Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: A fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states.
Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall, Erica Duncan, Lawrence W. Barsalou
NeuroImage, Volume 59, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 750-760
DOI PMID Google scholar Free
This paper is of special interest to me because the authors studied what happens physically in people’s brains while they do the exercise I utilized as an operationalized definition of “awareness” in the first article I wrote about consciousness. (I don’t mean to suggest that the authors were aware of my article. The exercise has been familiar to meditators for thousands of years.)
Summary of the paper
The authors observed their subjects’ brain activity with fMRI while the subjects tried to keep their attention on their breath. When the subjects noticed that their attention had wandered, they pressed a button and returned to watching their breath. The authors distinguished four subjective states in this process. They gave these states capitalized nicknames and correlated them with active brain regions:
MW (mind wandering); default mode network.
AWARE (awareness of mind wandering); salience network.
SHIFT (shifting of attention); executive network.
FOCUS (sustained attention); executive network.
My comments
The purpose of this study was to correlate the stages of a particular kind of meditation with active regions of the brain. I’m not competent to judge how well the authors did this so I won’t say anything about it.
Therefore nothing I say here is an appraisal of the paper or a criticism of it on its own terms.
The most interesting finding in the paper, for me, is the correlation between the salience network and snapping out of mind wandering. As I described in that early article of mine, the snap-out moment comes with a sense of intensified consciousness that has nothing to do with consciousness of anything in particular. The authors don’t mention this. They give this moment the nickname “AWARE” but it’s an abbreviation for “awareness of mind wandering” not for awareness itself.
The authors refer to the meditation used in the paper as “focused attention” and they see the whole four-step process in relation to focusing. “MW” means the mind wandered away from focusing; “AWARE” means the person became aware that they stopped focusing; “SHIFT” means the person deliberately resumed focusing; and FOCUS is self-explanatory.
In contrast, when I described the same exercise in my early article, my only purpose was to use it as an operationalized tool for showing readers the spike in consciousness that occurs at the moment they snap out of mind wandering. However I didn’t use the term “mind wandering” because that name has meaning only in relation to deliberate control of attention which was of little interest to me. I called it the “lost in thought state” because that name has meaning in relation to the snapping-out state. When we snap out, we come to our senses, i.e., we find something that had been lost while we were daydreaming. What was lost is more than focused attention; what was lost is an aspect or degree of consciousness.
Focused attention requires an object that we focus on, in this case the breath. This object is a content of consciousness not consciousness itself.
By “consciousness itself” I mean consciousness apart from objects. Consciousness is known and described this way in Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya/Yoga, and Dzogchen but not in most other soteriological traditions.
The meditation used in the paper is a Buddhist practice called anapanasati which is especially important in Theravada. Theravada, like most Buddhist schools, doesn’t recognize consciousness itself.
Other soteriological traditions have invented practices for knowing consciousness itself. The author’s finding that the snap-out moment correlates with salience network activity makes me wonder whether those practices, on the physical level, are attempts to prolong salience network activity.
If that conjecture is correct, biofeedback devices might help practitioners by showing them the level of salience network activity. Right now this is very far from practical but technology marches on.
The description given by the authors for the brief state that occurs when we snap out of mind wandering, “awareness of mind wandering,” is misleading because it can be interpreted in two different ways: “I know that my mind was wandering” or “I am experiencing mind wandering now.” This obfuscates an extremely important point: people are unaware of mind wandering while it happens. What actually takes place during the snap-out state is that people suddenly become aware that their minds had been wandering. We are aware of mind wandering only retrospectively. The authors show they know this by writing in the paper’s discussion section, “During the AWARE phase, participants detected that their mind had wandered away from the attentional object, namely, the breath,” but nonetheless their use of “aware of” is inconsistent. The problem here is that the phrase “be aware of” is ambiguous. It can mean both “know” and “experience.” This is not a minor pedantic point. It is impossible to write clearly about consciousness unless we have an unambiguous vocabulary for concepts as basic as “know” and “experience.”
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