Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective.

“…has been operationalized as a stable mental trait that can be measured by a variety of dispositional scales (e.g., the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006; Baer et al., 2008; or the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), Brown & Ryan, 2003).”

“The CEN is responsible for selection, planning, and decision making in the context of goal-oriented behavior, as well as for maintaining and manipulating information in working-memory (Miller & Cohen, 2001).”

“This construct parallels endogenous orienting of attention in psychology, which is manipulated by displaying a cue or other instruction indicating, for example, where in space a target is likely to occur (Posner & Petersen, 1990).”

“The CEN refers here to the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), ventrolateral PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and lateral parietal cortices (Seeley et al., 2007) including also rostrolateral PFC (BA10) (Fleming, Weil, Nagy, Dolan, & Rees, 2010).”

“In contemporary clinical practice, practitioners are often taught that, as thoughts and feelings arise during mindfulness meditation, one should maintain an accepting or friendly attitude toward them (Bishop et al., 2004; Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, & Freedman, 2006).”

“Extending this view, Craig (2009, 2010) and Damasio (Damasio, 1996) proposed a model where the insula, in interactions with the thalamus and brainstem (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013), instantiates, from moment-to-moment, high-order neural representation of all subjectively perceived feelings central for…”

“This form of emotion regulation is modulated by other prefrontal networks that are part of the CEN, or salience network (SN) (Ochsner & Gross, 2005).”

“In the first report of the clinical use of mindfulness training to mitigate the effects of such pain, Kabat-Zinn (1982) stressed the fundamental utility of patients learning to observe thoughts as simply events in the mind with no a priori truth value.”

“, 2012) and by an alteration of these patterns in clinical populations such as depressed or anxious patients (Menon, 2011).”

“In contemporary clinical practice, practitioners are often taught that, as thoughts and feelings arise during mindfulness meditation, one should maintain an accepting or friendly attitude toward them (Bishop et al., 2004; Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, & Freedman, 2006).”

“…also typically activated during tasks that ask participants to engage in internal mentation such as mentalizing, projecting oneself in the future, self-referential thought or decision making (Amodio & Frith, 2006; Andrews-Hanna, Reidler, Sepulcre, Poulin, & Buckner, 2010; Buckner & Carroll, 2007).”

“Similar neuroscientific models of maladaptive appraisal processes have been proposed in anxiety (Etkin & Wager, 2007) and risk-taking behavior in adolescence (Ernst & Fudge, 2009).”

“This ‘default network’ was initially identified during passive, uncontrolled tasks (Gusnard et al., 2001) and is consistently observed at rest using intrinsic functional connectivity MRI measures.”

“As such, MBCT has repeatedly been shown to effectively prevent depression relapse (Segal et al., 2010; Teasdale et al., 2000), as extensively reviewed in Dimidjian and Segal in this volume (Dimidjian & Segal, 2015).”

“The difficulty in specifying mindfulness as a cognitive process stems also from the drive to arrive at a single definition to cover all styles of mindfulness, and in some cases, Buddhist sources have been used to support this type of monolithic definition (e.g., Hölzel et al., 2011).”

“A growing literature reports improvements in attention and working memory with mindfulness training (for a recent review, see, Tang et al., 2015).”

“The function of the default mode has been related to participants’ spontaneous thoughts or mind-wandering (Fox et al., 2015; Mason et al., 2007).”

“In the Attention Network Test (ANT, Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002), for example, the orienting subsystem of attention is characterized by faster target detection reaction times for those targets appearing at locations at which attention was directed prior to the target onset versus targets appearing at…”

“As will be explained further below, it is also a key component of “decentering” (Williams, 2010), “cognitive defusion” (Hayes, 2004), or “metacognitive insight” whereby “thoughts are perceived to be transient, insubstantial mental events rather than accurate representations of reality” (Chambers et al.”

