Mindfulness + acceptance training - randomized controlled trial shows prosocial effects, less loneliness

From Lindsay et al.:

Significance

Loneliness (i.e., feeling alone) and social isolation (i.e., being alone) are among the most robust known risk factors for poor health and accelerated mortality. Yet mitigating these social risk factors is challenging, as few interventions have been effective for both reducing loneliness and increasing social contact. Mindfulness interventions, which train skills in monitoring present-moment experiences with an orientation of acceptance, have shown promise for improving social-relationship processes. This study demonstrates the efficacy of a 2-wk smartphone-based mindfulness training for reducing loneliness and increasing social contact in daily life. Importantly, this study shows that developing an orientation of acceptance toward present-moment experiences is a critical mechanism for mitigating these social risk factors.

Abstract

Loneliness and social isolation are a growing public health concern, yet there are few evidence-based interventions for mitigating these social risk factors. Accumulating evidence suggests that mindfulness interventions can improve social-relationship processes. However, the active ingredients of mindfulness training underlying these improvements are unclear. Developing mindfulness-specific skills—namely, (i) monitoring present-moment experiences with (ii) an orientation of acceptance—may change the way people perceive and relate toward others. We predicted that developing openness and acceptance toward present experiences is critical for reducing loneliness and increasing social contact and that removing acceptance-skills training from a mindfulness intervention would eliminate these benefits. In this dismantling trial, 153 community adults were randomly assigned to a 14-lesson smartphone-based intervention: (i) training in both monitoring and acceptance (Monitor+Accept), (ii) training in monitoring only (Monitor Only), or (iii) active control training. For 3 d before and after the intervention, ambulatory assessments were used to measure loneliness and social contact in daily life. Consistent with predictions, Monitor+Accept training reduced daily-life loneliness by 22% (d = 0.44, P = 0.0001) and increased social contact by two more interactions each day (d = 0.47, P = 0.001) and one more person each day (d = 0.39, P = 0.004), compared with both Monitor Only and control trainings. These findings describe a behavioral therapeutic target for improving social-relationship functioning; by fostering equanimity with feelings of loneliness and social disconnect, acceptance-skills training may allow loneliness to dissipate and encourage greater engagement with others in daily life.

Different meditation practices differently buffer from stress.

A group at the University of Wisconsin lead by my colleague Richard Davidson looks a the effects of different styles of brief contemplative practices:

Mindfulness practices are increasingly being utilized as a method for cultivating well-being. The term mindfulness is often used as an umbrella for a variety of different practices and many mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) contain multiple styles of practice. Despite the diversity of practices within MBIs, few studies have investigated whether constituent practices produce specific effects. We randomized 156 undergraduates to one of four brief practices: breath awareness, loving-kindness, gratitude, or to an attention control condition. We assessed practice effects on affect following brief training, and effects on affect and behavior after provocation with a stressor (i.e., Cold pressor test). Results indicate that gratitude training significantly improved positive affect compared to breath awareness (d = 0.58) and loving-kindness led to significantly greater reductions in implicit negative affect compared to the control condition (d = 0.59) immediately after brief practice. In spite of gains in positive affect, the gratitude group demonstrated increased reactivity to the stressor, reporting the CPT as significantly more aversive than the control condition (d = 0.46) and showing significantly greater increases in negative affect compared to the breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = 0.55, 0.60, 0.65, respectively). Greater gains in implicit positive affect following gratitude training predicted decreased post-stressor likability ratings of novel neutral faces compared to breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = - 0.39, -0.40, -0.33, respectively) as well. Moreover, the gratitude group was significantly less likely to donate time than the loving-kindness group in an ecologically valid opportunity to provide unrewarded support. These data suggest that different styles of contemplative practice may produce different effects in the context of brief, introductory practice and these differences may be heightened by stress. Implications for the study of contemplative practices are discussed.

Does meditation provide the only way to survive our brain-dissolving technological and political environment?

Both the last chapter of Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (abstracted in MindBlog here) and a recent Op-Ed piece by NYTimes tech columnist Farhad Manjoo suggest that the only means of maintaining sanity in the face of the overwhelmingly complex technological and political environment we face is to turn inwards -  away from all the input competing for our attention - and cultivate some insight into our internal body environments and mental practices that provide the basic foundation from which we proceed to experience our outer world...in other words, to practice some form of meditation.  For Harari meditation is:

...not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality…Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus…Over the millennia humans have developed hundreds of meditation techniques, which differ in their principles and effectiveness….but in principle meditation is any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind…Serious meditation demands a tremendous amount of discipline…If we are willing to make efforts to understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us…For a few more years or decades, we still have a choice. If we make the effort, we can still investigate who we really are. But if we want to make use of this opportunity, we had better do it now.

From Manjoo, meditation is:

...the subject of countless books, podcasts, conferences, a million-dollar app war. It’s extolled by C.E.O.s and entertainers and even taught in my kids’ elementary school (again, it’s Northern California). The fad is backed by reams of scientific research showing the benefits of mindfulness for your physical and mental health — how even short-term stints improve your attention span and your ability to focus, your memory, and other cognitive functions.

