An initial fMRI study on neural correlates of prayer in members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

BACKGROUND: Many individuals with alcohol-use disorders who had experienced alcohol craving before joining Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) report little or no craving after becoming long-term members. Their use of AA prayers may contribute to this. Neural mechanisms underlying this process have not been delineated. OBJECTIVE: To define experiential and neural correlates of diminished alcohol craving following AA prayers among members with long-term abstinence. METHODS: Twenty AA members with long-term abstinence participated. Self-report measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging of differential neural response to alcohol-craving-inducing images were obtained in three conditions: after reading of AA prayers, after reading irrelevant news, and with passive viewing. Random-effects robust regressions were computed for the main effect (prayer > passive + news) and for estimating the correlations between the main effect and the self-report measures. RESULTS: Compared to the other two conditions, the prayer condition was characterized by: less self-reported craving; increased activation in left-anterior middle frontal gyrus, left superior parietal lobule, bilateral precuneus, and bilateral posterior middle temporal gyrus. Craving following prayer was inversely correlated with activation in brain areas associated with self-referential processing and the default mode network, and with characteristics reflecting AA program involvement. CONCLUSION: AA members' prayer was associated with a relative reduction in self-reported craving and with concomitant engagement of neural mechanisms that reflect control of attention and emotion. These findings suggest neural processes underlying the apparent effectiveness of AA prayer.

Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness as such.

Consciousness is multi-dimensional but is most often portrayed with a two-dimensional (2D) map that has global levels or states on one axis and phenomenal contents on the other. On this map, awareness is conflated either with general alertness or with phenomenal content. This contributes to ongoing difficulties in the scientific understanding of consciousness. Previously, I have proposed that consciousness as such or nondual awareness-a basic non-conceptual, non-propositional awareness in itself free of subject-object fragmentation-is a unique kind that cannot be adequately specified by this 2D map of states and contents. Here, I propose an implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness to be added as the z-axis to the existing 2D map of consciousness. This gradient informs about the degree to which nondual awareness is manifest in any experience, independent of the specifics of global state or local content. Alternatively, within the multi-dimensional state space model of consciousness, nondual awareness can be specified by several vectors, each representing one of its properties. In the first part, I outline nondual awareness or consciousness as such in terms of its phenomenal description, its function and its neural correlates. In the second part, I explore the implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness and how including it as an additional axis clarifies certain features of everyday dualistic experiences and is especially relevant for understanding the unitary and nondual experiences accessed via different contemplative methods, mind-altering substances or spontaneously.

Duality and nonduality in meditation research.

The great variety of meditation techniques found in different contemplative traditions presents a challenge when attempting to create taxonomies based on the constructs of contemporary cognitive sciences. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Travis and Shear add 'automatic self-transcending' to the previously proposed categories of 'focused attention' and 'open monitoring', and suggest characteristic EEG bands as the defining criteria for each of the three categories. Accuracy of current taxonomies and potential limitations of EEG measurements as classifying criteria are discussed.

Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience.

Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) have recently gained attention in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. They can be thought of as episodes of greatly reduced or even absent phenomenal content together with a reduced level of arousal. It has also been proposed that MPEs are cases of consciousness-as-such. Here, we present a different perspective, that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is, non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind and cannot be adequately specified by the two-dimensional model of consciousness as the arousal level plus the phenomenal content or by their mental representations. Thus, we suggest that to understand consciousness-as-such, and by extension consciousness in general, more accurately, we need to research it as a unique kind.

Nondual Awareness and the Whole Person.

Integrative Health aims to treat the whole person and to do so within the context of whole systems and practices. We raise questions as to what constitutes the whole person and what must be taken into account to support the creation of optimal well-being. We propose that in order to fully account for the whole person, the transcendent aspects of human awareness, the development of which is the goal of many meditative traditions, must be taken into account. "Nondual awareness" is a term increasingly used in the literature to describe a state of awareness that is characterized by the experience of nonseparation, compassion, and love. Well-being in this state does not depend on anything being experienced per se, but it is rather an innate attribute of living in nonduality. For these reasons, nondual awareness can be considered foundational to the realization of the whole person and achieving the state of optimal well-being.

The enhancement of visuospatial processing efficiency through Buddhist Deity meditation.

This study examined the effects of meditation on mental imagery, evaluating Buddhist monks' reports concerning their extraordinary imagery skills. Practitioners of Buddhist meditation were divided into two groups according to their preferred meditation style: Deity Yoga (focused attention on an internal visual image) or Open Presence (evenly distributed attention, not directed to any particular object). Both groups of meditators completed computerized mental-imagery tasks before and after meditation. Their performance was compared with that of control groups, who either rested or performed other visuospatial tasks between testing sessions. The results indicate that all the groups performed at the same baseline level, but after meditation, Deity Yoga practitioners demonstrated a dramatic increase in performance on imagery tasks compared with the other groups. The results suggest that Deity meditation specifically trains one's capacity to access heightened visuospatial processing resources, rather than generally improving visuospatial imagery abilities.