“In its more technical uses, sm ṛ ti or “mindfulness” points to a fundamental capacity to retain an object in cognition, somewhat akin to working memory (Jha, Stanley, & Baime, 2010; Dreyfus, 2011).”

“It has been defined as the mental state that arises when attention is directed toward explicitly noting the current contents of consciousness (Schooler, 2002; Smallwood & Schooler, 2015).”

“Ernst, M., & Fudge, J. L. (2009). A developmental neurobiological model”

“…an 8-week mindfulness training course akin to MBSR to a no-training control group revealed more efficient orienting scores after training for the MT vs. control group (Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007; see also Hodgins & Adair, 2010; van den Hurk, Giommi, Gielen, Speckens, & Barendregt, 2010).”

“, Kober, H., & Tindle, H. A. (2013). Mindful attention reduces neural and self-reported cue-induced craving in smokers. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8, 73–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsr076 Williams, J. M. G. (2010). Mindfulness and psychological process. Emotion, 10, 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1…”

“By phenomenological space, we mean the characterization of categorical features of the field of experience, as it is lived and verbally articulated in the first-person (e.g., Husserl, 2008).”

“In this context, Dereification, or “decentering” (Barnard & Teasdale, 1991; Segal et al., 2012; Teasdale et al., 1995) refers to the ability to observe repetitive negative thinking as a temporary and impersonal process in the mind.”

“…and analytical schemas from divergent subdisciplines, including contemplative theories (e.g., in the Abhidharma or Mahāmudrā; see details in Gethin, 1998 and Dunne, 2015), or clinical frameworks (e.g., MBSR), or neuroscientific models (e.g., Hölzel et al, 2011; Vago & Silbersweig, 2012).”

“In support of this idea, Farb et al. (2007) found that focusing in the present moment after an MBSR intervention compared to being engaged in self-related narrative processes enhanced activity of interoceptive signals in areas such as the insula and secondary somatosensory cortex, and reduced…”

“…this view, Craig (2009, 2010) and Damasio (Damasio, 1996) proposed a model where the insula, in interactions with the thalamus and brainstem (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013), instantiates, from moment-to-moment, high-order neural representation of all subjectively perceived feelings central for…”

“, & Segal, Z. V. (2015). Prospects for a clinical science of”

“, & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion.”

“With this in mind, we note that revising one’s initial perception of a picture of an injured person as being just a picture taken from a movie (reappraisal) typically down-regulates the activity of subcortical affective regions like the amygdala (Urry et al., 2006).”

“In support of this claim, one study observed an inverted u-shaped curve in CEN activity in expert and novice meditators during FA in which those learning a skill initially had increased activation, yet eventually showed less activation (Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007).”

“…the thalamus and brainstem (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013), instantiates, from moment-to-moment, high-order neural representation of all subjectively perceived feelings central for subjective awareness or “conscious presence” (see also Seth, Suzuki, & Critchley, 2011 for a recent mechanistic model).”

“The other style of practice plotted in the figure is Open Monitoring (for an overview see Lutz et al., 2008; Gunaratana, 2002; Namgyal et al., 2004; Goldstein & Kornfield, 2001; Suzuki & Chadwick, 2011).”

“To determine if endogenous orienting is indeed akin to the proposed Object Orientation dimension, we delineate four prominent functional markers of orienting (Mangun, 1995) and review evidence suggesting that MT may improve the efficiency of these identified markers.”

“This tendency to treat Meta-awareness and Dereification as identical also appears in the psychological literature, where accounts of “cognitive defusion” (Hayes, 2004) and “decentering” (e.g., Fresco et al., 2007) do not clearly distinguish these capacities.”

“Jon Kabat-Zinn has noted (Williams & Kabat-Zinn, 2011) that mindfulness can be used as an “umbrella term” for a collection of practices and personal values that enable one to live mindfully.”