After decades of swimming in the frenetic digital waters, I found that my mind was often too scrambled to accommodate much focus. Sitting calmly, quietly and attempting to sharpen my thoughts on the present moment was excruciating...about four months ago, I brute-forced it: I made meditation part of my morning routine and made myself stick with it. I started with 10 minutes a day, then built up to 15, 20, then 30. Eventually, something clicked, and the benefits became noticeable, and then remarkable.

The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind...Now, even without app blockers, I can stay away from mindless online haunts without worrying that I’m missing out. I can better distinguish what’s important from what’s trivial, and I’m more gracious and empathetic with others online...I hope you give it a try. I hope everyone does. (The Times’s David Gelles has written a great guide for getting started.)

Limited prosocial effects of meditation.

Kreplin et al. do a meta-analysis, and Kreplin writes a more general review of studies on the effects of meditation. The Krepline et al. abstract:

Many individuals believe that meditation has the capacity to not only alleviate mental-illness but to improve prosociality. This article systematically reviewed and meta-analysed the effects of meditation interventions on prosociality in randomized controlled trials of healthy adults. Five types of social behaviours were identified: compassion, empathy, aggression, connectedness and prejudice. Although we found a moderate increase in prosociality following meditation, further analysis indicated that this effect was qualified by two factors: type of prosociality and methodological quality. Meditation interventions had an effect on compassion and empathy, but not on aggression, connectedness or prejudice. We further found that compassion levels only increased under two conditions: when the teacher in the meditation intervention was a co-author in the published study; and when the study employed a passive (waiting list) control group but not an active one. Contrary to popular beliefs that meditation will lead to prosocial changes, the results of this meta-analysis showed that the effects of meditation on prosociality were qualified by the type of prosociality and methodological quality of the study. We conclude by highlighting a number of biases and theoretical problems that need addressing to improve quality of research in this area.

A review of body effects of mindfulness meditation

I point to a review by Jill Suttie, "Five Ways Mindfulness Meditation Is Good for Your Health." because it has a number of useful links to research articles - with the usual cautions about 'preliminary" data and inadequate controls - suggesting beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation on heart function, immune responses, cell aging, psychological pain, and decreasing cognitive decline from aging or Alzheimer's.

Are you holding your breath?

As I was doing some homework on techniques of coping with stress, I came across an old MindBlog post which I pass on again, below. It was part of what motivated me to do the web/lecture "Are you holding your breath? - Structures of arousal and calm" Here is the repost:


I notice - if I am maintaining awareness of my breathing - that the breathing frequently stops as I begin a skilled activity such as piano or computer keyboarding. At the same time I can begin to sense an array of unnecessary (and debilitating) pre-tensions in the muscle involved. If I just keep breathing and noticing those tensions, they begin to release. (Continuing to let awareness return to breathing when it drifts is a core technique of mindfulness meditation). Several sources note that attending to breathing can raise one's general level of restfulness relative to excitation, enhancing parasympathetic (restorative) over sympathetic (arousing) nervous system activities. These personal points make me feel like passing on some excerpts from a recent essay which basically agrees with these points: "Breathtaking New Technologies," by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft VP and Co-Founder and Director of Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group. It is a bit simplistic, but does point in a useful direction.

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals...but... the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage...the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe. Either of these breathing patterns disturbs oxygen and carbon dioxide balance...breath holding can contribute significantly to stress-related diseases. The body becomes acidic, the kidneys begin to re-absorb sodium, and as the oxygen and CO2 balance is undermined, our biochemistry is thrown off.

The parasympathetic nervous system governs our sense of hunger and satiety, flow of saliva and digestive enzymes, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function. Focusing on diaphragmatic breathing enables us to down regulate the sympathetic nervous system, which then causes the parasympathetic nervous system to become dominant. Shallow breathing, breath holding and hyper-ventilating triggers the sympathetic nervous system, in a "fight or flight" response...Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Buteyko (breathing techniques developed by a Russian M.D.), Andy Weil's breathing exercises, diaphragmatic breathing, certain yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest.

I've changed my mind about how much attention to pay to my breathing patterns and how important it is to remember to breathe when I'm using a computer, PDA or cell phone...I've discovered that the more consistently I tune in to healthy breathing patterns, the clearer it is to me when I'm hungry or not, the more easily I fall asleep and rest peacefully at night, and the more my outlook is consistently positive...I've come to believe that, within the next 5-7 years, breathing exercises will be a significant part of any fitness regime.

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

I want to thank MindBlog reader Mike Walterman, who sent me an email pointing me to this article (which won an Ig Nobel Prize) and commented on his experience with "Flow Genome Project" which I reviewed in a Nov. 17, 2017 post titled "Modern flimflam men? - The Flow Genome Project". In commenting on this post, Mike described his experience of signing on for some classes with FGP:

I read your commentary on the Flow Genome Project (FGP) with great interest. Your suspicions about this "effort" are spot on, and I wish that I had your insight before taking two of these classes from the FGP. By the way, Steven Kotler is an alum of UW-Madison!!

The first class (Flow Fundamentals) was a great community of people, and I learned much from them, and nothing from the FGP personnel. The second class (Flow Performance) was pseudo-profound BS (PPBS.) There is a great paper that won an Ig Nobel Prize titled "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit." ... The paper perfectly described every aspect of this class!! The instructor - Jamie Wheal - is more interested in impressing people with PPBS than realaying any useful information. Also, each class is prefaced with the promise that "All the secrets of Stealing Fire will be revealed in this next class." I stopped when this promise was not delivered in Flow Performance; but, was promised for private coaching (at an extremely high price).

