From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

Abstract

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of meditation under the predictive processing view of living organisms. We start from relatively simple axioms. First, the brain is an organ that serves to predict based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, meditation serves to bring one closer to the here and now by disengaging from anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces predictive processing, in particular counterfactual cognition—the tendency to construct abstract and temporally deep representations—until all conceptual processing falls away. Our Many-to-One account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual meditation) on a single continuum, where each technique progressively relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the self. This deconstruction can also make the above processes more transparent to awareness, permitting certain insights into one’s mind. Our review suggests that our framework is consistent with the current state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence in contemplative science, and is ultimately illuminating about the plasticity of the predictive mind. It also serves to highlight that contemplative science can fruitfully go beyond cognitive enhancement, attention, and emotion regulation, to its more traditional goal of removing past conditioning and creating conditions for potentially profound insights. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms combined with neuroimaging are needed to further our understanding of how different styles of meditation affect predictive processing and the self, and the plasticity of the predictive mind more generally.

Self-Boundary Dissolution in Meditation: A Phenomenological Investigation

“…Of note, in mechanistic terms, these qualitative insights seem to be parsimonious with recent discussions of meditation within the predictive processing and active inference frameworks [ 82 , 83 , 84 ], where the release of attentional focus would correspond to a leveling of (ingrained and biased) precision weights, resulting in a (partial) suspension of ordinary self-evidencing (i.e. suspending the enactment of generative models [ 85 ]).…”

Attention and Default Mode Network Assessments of Meditation Experience during Active Cognition and Rest

“…We hypothesized that the oddball response (i.e., a prediction error signal) would be reduced in the meditation population relative to the controls. It has more recently been suggested that the oddball response may be sufficiently evolutionarily ingrained to remain unmalleable by meditation training [ 96 ]. Here, we observe decreased TPJ responsively to oddball stimuli with a small (0.34) effect size.…”

Self-boundary dissolution in meditation: A phenomenological investigation

“…Such investigation, describing the conditions constitutive of desirable states of dissolution, could have important implications for teachers of mindfulness and possibly also clinicians. These considerations, sometimes addressed by mindfulness teachers [90,91], are becoming increasingly relevant due to the phenomenological similarities between some psychopathologies (depersonalization in particular) 11 Of note, in mechanistic terms, these qualitative insights seem to be parsimonious with recent discussions of meditation within the predictive processing and active inference frameworks [83][84][85], where the release of attentional focus would correspond to a leveling of (ingrained and biased) precision weights, resulting in a (partial) suspension of ordinary self-evidencing (i.e. suspending the enactment of generative models [86]).…”