“…EEG report that orienting of attention increases phase locking of theta activity (e.g., Sauseng, Hoppe, Klimesch, Gerloff, & Hummel, 2007), and recent studies of MT in long-term retreatants reported greater phase locking to T2 (the second target) in an attentional blink task (Slagter et al., 2007).”

“…these results, in a randomized active control (health education) longitudinal study of compassion-based meditation, Pace et al. (Pace et al., 2010; Pace et al., 2009) found decreased IL-6 and cortisol activations after the TSST in the meditation training group, but only for those who practiced…”

“As noted above, this capacity to detect the “background” or lived subjective context of one’s object-focused experience contrasts with an “inward turn” of attention, often characterized as “introspection,” or retrospective second-order judgment (Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Overgaard & Sandberg, 2012).”

“In particular, mindfulness practices are now incorporated in a variety of axiological frameworks ranging from traditional religious contexts to educational settings (Flook et al., 2010), military training (Jha et al., 2010) and other contemporary societal contexts such as law (Orenstein, 2011).”

“Next, we briefly describe three neural networks that are often reported in research on mindfulness or in studies that are directly relevant to the dimensions described in our model (Fox, Spreng, Ellamil, Andrews-Hanna, & Christoff, 2015; Tang et al., 2015).”

“Grossman, in his 2008 commentary, has addressed some of these issues (Grossman, 2008; see also Grossman & Van Dam, 2011).”

“The other style of practice plotted in the figure is Open Monitoring (for an overview see Lutz et al., 2008; Gunaratana, 2002; Namgyal et al., 2004; Goldstein & Kornfield, 2001; Suzuki & Chadwick, 2011).”

“…amoli & Bodhi, 2009; Namgyal et al., 2004) and contemporary meditation manuals (Goldstein & Kornfield, 2001; Suzuki & Chadwick, 2011), along with scholarly analyses of traditional practices (Anālayo, 2003; Bodhi, 2011; Dreyfus, 2011; Dunne, 2011, 2105; Gethin, 2011; Sharf, 2014; Van Schaik, 2004).”

“In line with improvements in perceptual clarity, MacLean et al. (2010) reported improvements in visual perceptual thresholds in the context of a sustained attention continuous performance vigilance task after three months of intensive FA retreat experience compared to a matched control group.”

“This broader model accounts for salient and alerting affective states, such as fear, which activate the sympathetic automatic nervous system, but could also instantiate parasympathetic-related affective states such as calm, positive feeling (Craig, 2010).”

“A similar dimensional approach has been advocated for characterizing mental disorders (Hyman, 2007).”

“Grossman, in his 2008 commentary, has addressed some of these issues (Grossman, 2008; see also Grossman & Van Dam, 2011).”

“…constructs have been studied, for instance in research on trial-to-trial variability in behavioral or neurophysiological measures of vigilance (Lutz et al., 2009; Zanesco, King, Maclean, & Saron, 2013), or in the recovery function in studies of response to aversive stimulation (Schuyler et…”

“It has been defined as the mental state that arises when attention is directed toward explicitly noting the current contents of consciousness (Schooler, 2002; Smallwood & Schooler, 2015).”

“…these phenomenological dimensions and activity in specific brain regions is plausible because studies concerning emotion and cognition have shown that brain regions’ functions are inherently multidimensional, and that structurally different regions can perform the same function (Pessoa, 2014).”

“As such, MBCT has repeatedly been shown to effectively prevent depression relapse (Segal et al., 2010; Teasdale et al., 2000), as extensively reviewed in Dimidjian and Segal in this volume (Dimidjian & Segal, 2015).”

“But as Rupert Gethin has pointed out (Gethin, 2011), in its broadest sense, mindfulness also implies keeping in mind the larger context within which Buddhist practice occurs, including the motivations and goals for practice, and the ethical and aesthetic values that inform a practitioner’s worldview.”

“, using negative images like a snake) to explore this possibility in a well-matched randomized longitudinal study pre/post a 6-week meditation intervention (Allen et al., 2012).”