Here is the abstract from the Pennycook et al. article on pseudo-profound bullshit:

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.

Meditation quiets the ego? ….maybe just the opposite.

From Gebauer et al.. In their abstract "self-enhancement bias" refers to exaggerated self views or valuations.

Mind-body practices enjoy immense public and scientific interest. Yoga and meditation are highly popular. Purportedly, they foster well-being by curtailing self-enhancement bias. However, this “ego-quieting” effect contradicts an apparent psychological universal, the self-centrality principle. According to this principle, practicing any skill renders that skill self-central, and self-centrality breeds self-enhancement bias. We examined those opposing predictions in the first tests of mind-body practices’ self-enhancement effects. In Experiment 1, we followed 93 yoga students over 15 weeks, assessing self-centrality and self-enhancement bias after yoga practice (yoga condition, n = 246) and without practice (control condition, n = 231). In Experiment 2, we followed 162 meditators over 4 weeks (meditation condition: n = 246; control condition: n = 245). Self-enhancement bias was higher in the yoga (Experiment 1) and meditation (Experiment 2) conditions, and those effects were mediated by greater self-centrality. Additionally, greater self-enhancement bias mediated mind-body practices’ well-being benefits. Evidently, neither yoga nor meditation fully quiet the ego; to the contrary, they boost self-enhancement.

Mechanism of white matter changes induced by meditation?

Posner and collaborators, who previously have shown changes in brain white matter induced by meditation, suggest a possible mechanism, using a mouse model.

Meditation has been shown to modify brain connections. However, the cellular mechanisms by which this occurs are not known. We hypothesized that changes in white matter found following meditation may be due to increased rhythmicity observed in frontal areas in the cortex. The current study in mice tested this directly by rhythmically stimulating cells in the frontal midline. We found that such stimulation caused an increase in connectivity due to changes in the axons in the corpus callosum, which transmit impulses to and from the frontal midline. This work provides a plausible but not proven mechanism through which a mental activity such as meditation can improve brain connectivity.

The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation

I completely missed this review article by Posner and colleagues when it appeared, and am grateful for Bäumli's mention of it in her recent brief essay, which gives this link for downloading it. It has a mind numbing amount of information on research into the brain correlates of meditative practice and competence, summary tables, references, graphics. In this post I'm passing passing on the summary of key points and one graphic:

Key points

It is proposed that the mechanism through which mindfulness meditation exerts its effects is a process of enhanced self-regulation, including attention control, emotion regulation and self-awareness.

Research on mindfulness meditation faces a number of important challenges in study design that limit the interpretation of existing studies.

A number of changes in brain structure have been related to mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness practice enhances attention. The anterior cingulate cortex is the region associated with attention in which changes in activity and/or structure in response to mindfulness meditation are most consistently reported.

Mindfulness practice improves emotion regulation and reduces stress. Fronto-limbic networks involved in these processes show various patterns of engagement by mindfulness meditation.

Meditation practice has the potential to affect self-referential processing and improve present-moment awareness. The default mode networks — including the midline prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, which support self-awareness — could be altered following mindfulness training.

Mindfulness meditation has potential for the treatment of clinical disorders and might facilitate the cultivation of a healthy mind and increased well-being.

Future research into mindfulness meditation should use randomized and actively controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes to validate previous findings.

The effects of mindfulness practice on neural structure and function need to be linked to behavioural performance, such as cognitive, affective and social functioning, in future research.

The complex mental state of mindfulness is likely to be supported by the large-scale brain networks; future work should take this into account rather than being restricted to activations in single brain areas.

Legend - Schematic view of some of the brain regions involved in attention control (the anterior cingulate cortex and the striatum), emotion regulation (multiple prefrontal regions, limbic regions and the striatum) and self-awareness (the insula, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus).

Mindfulness training increases strength of right insula connections.

Sharp et al.(open source) suggest that:

The endeavor to understand how mindfulness works will likely be advanced by using recently developed tools and theory within the nascent field of brain connectomics. The connectomic framework conceives of the brain’s functional and structural architecture as a complex, dynamic network. This network view of brain function partly arose from the lack of support for highly selective, modular regions instantiating specialized functions. That is, large meta-analyses consisting mostly of univariate fMRI analyses disconfirm that, for example, the amygdala is exclusively selective for fear processing. Indeed, more fruitful mechanistic knowledge of how neural systems function may emerge from delineating how different regions communicate functionally across a range of environments, and by identifying the underlying structural connections that constrain such functional dynamics.

Their abstract, and a summary figure:

Although mindfulness meditation is known to provide a wealth of psychological benefits, the neural mechanisms involved in these effects remain to be well characterized. A central question is whether the observed benefits of mindfulness training derive from specific changes in the structural brain connectome that do not result from alternative forms of experimental intervention. Measures of whole-brain and node-level structural connectome changes induced by mindfulness training were compared with those induced by cognitive and physical fitness training within a large, multi-group intervention protocol (n = 86). Whole-brain analyses examined global graph-theoretical changes in structural network topology. A hypothesis-driven approach was taken to investigate connectivity changes within the insula, which was predicted here to mediate interoceptive awareness skills that have been shown to improve through mindfulness training. No global changes were observed in whole-brain network topology. However, node-level results confirmed a priori hypotheses, demonstrating significant increases in mean connection strength in right insula across all of its connections. Present findings suggest that mindfulness strengthens interoception, operationalized here as the mean insula connection strength within the overall connectome. This finding further elucidates the neural mechanisms of mindfulness meditation and motivates new perspectives about the unique benefits of mindfulness training compared to contemporary cognitive and physical fitness interventions.

