Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications

409 Pages·2014·4.329 MB·English

by  Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach (auth.), Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach (eds.)

Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality
Stefan Schmidt
Harald Walach Editors
Meditation –
Neuroscientifi c
Approaches and
Philosophical
Implications
Meditation – Neuroscientifi c Approaches
and Philosophical Implications
Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness
and Spirituality
Volume 2
Series Editors
Harald Walach, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
Stefan Schmidt, University Medical Center, Freiburg and European University
Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
Editorial Board
Jonathan Schooler, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Mario Beauregard, University of Montreal, Canada
Robert Forman, The Forge Institute, USA
B. Alan Wallace, Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, CA, USA
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/10195
Stefan Schmidt (cid:129) Harald Walach
Editors
Meditation – Neuroscientifi c
Approaches and
Philosophical Implications
Editors
Stefan Schmidt Harald Walach
Department of Psychosomatic Medicine Institute for Transcultural Health Science
and Psychotherapy European Universtiy Viadrina, Frankfurt
University Medical Center Freiburg Frankfurt , Germany
Freiburg, Germany
ISSN 2211-8918 ISSN 2211-8926 (electronic)
ISBN 978-3-319-01633-7 ISBN 978-3-319-01634-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954596
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Contents
Introduction: Laying out the Field of Meditation Research ....................... 1
Stefan Schmidt and Harald Walach
Towards an Epistemology of Inner Experience. ........................................... 7
Harald Walach
The Meditative Approach to Awaken Selfl ess Insight-Wisdom .................. 23
James H. Austin
Meditation as First-Person Methodology:
Real Promise—and Problems ........................................................................ 57
Jonathan Shear
Using First-Person Reports During Meditation
to Investigate Basic Cognitive Experience .................................................... 75
Wendy Hasenkamp
I Am I From Moment to Moment: Methods and Results
of Grasping Intersubjective and Intertemporal
Neurophysiological Differences During Meditation States ......................... 95
Thilo Hinterberger
Does Neuroimaging Provide Evidence of Meditation-Mediated
Neuroplasticity? .............................................................................................. 115
Shawn S. Clausen , Cindy C. Crawford , and John A. Ives
Opening Up Meditation for Science: The Development
of a Meditation Classifi cation System ........................................................... 137
Stefan Schmidt
The Neurobiology of Meditation and Mindfulness ...................................... 153
Tobias Esch
v
vi Contents
Meditation Effects in the Social Domain: Self-Other Connectedness
as a General Mechanism? .............................................................................. 175
Fynn-Mathis Trautwein , José Raúl Naranjo , and Stefan Schmidt
Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience of Time. ................................. 199
Marc Wittmann and Stefan Schmidt
Meditation and Hypnosis at the Intersection Between
Phenomenology and Cognitive Science ......................................................... 211
Michael Lifshitz , Emma P. Cusumano , and Amir Raz
Insights from Quiet Minds: The Converging Fields
of Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering ........................................................... 227
Michael D. Mrazek , Benjamin W. Mooneyham ,
and Jonathan W. Schooler
Can Contemplative Science Bring Meditation to (Western) Life? .................. 243
Norman A.S. Farb
Spiritual Phenomena as Public Goods: Exploring Meditation
Beyond the Standard Model. .......................................................................... 261
Torkel Falkenberg
Does Meditation Give Us Unique Insight into Ultimate Reality?
The Ethical Aim of Buddhism ....................................................................... 271
Hoyt L. Edge
God or Ultimate Reality in Theory and Practice:
A Philosophical Analysis ................................................................................ 297
Anne L. C. Runehov
The Concept of Tri-Guna: A Working Model .............................................. 317
Maika Puta and Peter Sedlmeier
Meditation: A Link to Spirituality and Health. A Novel Approach
to a Human Consciousness Field Experiment .............................................. 365
Eduard van Wijk , John Ackerman , and Roeland van Wijk
Mindfulness in German Schools (MISCHO):
A Specifi cally Tailored Training Program: Concept,
Implementation and Empirical Results ........................................................ 381
Vera Kaltwasser , Sebastian Sauer , and Niko Kohls
Index ................................................................................................................. 405
Introduction: Laying Out the Field
of Meditation Research
Stefan Schmidt and Harald Walach
Meditation is not just a simple research object. The rising and popular fi eld of
meditation research or contemplative science as it is called has a much larger impact
on modern science and on our society as we assume at the fi rst glance. This is
because meditation is not only a fascinating research object but also quite a challenge
for our current scientifi c practice. The content of this volume, which summarizes
presentations and discussions of an expert meeting in Freiburg, Germany, documents
the many facets and implications of meditation research. In this introduction we will
touch on a few of them.
The fi rst challenge meditation research brings to the established scientifi c para-
digm is that it is pointing to the n eglect of experience . Our personal fi rst person
experience, which, by the way, is our primary access to the world, cannot be shared
with others directly. You cannot explain how chocolate tastes. In order to get the
experience of the taste of chocolate others have to taste it themselves. Even worse,
scientists are not even able to explain the phenomenal experience (qualia) using
the current predominant approach in consciousness research (Chalmers 1 995 ).
The pragmatic solution taken so far was that personal experience was mainly devalued
in comparison with third person approaches. And this scientifi c practice is also
related to our cultural and social practice, where scientifi c beliefs often predominate
personal experience. Classical examples are: Patients who have been told for many
years that they cannot possibly have back pain because there is nothing to see on
their x-ray; people having unwanted telepathic experiences being told that they are
S. Schmidt (*)
European University Viadrina , Frankfurt (Oder) , Germany
University Medical Center Freiburg , Freiburg , Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
H. Walach
European University Viadrina , Frankfurt (Oder) , Germany
S. Schmidt and H. Walach (eds.), Meditation – Neuroscientifi c Approaches 1
and Philosophical Implications, Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality 2,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_1, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