Nondual awareness: Consciousness-as-such as non-representational reflexivity.

I introduce arguments toward a non-representational reflexivity theory of consciousness-as-such to address one of the key issues in the science of consciousness today: lack of understanding of the nature of consciousness itself. An expanded map of consciousness is outlined, which includes, in addition to the well-known contents of awareness and levels of arousal, the indeterminate substrate and consciousness-as-such or nondual awareness. The central idea presented is that consciousness-as-such is a non-conceptual nondual awareness, whose essential property is non-representational reflexivity. This property makes consciousness-as-such phenomenologically, cognitively and neurobiologically a unique kind, different from and irreducible to any contents, functions and states, including the indeterminate substrate. Our previous hypothesis on the precuneus network for nondual awareness is further discussed in relation to non-representational reflexivity, and in the light of other hypotheses on the neural correlates of consciousness-as-such.

Future directions in meditation research: Recommendations for expanding the field of contemplative science.

The science of meditation has grown tremendously in the last two decades. Most studies have focused on evaluating the clinical effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, neural and other physiological correlates of meditation, and individual cognitive and emotional aspects of meditation. Far less research has been conducted on more challenging domains to measure, such as group and relational, transpersonal and mystical, and difficult aspects of meditation; anomalous or extraordinary phenomena related to meditation; and post-conventional stages of development associated with meditation. However, these components of meditation may be crucial to people's psychological and spiritual development, could represent important mediators and/or mechanisms by which meditation confers benefits, and could themselves be important outcomes of meditation practices. In addition, since large numbers of novices are being introduced to meditation, it is helpful to investigate experiences they may encounter that are not well understood. Over the last four years, a task force of meditation researchers and teachers met regularly to develop recommendations for expanding the current meditation research field to include these important yet often neglected topics. These meetings led to a cross-sectional online survey to investigate the prevalence of a wide range of experiences in 1120 meditators. Results show that the majority of respondents report having had many of these anomalous and extraordinary experiences. While some of the topics are potentially controversial, they can be subjected to rigorous scientific investigation. These arenas represent largely uncharted scientific terrain and provide excellent opportunities for both new and experienced researchers. We provide suggestions for future directions, with accompanying online materials to encourage such research.

Love and compassion meditation: a nondual perspective.

This paper discusses meditation from the unique perspective of the nondual approach and explores the possible relevance of this approach to applications of love and compassion meditation in clinical settings. It contrasts the nondual approach with the better known gradual or goal-oriented, dualistic view of meditation. This paper also introduces one of the central ideas of the nondual approach-that love and compassion, like other positive qualities that are ordinarily considered as goals of meditation practice, can be found to be already present within oneself as innate dimensions of one's authentic being.

Neural correlates of nondual awareness in meditation.

Dualities such as self versus other, good versus bad, and in-group versus out-group are pervasive features of human experience, structuring the majority of cognitive and affective processes. Yet, an entirely different way of experiencing, one in which such dualities are relaxed rather than fortified, is also available. It depends on recognizing, within the stream of our consciousness, the nondual awareness (NDA)--a background awareness that precedes conceptualization and intention and that can contextualize various perceptual, affective, or cognitive contents without fragmenting the field of experience into habitual dualities. This paper introduces NDA as experienced in Tibetan Buddhist meditation and reviews the results of our study on the influence of NDA on anticorrelated intrinsic and extrinsic networks in the brain. Also discussed are preliminary data from a current study of NDA with minimized phenomenal content that points to involvement of a precuneus network in NDA.

Influence of meditation on anti-correlated networks in the brain.

Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that are internal and self-related. The cerebral cortex appears to be divided into two corresponding systems: an "extrinsic" system composed of brain areas that respond more to external stimuli and tasks and an "intrinsic" system composed of brain areas that respond less to external stimuli and tasks. These two broad brain systems seem to compete with each other, such that their activity levels over time is usually anti-correlated, even when subjects are "at rest" and not performing any task. This study used meditation as an experimental manipulation to test whether this competition (anti-correlation) can be modulated by cognitive strategy. Participants either fixated without meditation (fixation), or engaged in non-dual awareness (NDA) or focused attention (FA) meditations. We computed inter-area correlations ("functional connectivity") between pairs of brain regions within each system, and between the entire extrinsic and intrinsic systems. Anti-correlation between extrinsic vs. intrinsic systems was stronger during FA meditation and weaker during NDA meditation in comparison to fixation (without mediation). However, correlation between areas within each system did not change across conditions. These results suggest that the anti-correlation found between extrinsic and intrinsic systems is not an immutable property of brain organization and that practicing different forms of meditation can modulate this gross functional organization in profoundly different ways.