Legend - Anatomical representation of tractography pathways between right insula and highly connected regions. Connections displayed (only corticocortical, here) comprised the top 80% connection strengths across all insula pathways. (A) Displays pre-training connections in right insula, which showed the greatest structural reorganization across mindfulness training. (B) Represents the same image as in (A) except at post-training.

Mindfulness can lower your motivation.

Vohs and Hafenbrack do an NYTimes opinion piece to advertise their forthcoming paper on effects of meditation. Given my personal experience with 'mindfulness' I think they are right on track. Some clips:

The practical payoff of mindfulness is backed by dozens of studies linking it to job satisfaction, rational thinking and emotional resilience...But on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting. A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.

To test this hunch, we recently conducted five studies, involving hundreds of people, to see whether there was a tension between mindfulness and motivation...Among those who had meditated, motivation levels were lower on average. Those people didn’t feel as much like working on the assignments, nor did they want to spend as much time or effort to complete them. Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project...previous studies have found that meditation increases mental focus, suggesting that those in our studies who performed the mindfulness exercise should have performed better on the tasks. Their lower levels of motivation, however, seemed to cancel out that benefit...Mindfulness is perhaps akin to a mental nap. Napping, too, is associated with feeling calm, refreshed and less harried. Then again, who wakes up from a nap eager to organize some files?

Mindfulness might be unhelpful for dealing with difficult assignments at work, but it may be exactly what is called for in other contexts. There is no denying that mindfulness can be beneficial, bringing about calm and acceptance. Once you’ve reached a peak level of acceptance, however, you’re not going to be motivated to work harder.

Predicting the effectiveness of cognitive therapy with functional MRI

Reggente et al. do interesting work showing that MRI measurement of functional connectivity patterns in the default mode and visual networks of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) individuals before entering cognitive therapy predict post treatment OCD severity. Such information could prove useful in choosing between behavioral and drug therapy for a given individual.

Significance

The ability to predict an individual’s potential response to treatment would permit clinicians to more prudently allocate resources that support cognitive behavioral therapy for obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), an often stressful and time-consuming treatment. The current study lays important groundwork for an exciting advance toward personalized medicine in psychiatry that up to this point has eluded the field. This study marks a success in using multivariate pattern recognition to identify neurobiological predictors of treatment response. In addition, it advances knowledge of the neurophysiology of OCD and of mechanistic processes involved in the therapeutic response, which could be used to refine existing treatments or to develop novel treatments based on identified potential brain targets.

Abstract

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for many with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). However, response varies considerably among individuals. Attaining a means to predict an individual’s potential response would permit clinicians to more prudently allocate resources for this often stressful and time-consuming treatment. We collected resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging from adults with OCD before and after 4 weeks of intensive daily CBT. We leveraged machine learning with cross-validation to assess the power of functional connectivity (FC) patterns to predict individual posttreatment OCD symptom severity. Pretreatment FC patterns within the default mode network and visual network significantly predicted posttreatment OCD severity, explaining up to 67% of the variance. These networks were stronger predictors than pretreatment clinical scores. Results have clinical implications for developing personalized medicine approaches to identifying individual OCD patients who will maximally benefit from intensive CBT.

Mental autonomy - developing a ‘culture of consciousness’.

One of MindBlog's threads has been presentation and discussion of work on the default mode network of our brains that mediates our mind wandering. One of my heroes, Thomas Metzinger, has done a nice essay on the larger implications of what we have learned. I strongly recommend that you read the whole piece, but will also pass on a rather extensive series of clips that convey the main points:

When traveling long distances, jumping saves dolphins energy, because there’s less friction in the air than in the water below. It also seems to be an efficient way to move rapidly and breathe at the same time…These cetacean acrobatics are a fruitful metaphor for what happens when we think. What most of us still call ‘our conscious thoughts’ are really like dolphins in our mind, jumping briefly out of the ocean of our unconscious for a short period before they submerge themselves once again. This ‘dolphin model of cognition’ helps us to understand the limits of our awareness.

One of the most exciting recent research fields in neuroscience and experimental psychology is mind-wandering – the study of spontaneous or task-unrelated thoughts….Much of the time we like to describe some foundational ‘self’ as the initiator or cause of our actions, but this is a pervasive myth. In fact, we only resemble something like this for about a third of our conscious lifetime. ..As far as our inner life is concerned, the science of mind-wandering implies that we’re only rarely autonomous persons. 

As the dolphin story hints, human beings are not Cartesian egos capable of complete self-determination. Nor are we primitive, robotic automata. Instead, our conscious inner life seems to be about the management of spontaneously emerging mental behaviour. Most of what populates our awareness unfolds automatically, just like a heartbeat or autoimmune response, but it can still be guided to a greater or lesser degree. 