2 S. Schmidt and H. Walach
having illusions and being advised to seek psychological help because no scientifi c
explanation is available; or people being shut away into psychiatric hospitals for no
other reason than for hearing voices. The investigation into the practice of meditation
has made a decisive difference here. The debate about including fi rst person perspec-
tive into science had started already at the end of the 1990s (Shear and Varela 1 999 ),
and successively we were able to demonstrate that this is a feasible position which
is also deeply rooted in the history of our western scientifi c paradigm (Walach and
Runehov 2010 ; Walach 2 011 ; see also the chapter by Walach in this volume).
Expanding on this fi rst person approach we can now conceptualize the practice
of meditation itself as a scientifi c method . Eastern cultures have investigated for
millennia consciousness and the mind by introspective methods based on insights
from meditation practice (Wallace 2 007 ). Western science has abandoned introspec-
tive approaches since they were considered error-prone. What has been overlooked
here is that any introspective approach needs the capability of stable attention
regulation in order to arrive at an unwavering perspective for observing one’s own
inner processes. In the same way as you cannot play music on the piano without
serious practice you cannot reliably observe your inner mental activities without
having some stability in your attention. Meditation provides us with a technique
to gain such stability, and thus trained mediators can be valuable participants in
all kinds of psychological and neuroscientifi c experiments which rely on precise
description of mental events (Lutz et al. 2007 , see also Hasenkamp in this volume,
Hinterberger in this volume for some examples).
Being an object and a method of research addresses another issue which is not
usual for scientifi c practice. In order to study meditation most r esearchers meditate
themselves . Some even argue that you cannot work in this area at all, if you do not
have your own fi rst person experience. This in turn means that the conceptualizations
of most of our colleagues in this fi eld (ourselves included) are among other factors
also driven by our personal meditation experience and also the specifi c tradition
we align ourselves to. In this sense meditation is no research object that one can
remain separate from oneself in the way like for example a biologists can stay
separate from a certain protein. Meditation science is mostly done by meditating
scientists. For somebody familiar with different traditions it is often obvious when
reading a publication whether the researchers in charge are coming from the
Theravada Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist or Transcendental Meditation tradition. But
on the other hand, with science normally conceptualized as an objective method
which should be independent of the individual conducting the research procedures,
this fact is rarely mentioned. Jonathan Shear and Hoyt Edge, both in this volume,
independently stress the importance and impact of this personal experience within
the research context and make suggestions how to incorporate it into the research
team or even into the process of forming teams including diverse perspectives on
meditations by mixing researchers with background in different traditions.
But meditation is also a complex research object for yet more reasons. One is
that meditation is almost i mpossible to defi ne and we have to look for different
approaches to conceptualize meditation within the scientifi c paradigm (see the
chapter by Schmidt in this volume). But even the very idea of defi ning an object of
Introduction: Laying Out the Field of Meditation Research 3
research makes obvious where meditative practices and scientifi c approach diverge.
Science needs defi nitions in order to create stable research objects. These well-d efi ned
objects, sometimes termed constructs, can then be empirically investigated by
research teams all over the world. But let’s take e.g. the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is entailing a radical reorientation towards one’s own experience.
One of the major insights gained by this approach is that there is no stability in
experience; or in other words that objects and constructs will wax and wane and
that they are thus essentially of a void nature, or at the very least quite fi ckle. This is,
epistemologically speaking, a radically different approach to the world. Trying to
fi nd a defi nition for mindfulness seems to be a contradiction in itself.
Another issue where meditation is at odds with the standard scientifi c paradigm
is the topic of the individuality of meditative states and experiences in meditators,
despite similar formal traditions that are being followed. Here we are hardly at the
beginning of even recognizing the problem. If you take a short glance at the colorful
charts mapping brain activities of 50 different meditators in the chapter of
Hinterberger (in this volume) you will get a fi rst impression of the issue at stake.
Standard empirical approaches normally imply that an intervention does the same to
everybody and thus statistics across populations meditating or not meditating are
computed and compared. The idea that this might be misleading came to our mind
for the fi rst time when we measured two very experienced nuns from the Theravada
tradition in our neurophysiological laboratory in Freiburg, Germany. The two nuns,
as well as the two sessions were quite alike. We spoke about techniques, meditation
practices and different approaches and for us this all looked very similar in
background, culturalization and practice of meditation. But the resulting EEGs of
these two women were quite different. Thus, not only can we hardly compare inner
experiences of meditators which each other, moreover, we even have to doubt that
similar experiences result in similar third person data. Hinterberger in his chapter
shows some data documenting this conundrum, and fi rst approaches to deal with
this variation in an adequate way.
With respect to this individuality of meditation we always have to recall the
fact that meditation – although it is nowadays frequently applied in the clinical
context – is no passive drug . Patients learning to meditate not only adopt a certain
practice of attention regulation. Most of them will also experience a deep intellectual
reorienting themselves and their lives. And it very likely is especially this part of
fi nding new meaning and understanding which is part of the clinical effectiveness.
In a qualitative study we have assessed the understanding of the concept of mind-
fulness by participants of a mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR)
and found huge differences, mainly regarding biographical aspects (see Schmidt,
this volume). So while we still use the method for assessing a passive drug – i.e. the
randomized controlled trial – to measure clinical effectiveness of mindfulness-based
interventions, we need to remind ourselves that the model behind the changes
observed does not really fi t this method. This is another incentive for researchers
within contemplative sciences to develop new methods which are more adequate to
the topic. And this generally applies to most scientifi c approaches regarding meditation
and its benefi ts. The goals of meditation are mostly levels of attainment within and