This week’s newsletter finishes the report on the 2014 Brain and Cognition paper that examined whether Hinduist and Buddhist meditations triggered different brain networks.
Standardising all the EEG data from the 16 Buddhism and eight Hinduist trials – necessary to build these pictures – was only possible due to a nifty trick. As the location of the peaks came with a degree of uncertainty, co-ordinates weren’t modelled as single points, but by “a three-dimensional Gaussian function” – basically, a mathematical equation determining the probability of them being in a certain place.
The results are below. Bonus points for treating them as a Rorschach test and seeing what you can come up with. There you are, grumpy ape!
The lack of labelling makes the detail hard to follow, but the top line shows pretty clearly that different parts of the brain are being activated. In a nutshell, Buddhism meditations can trigger regions associated with attention, while Hinduist ones work on those associated with different levels of absorption.
Let’s take Hinduist meditation first, aimed at inducing non-dual awareness, with results showing five activation clusters. These could be related to (as all is correlation in neuroscience):
* Tasks involving internal visualisation and autobiographical memory.
* Aspects of language processing.
* Orienting the body in response to sensory stimuli (ie, awareness of bodily sensations).
* Autonomic control.
* Alterations in the subjective sense of self.
As for Buddhist meditation, where focus and attention was the name of the game? This implied that the fronto-parietal attention network would have been activated – and so it was.
Get the bubbles on ice!
Such meditation practices were associated with five clusters again, with three in the frontal lobe region. These are involved with self-referential processes, cognitive control and in first-person perspective taking – all suggesting that voluntary attention can be developed and control exercised over thoughts, feelings and sensations.
Another activation cluster was in a region associated with the brain receiving information about where body parts are situated, and internal simulation of the body moving. The authors suggest this could be linked with the focus of attention on sensations arising in the body and internal visualisation of body parts.
And areas in the default mode network – thought to regulate self-representation and “mental time travelling” – deactivated. “It is worth mentioning,” say the authors, “that these modifications are considered as the main aims of Buddhism-inspired meditation tradition that include the development of a higher concentration on present-time experience and the experiential understanding of the fleeting nature of the self (defined by Buddhists as anatta, a term deriving from Pali meaning “non-self”).
Bonus clip
Bonus bonus clip
Taken from the New Thinking Allowed newsletter, published by Jeffrey Mishlove, a trove of exploration of out-there ideas. This is the blurb for this 30-minute interview discussing non-dual awareness: “Swami Dayananda Saraswati was a member of the Order of Sanyasins, or spiritual renunciates. He is author of several books including The Value of Values, Who am I?, and Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. Here he points out that all human activity is based on a quality of non-self-acceptance. When we feel ourselves to be incomplete, inadequate or lacking in something that we desire, we often confuse the true self with the objects of awareness -- such as our own body.”
Next week: Reviewing the evidence for yogic breath regulation.