We ought to probe how our organism turns different sub-personal events into thoughts or states that appear to belong to ‘us’ as a whole, and how we can learn to control them more effectively and efficiently. This capacity creates what I call mental autonomy, and I believe it is the neglected ethical responsibility of government and society to help citizens cultivate it.

The mind wanders more frequently than most of us think – several hundred times a day and up to 50 per cent of our waking life, in fact…The wandering mind is like a monkey, swinging from branch to branch across an inner emotional landscape. It will flee from unpleasant perceptions and feelings, and try to reach a state that feels better. If the present moment is unattractive or boring, then of course it’s more pleasant to be planning the next holiday or drifting away into a romantic fantasy.

A multitude of empirical studies show that areas of our brain responsible for the wandering mind overlap to a large extent with the so-called default-mode network (DMN). This is a large network in our brain that typically becomes active during periods of rest, when attention is directed to the inside.

My view is that the mind-wandering network and the DMN basically serve to keep our sense of self stable and in good shape. Like an automatic maintenance program, they constantly generate new stories, weaving back and forth between different time-horizons, each micro-narrative contributing to the illusion that we are actually the same person over time. Like nocturnal dreaming, mind-wandering also appears to be a process by which our brain and body consolidate our long-term memory and stabilise specific parts of what I call the ‘self-model’. 

At its most basic, this self-model is based on an internal model of the body, including affective and emotional states, and grounded in inner-body perceptions such as gut feelings, heartbeat, breath, hunger or thirst. On another, higher layer, the self-model reflects a person’s relationships to other people, ethical and cultural norms, and sense of self-worth. But in order to create a robust connection between the social and biological levels, the self-model fosters the illusion of transtemporal identity – the belief that we are a whole and persisting entity based on the narrative our brain tells itself about ‘our’ past, present and future. (I think that it was exactly the impression of transtemporal identity that turned into one of the central factors in the emergence of large human societies, which rely on the understanding that it is I who will be punished or rewarded in the future. Only as long as we believe in our own continuing identity does it make sense for us to treat our fellow human beings fairly, for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern us.)

But don’t lose sight of the fact that all this modelling is just a convenient trick our organism plays on itself to enhance its chances of survival. We must not forget that the phenomenal realm (how we subjectively experience ourselves) is only a small part of the neurobiological one (the reality of the creatures we actually are). There’s no little person in our head, only a set of dynamical, self-organising processes at play behind the scenes. Yet it seems like these processes often function by creating self-fulfilling prophecies; in other words, we have an identity because we convince ourselves we have one. Humans have evolved to be a bit like method actors, who need to really imagine and believe they are a particular character in order to perform effectively on stage. But just as there is no ‘real’ character, there’s also no such thing as ‘a self’, and probably nothing like an immortal soul either. 

…one of the main functions of the self-model is how it lets our biological organism predict, and thereby control, the sensory consequences of our actions. That produces what’s called our sense of agency. ..when I close my fingers around the stem of a wineglass or feel the rough surface of a tennis ball in my hand, I infer that I must be an agent who is capable of originating, controlling and owning all these events.

..just like a method actor can’t focus on the fact that she’s acting, our biological organism is usually unable to experience our self-model as a model. Instead, we tend to identify with its content, just as the actor identifies with the character. The more we achieve a high degree of predictability over our behaviour, the more tempting it is to say: this is me, and I did this. We tell ourselves a brilliant and parsimonious causal story, even if it’s false from the third-person perspective of science. Empirically speaking, the self-as-agent is just a useful fiction or hypothesis, a neurocomputational artefact of our evolved self-model.

On the level of the brain, this process is a truly amazing affair, and a major achievement of evolution. But if we look at the resulting conscious experience from the outside, and on the level of the whole person, the brain’s mini-narrative also appears as a misrepresentation, slightly complacent, a bit grandiose, and ultimately delusional. Agency on the level of thought is really a ‘surface’ phenomenon, produced by the fact that the underwater, unconscious causal precursors are simply unknown to us. Even if we sometimes reach what resembles the rationalist ideal, we probably do so only sporadically, and the notion of controlled, effortful thinking is probably a very bad model of conscious thought in general. Our conscious mental activity is usually an unbidden, unintentional form of behaviour. Yet somehow the tourist on the prow begins to experience herself as an omnipotent magician, making dolphins come into existence out of the blue, and jump at her command.

The self might not be a Cartesian agent that causes thought or action, but perhaps there are other ways for the organism as a whole to shape what happens in its mental life. We can’t get off the ship, let alone summon dolphins from nowhere, but perhaps we can choose where to look. 

We’re familiar with the idea of autonomy over our actions in the outer realm, such as when we control our bodily movements…however, there are not only bodily actions, but also mental ones… actively re-directing attention to your breath in meditation, deliberately paying attention to a person’s face in front of you, trying to retrieve visual images from your memory, logical thinking, or engaging in mental calculation. Note that deliberately not acting is as important here as acting. The defining feature of autonomy in both the inner and outer realms is veto control, the power to inhibit, suspend or terminate ongoing actions.  A specific layer of the self-model is of central importance here. I call it the ‘epistemic agent model’ – the bit that allows us to have the feeling ‘I am a knowing self; I know that I know.’ This is the true origin of our first-person perspective. It’s created by predictions about what the organism can and will know in the future, and helps us to continuously improve our model of reality.

