Remembrance of things to come: a conversation between Zen and neuroscience on the predictive nature of the mind

Abstract

The notion of the brain as a predictive organ following Bayesian principles has been steadily gaining favor in neuroscience. This perspective, which has broad theoretical and applicative consequences, suggests also a novel way to look at the mind-body processes mobilized by meditative practices. In this article, the topic is introduced and subsequently explored as a conversation between a neuroscientist (GP) and the abbot of a Zen Sōtō monastery (FTG). We believe that such ‘mutual perturbations’ between the third-person descriptions provided by scientific research and the phenomenological depth of Buddhist lore have a great potential for advancing our understanding of both brain function and meditation

Mindfulness and Cognitive Functions: Toward a Unifying Neurocognitive Framework

“…The articles by van Vugt and van den Hurk (2017) and of Malinowski et al (2017) also contribute to the understanding of the attentional and cognitive control mechanisms associated with mindfulness meditation training. The articles by Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn (2017), Norman (2017), and of Pagnoni and Guareschi (2017), together with the current article, integrate the study of meditation and mindfulness within broader areas of theoretical research on consciousness, cognition, self, and the mind-brain relationship.…”

“…The mental functions addressed by these articles include perception (Pagnoni and Guareschi 2017;Srinivasan and Singh 2017), multiple attentional processes (Di Francesco et al 2017;Ben-Soussan et al 2017;Jha et al 2017;Malinowski et al 2017;Srinivasan and Singh 2017;van Vugt and van den Hurk 2017), including attentional control, attentional orienting, alertness, sustained attention, attentional effort, and scope of attention, cognitive control (Malinowski et al 2017), thinking processes (Colzato et al 2017), metacognition (Norman 2017), consciousness (Ben-Soussan et al 2017;Norman 2017;Pagnoni and Guareschi 2017;Srinivasan and Singh 2017), and self (Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn 2017). Neurocognitive aging (Malinowski et al 2017) as well as affective processing (Malinowski et al 2017;Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn 2017) and transcendence experiences (Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn 2017; Pagnoni and Guareschi 2017) are also addressed in the special section.…”

“…Other contributed articles emphasize theoretical reflection informed by phenomenology, neurosciences, and contemplative tradition (Norman 2017;Pagnoni and Guareschi 2017). The empirical investigations involve mindfulness or meditation training on the timescale of several weeks (e.g., Ben-Soussan et al 2017;Jha et al 2017;Malinowski et al 2017) as well as long-term meditators (e.g., Srinivasan and Singh 2017) and assessment of dispositional mindfulness in non-meditators (Di Francesco et al 2017).…”

“…Colzato et al (2017) contrast the effects of focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation on thinking processes. Pagnoni and Guareschi (2017) present an original dialogue between a neuroscientist and a contemplative (Zen Buddhist) teacher, with a particular focus on the influential predictive coding framework (Friston 2009). …”

The epistemic and pragmatic value of non-action: a predictive coding perspective on meditation

“…In fact, it ties together in a coherent theoretical scaffold the core meditative notions of attention (top-down deployment of precision weighting), the conditioning power of habitual Self-related patterns of thought and behavior (priors), and the embodied nature of cognition and emotion (interoceptive inference). While this theoretical approach has already been endorsed in a few opinion pieces [9][10][11][12], and is gaining momentum in the community, its application to meditation-related experimental measures is still in its infancy [13]. The present article aims to provide not a detailed FEP-based manifesto for contemplative research ---a task which would require a more formal and extensive effort ---but rather an illustrative example of framing a previously proposed phenomenological model of focused attention (FA) meditation [14] in terms of active inference.…”