Meditation Experience Predicts Introspective Accuracy

Abstract

The accuracy of subjective reports, especially those involving introspection of one's own internal processes, remains unclear, and research has demonstrated large individual differences in introspective accuracy. It has been hypothesized that introspective accuracy may be heightened in persons who engage in meditation practices, due to the highly introspective nature of such practices. We undertook a preliminary exploration of this hypothesis, examining introspective accuracy in a cross-section of meditation practitioners (1-15,000 hrs experience). Introspective accuracy was assessed by comparing subjective reports of tactile sensitivity for each of 20 body regions during a 'body-scanning' meditation with averaged, objective measures of tactile sensitivity (mean size of body representation area in primary somatosensory cortex; two-point discrimination threshold) as reported in prior research. Expert meditators showed significantly better introspective accuracy than novices; overall meditation experience also significantly predicted individual introspective accuracy. These results suggest that long-term meditators provide more accurate introspective reports than novices.

Contribution of REM sleep and N2 sleep spindles to procedural memory consolidation in Vipassana meditators and non-meditating controls.

“…As predicted, however, meditators scored higher than controls on the Body Awareness subscale of the Scale of Body Connection and that these scores were related in a graded fashion to task performance (time and score) before the nap. These finding are consistent with studies suggesting that sustained meditation practice contributes to higher levels of somatic awareness [8] and confirms our rationale for choosing a full-body balance task to examine patterns of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. In this case, one required skill for learning the task quickly is a heightened level of attunement to one's own bodily/somatic states.…”

“…Mindfulness interventions, including sitting meditation practices and movement-based practices such as yoga or t'ai chi [5], all include an element of cultivating access to and awareness of increasingly subtle bodily sensations [6,7]. Meditation practitioners, therefore, may represent an 'expert' group of healthy individuals who intentionally cultivate attention to bodily states, and are better able to access and employ them [8]. Meditators may embody cognitive processes differently than do non-meditators; in particular, they may rely more upon awareness of kinesthetic and other types of endogenous information to encode memories.…”

The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation

“…Empirical findings to support this claim are mixed. Although studies that assessed performance on a heartbeat detection task -a standard measure of interoceptive awareness -found no evidence that meditators had superior performance to non-meditators 124,125 , other studies found that meditators showed greater coherence between objective physiological data and their subjective experience in regard to an emotional experience 126 and the sensitivity of body regions 127 .…”

Brain Network Organization During Mindful Acceptance of Emotions

“…Furthermore, insula activation correlates with interoceptive accuracy when participants monitor their heartbeat (Critchley, Wiens, Rotshtein, Ohman, & Dolan, 2004). Notably, meditation training is associated with greater interoceptive accuracy (Fox et al, 2012) and is associated with changes in insula structure and function (Farb, Segal, & Anderson, 2013;Fox et al, 2014;Young et al, 2017). The mid and posterior insula have a close relationship with sensorimotor cortices, which may also play a role in representing the concrete aspects of sensory experience during emotional processing (Khalsa, Rudrauf, Feinstein, & Tranel, 2009;Satpute et al, 2015).…”