Now we can see mind-wandering for what it really is: a transient loss of mental autonomy, via the loss of the epistemic-agent model. A daydream just happens to you – there is ownership, but no control over the event. It is not something you do, but something in which you ‘lose yourself’. You have forgotten a specific kind of self-knowledge, the ability to terminate a train of thought and to choose what it is you want to know. You might daydream about being a knowing self, but right now you have lost all awareness of your own power to put an end to the process.

Meditation research is poised to make major contributions to mental autonomy. Mindfulness practice can sometimes lead to a crystal-clear and silent mind that is not clouded by thoughts at all, the pure conscious experience of mental autonomy as such that arises without actually exerting control. In long-term practitioners, this can result from the cultivation of a kind of inner non-acting that includes noticing, gently letting go, and resting in an open, effortless state of choiceless awareness. However, in the beginning, meditation clearly involves making decisions, as subjects develop meta-awareness, alongside an awareness of their capacity for attentional control. This can be seen as a systematic form of ‘experience sampling’.

Whether this sort of cognition really requires a robust notion of selfhood, as most Western philosophers would argue, would be disputed in many Eastern traditions. Here the highest level of mental autonomy is often seen as a form of impersonal witnessing or (in the words of the Indian-born philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti) ‘observing without an observer’ (though even this pure form of global meta-awareness still contains the implicit knowledge that the organism could act if necessary). There seems to be a middle way: perhaps mental autonomy can actually be experienced as such, in a non-agentive way, as a mere capacity. The notion of ‘mental autonomy’ could therefore be a deep point of contact where Eastern and Western philosophy discover common conceptual ground.

It’s important to remember that neuroscience isn’t the only piece of the puzzle. Culture plays its part, too…Accountability and ethical responsibility might actually be implemented in the human brain from above, via early social interactions between children and adults. If we tell children at an early age that they are fully responsible for their own actions, and if we accordingly punish and reward them, then this assumption will get built into their conscious self-model...The human adult’s conscious model of the ‘self’ might therefore be an enculturated post-hoc confabulation, at least in part – a causal-inference illusion that’s become part of how we model our own sociocultural niche, ultimately based on how we’ve internalised social interactions and ingrained language games.

…the mind-wandering network does not, I believe, actually produce thoughts. It also is not conscious – the person as a whole is. Rather, it creates what I would describe as cognitive affordances, opportunities for inner action. In the theory of psychology developed by J J Gibson, what we perceive in our environment aren’t simply objects, but possible actions: this is something I could sit on, this is something I could put into my mouth, and so on. Cognitive affordances are possible mental actions, and they are not perceived with our sensory organs but they are available for introspection.

Cognitive affordances are actually precursors of thoughts, or proto-thoughts, that call out ‘Think me!’ or ‘Don’t miss me – I am the last of my kind!’ Our inner landscape is full of these possibilities, which we must constantly navigate. What mind-wandering does is create a fluid and highly dynamic task-domain. 

One central function of mind-wandering, then, could be to provide us with an internal environment of competing affordances, accompanied by possible mental actions, which have the potential to become an extended process of controlling the content of your own mind. This inner landscape could even be below our conscious awareness, but it is out of this that the epistemic-agent model emerges, like any other conscious experience, seemingly selecting what she wants to know and what she wants to ignore…true autonomy is about different levels of context-sensitivity and supple self-control.  

What is clear by now is that our societies lack systematic and institutionalised ways of enhancing citizens’ mental autonomy. This is a neglected duty of care on the part of governments. There can be no politically mature citizens without a sufficient degree of mental autonomy, but society as a whole does not act to protect or increase it. Yet, it might be the most precious resource of all. In the end, and in the face of serious existential risks posed by environmental degradation and advanced capitalism, we must understand that citizens’ collective level of mental autonomy will be the decisive factor.

It was William James, the father of American psychology, who said in 1892: ‘And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. […] And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.’ We can finally see more clearly what meditation is really about: over the centuries, the main goal has always been a sustained enhancement of one’s mental autonomy.

Mental autonomy brings together the core ideas of both Eastern and Western philosophy. It helps us see the value of both secularised spiritual practice and of rigorous, rational thought. There seem to be two complementary ways to understand the dolphins in our own mind: one, from the point of view of a truly hard-nosed, scientifically minded tourist on the prow of the boat; and two, from the perspective of the wide-open sky, silently looking down from above at the tourist and the dolphins porpoising in the ocean.

On gratitude...

I want to pass on this bit from an essay by Philip Garrity in the New York Times Philosophy Forum "The Stone". On recovering from the vibrancy and trauma of illness he notes:

I notice myself falling back into that same pattern of trying to harness the vibrancy of illness...I am learning, however slowly, that maintaining that level of mental stamina, that fever pitch of experience, is less a recipe for enlightenment, and more for exhaustion.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes our experience as a perpetual transitioning between unreflective consciousness, “living-in-the-world,” and reflective consciousness, “thinking-about-the-world.” Gratitude seems to necessitate an act of reflection on experience, which, in turn, requires a certain abstraction away from that direct experience. Paradoxically, our capacity for gratitude is simultaneously enhanced and frustrated as we strive to attain it.

Perhaps, then, there is an important difference between reflecting on wellness and experiencing wellness. My habitual understanding of gratitude had me forcefully lodging myself into the realm of reflective consciousness, pulling me away from living-in-the-world. I was constantly making an inventory of my wellness, too busy counting the coins to ever spend them.