“The potentially reciprocal nature of activation of these large-scale networks and their functional roles have started to be explored in the context of meditation sessions or meditation expertise, and is a promising avenue of research (Hasenkamp & Barsalou, 2012).”

“Recent interest in investigating the effect of contemplative practices on children and adolescents (Davidson et al., 2012) could offer a promising research opportunity to disentangle these dimensions by virtue of the possible interaction of developmental changes and locations along these dimensions.”

“…studies of attention examining synchronous activity in EEG report that orienting of attention increases phase locking of theta activity (e.g., Sauseng, Hoppe, Klimesch, Gerloff, & Hummel, 2007), and recent studies of MT in long-term retreatants reported greater phase locking to T2 (the…”

“…the aI/dACC acts as a hub whose activity is correlated with changes in subjective feeling states and that flexibly connects not only with fixed anatomical pathways (e.g., amygdala, rTPJ), but also dynamically integrates a broad variety of neural systems (e.g., Jabbi, Bastiaansen, & Keysers, 2008).”

“Similar neuroscientific models of maladaptive appraisal processes have been proposed in anxiety (Etkin & Wager, 2007) and risk-taking behavior in adolescence (Ernst & Fudge, 2009).”

“Recently Kerr and colleagues investigated if an 8-week MBSR course in MT-naïve participants might improve the efficiency of this biasing of baseline activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Kerr et al., 2013).”

“In a recent study by Moore et al. (2012), participants were given a Stroop task which required them to report the color of the ink regardless of the color word containing the ink.”

“Schooler, J. W. (2002). Re-representing consciousness: Dissociations”

“The subjects in the MBSR course were compared to an active control intervention carefully matched to the structure and non-specific social context of MBSR, where the program for the active control group that has itself been shown to promote well-being without explicitly training mindfulness (Health Enhancement Program…”

“For instance, manipulating task demand to increase difficulty is typically associated with increase BOLD activity in CEN and subcortical reward circuitry (Schmidt et al., 2012).”

“In addition, the diurnal slope of cortisol responses was steeper in the MBSR compared with HEP groups after training, a pattern associated with improved cognitive and psychological functioning (Rosenkranz et al., 2013).”

“Grossman, in his 2008 commentary, has addressed some of these issues (Grossman, 2008; see also Grossman & Van Dam, 2011).”

“One of the consequences of sustained effort expenditure is ego depletion, which lowers one’s capacity to inhibit maladaptive responses to environmental challenges (Baumeister, 2003).”

“Jensen et al. (2012) recently explored this methodological issue by investigating the specificity of MBSR-related effect on attention.”

“Some researchers have used these scales to characterize clinical groups (e.g., Leigh, Bowen, & Marlatt, 2005) or to identify, in untrained subjects, the neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness (e.g., Creswell, Way, Eisenberger, & Lieberman, 2007).”

“While this proposal is still largely speculative in the context of meditation research, it is now a plausible prediction in light of research on spatially independent patterns of intrinsic brain networks (Calhoun & Adalı, 2012; Jack et al., 2012) and by an alteration of these patterns in clinical populations such as d…”

“In line with this literature, Westbrook et al. (2013) demonstrated how just the briefest training in mindfulness can have important effects on the experience of craving, and activation of craving-related brain regions in smokers actively desiring to quit.”

“In this framework, the Dereification of the perceived object or process should reduce the mental absorption into the object (for a recent example see Papies et al., 2012).”

“As will be explained further below, it is also a key component of “decentering” (Williams, 2010), “cognitive defusion” (Hayes, 2004), or “metacognitive insight” whereby “thoughts are perceived to be transient, insubstantial mental events rather than accurate representations of reality” (Chambers et…”

“org/10.1037/10037-000 Brown, C. A., & Jones, A. K. P. (2010). Meditation experience predicts less negative appraisal of pain: Electrophysiological evidence for the involvement of anticipatory neural responses.”

