an attempt to monitor our meditation via fMRI would fail. We would both be majorly stressed out by the static magnetic fields. I am not certain just how widespread this phenomena is, but I do know that it is common enough for the World Health Organization to have produced a paper regarding the effects of strong static magnetic fields on some people.

Now if some researcher has an idea of how to monitor the desired brain activity during deep meditation without invoking strong magnetic fields I think that much more progress will be able to be made. Or if someone can determine what it is that causes some people to be aware of and react to strong magnetic fields that might also provide some insights.

Michele, you wrote: "I still wonder however, what this change in brain waves actually mirrors or causes and whether the induced state of relaxation is the cause of the feeling of a widened consciousness, or whether these phenomena are unrelated?"

I think this is a crucial question, and one that frequently underlies determining causality in scientific research. Despite the number of studies that have been published, it seems that a consensus is lacking. How might we design a study that would help answer whether brainwave activity and the state of altered/heightened consciousness are cause, effect, or simply covariation?

Hi Michele,

You noted that, "From a phenomenological point of view your description of widened consciousness as an attentional focus onto the body is very accurate and indeed many (sophrology, yoga nidra, progressive muscle relaxation aso.) start off by focussing our attention on the body in order to totally relax it." The point that I want to offer you is rather subtle, and a little different than what you have agreed with here. In my inquiry, it is not a shifting of attention "onto" the body, but a shifting of the location from which that attention arises--away from the head and into the body. In this way, the felt sense of the self that is attending to the body has actually shifted to a location down within the chest or belly. The sense of "me" is attending to the body from a different place than the "normal" location in the head. In my experience, this is a much more powerful shift of state than simply placing attention "onto" the body from its usual location in the head.

As for your question regarding fMRI measurement for localizing brain activity, there is a foundational issue in that there is not yet a clear way of defining various meditational states. That is, until and unless a meditative state can be operationalized and entered in a consistent way, it is difficult to have a clear target phenomenon for any measurement. However, I do believe that the way in which somatic attention (as the bodily experience of where attention arises from) is arrayed within the body is a promising way forward on operationalizing such states of consciousness--this is a current area of research for me. If that is successful, I do want to go on and do fMRI studies to obtain more quantitative data on neurological correlates and their location.

I attach, if you are interested, my paper on somatic phenomenology.

Glenn,

You wrote:"the felt sense of the self that is attending to the body has actually shifted to a location down within the chest or belly. The sense of "me" is attending to the body from a different place than the "normal" location in the head."

This is an interesting interpretation of what is occurring - and I do believe it is subjective - but I think we may be deep into the domain of semantics here. Whether I "sense" a state of "self" as being in my head or my chest, it is still my brain that is providing me with this information, subjective though those sensations may be. I have doubts as to how successful we can be in operationalizing states of consciousness. As a person who has personally engaged in a number of meditative practices, my opinion is that (as Wilhelm Wundt and others researchers found) it is very difficult to adequately describe almost any mental state with anything approaching objectivity or consistency. Where does this leave us with regard to Michele's original question? Given that we can link fMRIs and other physiological measures with meditative states, what proof do we have that the meditation is causing the measured data?

Michele,

I have been thinking more about the neuroscience and how it might answer your specific question about contrast meditation and relaxation response. I am not a neuroscientist, but it looks to me like Lazar, Bush et al 2000 both distinguishes 'meditation' and 'relaxation response' and confuses them in its intro and discussion. A similar distinction/confusion occurs in Lou, Kjaer et al 1999. Conversely, each compares meditation to the resting state (default network). Would this control contrast not subtract the subject's state of physical relaxation and its brain substrate from the 'meditation' effects?

Looking at the neural coordinates in these two studies, my first hypothesis would be that there are overlapping networks for attention, meditation sensu stricto, and autonomic changes due to relaxation. Schjoedt U (2009) The Religious Brain is a good review and critique of studies to that date.

The study by Baerentsen, Stodkilde-Jorgensen et al 2009 found something like 47 component variables and multiple networks that are activated and deactivated during meditation. This study confirms that 'normal relaxation' is different from meditation, since meditation deactivates the posterior cingulate. Further, this study did not find deactivation of the anterior cingulate "which suggests that meditation is also different from most cognitive tasks that require attention to task-related aspects of the external spatio-temporal context." However, they do hypothesize a kind of internal attention shift to a 'cortico-striatal-thalamo-cortical loop'.

In my amateur-neuroscientist view, these studies make no comparisons to all the research on dreaming REM and NREM altered states. What I see is that many of the neural nodes activated by advanced meditators in Christian (unio mystica study), Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist meditation occur in or near the same limbic and pre-limbic neural nodes activated by REM dreaming. Since studies show deactivation of parietal and occipital areas for external vision and perception, how is it that religious adepts have visions and prajna ('insight')? I propose that it is precisely because deep meditation activates these limbic areas that are correlated in other imaging studies to 'interior vision', i.e., hallucination, delusions, the Parahippocampal Place Area, the insular compassion area, etc. etc.

I've attached a couple files -- very condensed I admit -- summarizing correlations of these limbic areas and meditation areas and REM areas, which I used for a Seminar on Neuroscience and Dreaming

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Dear All,

Consciousness is still uncharted territory. Even basic definitions have not been arrived yet in 'modern science'. In contrast, a wide array of work attributed to many eastern spiritual scientists has been done, from where the concept of Consciousness first caught 'modern scientific' thought. Be it, Yoga or Zen, definite concepts of Consciousness have been given out. But the limitation is that the researcher has to go into the meditative state himself/herself to experience the different states of Consciousness and this is anathema to the 'modern science' researcher who is independent of the experiment. He would rather study and observe rather than undergo the discipline of meditation himself.

Hope this helps.

Regards

P.S: The seat of Consciousness is in the Heart. When a question like "Who does this child/ house/toy belong to?", Most people will lay their hands on their chest and claim it as theirs. Doing the same while placing the hand on their head would 'seem' ridiculous.