Gratitude, in the experiential sense, requires that we wade back into the current of unreflective consciousness, which, to the egocentric mind, can easily feel like an annihilation of consciousness altogether. Yet, Sartre says that action that is unreflective isn’t necessarily unconscious. There is something Zen about this, the actor disappearing into the action. It is the way of the artist in the act of creative expression, the musician in the flow of performance. But, to most of us, it is a loss of self — and the sense of competency that comes with it.

If there is any sage in me, he says I must accept the vulnerability of letting the pain fade, of allowing the wounds to heal. Even in the wake of grave illness — or, more unsettlingly, in anticipation of it — we must risk falling back asleep into wellness.

Mind the Hype - Mindfulness and Meditation

Smith et al. point to and summarize an article by Van Dam et al. I pass on the Van Dam et al. abstract:

During the past two decades, mindfulness meditation has gone from being a fringe topic of scientific investigation to being an occasional replacement for psychotherapy, tool of corporate well-being, widely implemented educational practice, and “key to building more resilient soldiers.” Yet the mindfulness movement and empirical evidence supporting it have not gone without criticism. Misinformation and poor methodology associated with past studies of mindfulness may lead public consumers to be harmed, misled, and disappointed. Addressing such concerns, the present article discusses the difficulties of defining mindfulness, delineates the proper scope of research into mindfulness practices, and explicates crucial methodological issues for interpreting results from investigations of mindfulness. For doing so, the authors draw on their diverse areas of expertise to review the present state of mindfulness research, comprehensively summarizing what we do and do not know, while providing a prescriptive agenda for contemplative science, with a particular focus on assessment, mindfulness training, possible adverse effects, and intersection with brain imaging. Our goals are to inform interested scientists, the news media, and the public, to minimize harm, curb poor research practices, and staunch the flow of misinformation about the benefits, costs, and future prospects of mindfulness meditation.

And also Smith et al.'s list of points that seem fairly settled (they provide supporting references):

-Meditation almost certainly does sharpen your attention. 

-Long-term, consistent meditation does seem to increase resiliency to stress. 

-Meditation does appear to increase compassion. It also makes our compassion more effective. 

-Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. 

-Mindfulness could have a positive impact on your relationships. 

-Mindfulness seems to reduce many kinds of bias. 

-Meditation does have an impact on physical health—but it’s modest.  

-Meditation might not be good for everyone all the time. 

-What kind of meditation is right for you? That depends. 

-How much meditation is enough? That also depends.

Buddhism is more Western than you think.

Robert Wright does a review of Adam Gopnik’s review (in the New Yorker) of Wright’s book “Why Buddhism Is True.” The whole piece is very clearly written and worth reading, and I want to pass on a few clips:

In recent decades, important aspects of the Buddhist concept of not-self have gotten support from psychology. In particular, psychology has bolstered Buddhism’s doubts about our intuition of what you might call the “C.E.O. self” — our sense that the conscious “self” is the initiator of thought and action…There is a paradox that can surface if you pursue the logic of not-self through meditation. Namely: recognizing that “you” are not in control, that you are not a C.E.O., can help give “you” more control. Or, at least, you can behave more like a C.E.O. is expected to behave: more rationally, more wisely, more reflectively; less emotionally, less rashly, less reactively.

Here’s how it can work. Suppose that, via mindfulness meditation, you observe a feeling like anxiety or anger and, rather than let it draw you into a whole train of anxious or angry thoughts, you let it pass away. Though you experience the feeling — and in a sense experience it more fully than usual — you experience it with “non-attachment” and so evade its grip. And you now see the thoughts that accompanied it in a new light — they no longer seem like trustworthy emanations from some “I” but rather as transient notions accompanying transient feelings.

There’s a broader and deeper sense in which Buddhist thought is more “Western” than stereotype suggests. What, after all, is more Western than science’s emphasis on causality, on figuring out what causes what, and hoping to thus explain why all things do the things they do? Well, in a sense, the Buddhist idea of “not-self” grows out of the belief undergirding this mission — that the world is pervasively governed by causal laws. The reason there is no “abiding core” within us is that the ever-changing forces that impinge on us — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes — are constantly setting off chain reactions inside of us.

Indeed, this constant causal interaction with our environment raises doubts not only about how firm the core of the “self” is but, in a sense, how firm the bounds of the self are. Buddhism’s doubts about the distinctness and solidity of the “self” — and of other things, for that matter — rests on a recognition of the sense in which pervasive causality means pervasive fluidity.

…psychology has lately started to let go of its once-sharp distinction between “cognitive” and “affective” parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very coloration. This wouldn’t qualify as breaking news in Buddhist circles. A sutra attributed to the Buddha says that a “mind object” — a category that includes thoughts — is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”

Brain-scan studies have produced tentative evidence that this lusting and disliking — embracing thoughts that feel good and rejecting thoughts that feel bad — lies near the heart of certain “cognitive biases.” If such evidence continues to accumulate, the Buddhist assertion that a clear view of the world involves letting go of these lusts and dislikes will have drawn a measure of support from modern science.

Arousal versus relaxation in meditative practices.

I am grateful to Robert Ruhloff for his comment on MindBlog's Oct. 25th post on Mindfulness, in which he pointed to a reference whose abstract I would like to pass on here:

Based on evidence of parasympathetic activation, early studies defined meditation as a relaxation response. Later research attempted to categorize meditation as either involving focused or distributed attentional systems. Neither of these hypotheses received strong empirical support, and most of the studies investigated Theravada style meditative practices. In this study, we compared neurophysiological (EEG, EKG) and cognitive correlates of meditative practices that are thought to utilize either focused or distributed attention, from both Theravada and Vajrayana traditions. The results of Study 1 show that both focused (Shamatha) and distributed (Vipassana) attention meditations of the Theravada tradition produced enhanced parasympathetic activation indicative of a relaxation response. In contrast, both focused (Deity) and distributed (Rig-pa) meditations of the Vajrayana tradition produced sympathetic activation, indicative of arousal. Additionally, the results of Study 2 demonstrated an immediate dramatic increase in performance on cognitive tasks following only Vajrayana styles of meditation, indicating enhanced phasic alertness due to arousal. Furthermore, our EEG results showed qualitatively different patterns of activation between Theravada and Vajrayana meditations, albeit highly similar activity between meditations within the same tradition. In conclusion, consistent with Tibetan scriptures that described Shamatha and Vipassana techniques as those that calm and relax the mind, and Vajrayana techniques as those that require ‘an awake quality’ of the mind, we show that Theravada and Vajrayana meditations are based on different neurophysiological mechanisms, which give rise to either a relaxation or arousal response. Hence, it may be more appropriate to categorize meditations in terms of relaxation vs. arousal, whereas classification methods that rely on the focused vs. distributed attention dichotomy may need to be reexamined.

Different kinds of mindfulness correlate with different benefits.

Jazaieri points to work by Blanke et al. that probed how different aspects of mindfulness influence our emotional well-being. Three kinds of mindfulness were considered: present-moment attention, nonjudgmental acceptance, and acting with awareness. From Jazaieri's summary:

Seventy students ages 20-30 received pings via smartphone six times a day over the course of nine days. The pings included questions about the positive and negative emotions they had experienced recently, any unpleasant hassles that had occurred, and how mindful they had been, along the three specific dimensions of mindfulness.....Present-moment attention was the strongest predictor for increased positive emotions—the more attentive people said they were, the better they felt overall. ... Nonjudgmental acceptance was the strongest predictor for decreased negative emotions—the more people reported nonjudgmental acceptance in their lives, the less negative emotion they reported experiencing.

Here is the Blanke et al. abstract:

Mindfulness is commonly defined as a multidimensional mode of being attentive to, and aware of, momentary experiences while taking a nonjudgmental and accepting stance. These qualities have been linked to 2 different facets of affective well-being: being attentive is proposed to lead to an appreciation of experiences as they are, and thus to positive affect (PA). Accepting unpleasant experiences in a nonjudgmental fashion has been hypothesized to reduce negative affect (NA). Alternatively, however, attention may increase both positive and negative affectivity, whereas nonjudgmental acceptance may modify how people relate to their experiences. Previous research has considered such differential associations at the trait level, although a mindful mode may be understood as a state of being. Using an experience-sampling methodology (ESM) with smartphones, the present research therefore links different state mindfulness facets to positive and NA in daily life. Seventy students (50% female, 20–30 years old) of different disciplines participated in the study. Based on multidimensional assessments of self-reported state mindfulness and state affect, the findings corroborate the hypotheses on the differential predictive value of 2 mindfulness facets: Participants experienced more PA when they were attentive to the present moment and less NA when they nonjudgmentally accepted momentary experiences. Furthermore, only nonjudgmental acceptance buffered the impact of daily hassles on affective well-being. The study contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of the within-person mechanisms relating mindfulness to affective well-being in daily life. Future interventions may be able to enhance different aspects of affective well-being by addressing specific facets of mindfulness.

American Nirvana

I've been meaning to point to an engaging article by polymath Adam Gopnik reviewing Robert Wright's recent book "Why Buddhism Is True." (Wright has written popular books on evolutionary psychology.) Gopnik briefly reviews the major appearances of Buddhism in late 19th century New England and then in the nineteen-fifties, spurred by writings of Suzuki and others. A few clips from the review, which I encourage you to read in its entirety:

Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively “scientized.” He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the “modular” view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science. Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers.

Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane. It is a cognitive probe for self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind.

Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it: he tells us about an enlightened man who tastes wine without the contextual tales about vintage, varietal, region. It tastes . . . less emotional. “All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren’t what we thought they were,” Wright quotes a guru as saying. What Wright calls “the perception of emptiness” dampens the affect, but it also settles the mind. If it isn’t there, you don’t overreact to it.

Simply to sit and breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only to hear cars and buses go by on a city avenue—listening to the world rather than to the frantic non sequiturs of one’s “monkey mind,” fragmented thoughts and querulous moods racing each other around—can intimate the possibility of a quiet grace in the midst of noise.

A faith practice with an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a horror; a faith practice without an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a hobby. The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice...Yet what Wright is doing seems an honorable, even a sublime, achievement. Basically, he says that meditation has made him somewhat less irritable. Being somewhat less irritable is not the kind of achievement that people usually look to religion for, but it may be as good an achievement as we ought to expect. (If Donald Trump became somewhat less irritable, the world would be a less dangerous place.)