“The technical interpretation of mindfulness within Buddhism has engendered considerable debate among Buddhist theorists (Dreyfus, 2011; Dunne, 2011; Gethin, 2011; Olendzki, 2011; Teasdale & Chaskalson, 2011a–b), but contemporary accounts from within psychology converge around some key themes.”

“…an 8-week mindfulness training course akin to MBSR to a no-training control group revealed more efficient orienting scores after training for the MT vs. control group (Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007; see also Hodgins & Adair, 2010; van den Hurk, Giommi, Gielen, Speckens, & Barendregt, 2010).”

“In this context, Dereification, or “decentering” (Barnard & Teasdale, 1991; Segal et al., 2012; Teasdale et al., 1995) refers to the ability to observe repetitive negative thinking as a temporary and impersonal process in the mind.”

“Recent studies have reported a high degree of correspondence between mindfulness scores and stress (Goldberg, Del Re, Hoyt, & Davis, 2014; Stanley, Schaldach, Kiyonaga, & Jha, 2011), personality factors (Siegling & Petrides, 2014), as well as other composite psychological factors such as quality of…”

“, 2008) or working memory (Morrison et al., 2014)— uncharacterized dose-response profile, possible aversive effects (e.”

“Recent studies have reported a high degree of correspondence between mindfulness scores and stress (Goldberg, Del Re, Hoyt, & Davis, 2014; Stanley, Schaldach, Kiyonaga, & Jha, 2011), personality factors (Siegling & Petrides, 2014), as well as other composite psychological factors such as quality of life and “adaptive…”

“For example, participants in a tango class exhibited comparable improvement in mindfulness scores when compared to participants in a mindfulness intervention (Pinniger, Brown, Thorsteinsson, & McKinley, 2012).”

“Nevertheless, even when ethical or spiritual issues are downplayed due to concerns about secularity, mindfulness interventions are often still delivered within an implicit framework of values and ethics (Wilson, 2014).”

“In an electrophysiological study of pain anticipation, Brown & Jones (2010) found markedly lower anticipatory activations of multiple cortical structures in meditators generally engaged in FA and mindfulness practices compared to a non-meditating control group.”

“As noted above, this capacity to detect the “background” or lived subjective context of one’s object-focused experience contrasts with an “inward turn” of attention, often characterized as “introspection,” or retrospective second-order judgment (Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Overgaard & Sandberg, 2012).”

“As is the case with “self-distancing” (Kross, Duckworth, Ayduk, Tsukayama, & Mischel, 2011; Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012), Dereification may facilitate elimination of an earlier interpretation of mental content and enable the new interpretation provided by the reappraisal process.”

“…have been studied, for instance in research on trial-to-trial variability in behavioral or neurophysiological measures of vigilance (Lutz et al., 2009; Zanesco, King, Maclean, & Saron, 2013), or in the recovery function in studies of response to aversive stimulation (Schuyler et al., 2012).”

“In a more recent study Melloni et al. (2013) replicated these null effects and reported that meditators and novices that completed a MBSR intervention did not differ from non-meditators on cardiac interoceptive sensitivity.”

“These data are consistent with longitudinal findings from a 3-month training with FA meditation that demonstrated increases in EEG activation within frontal and parietal electrodes during mindfulness of breathing as assessed by oscillatory EEG activity (Saggar et al., 2012).”

“…between mindfulness scores and stress (Goldberg, Del Re, Hoyt, & Davis, 2014; Stanley, Schaldach, Kiyonaga, & Jha, 2011), personality factors (Siegling & Petrides, 2014), as well as other composite psychological factors such as quality of life and “adaptive functioning” (Goldberg, Del Re,…”

“…an integrated and careful description employing first, second, and third-person methods, including physiological measures by which to probe an individual’s phenomenology in an online fashion along the dimensions we propose (see Varela, 1996; Petitmengin, Baulac, & Navarro, 2006 for methods).”

“In support of this possibility, Pagnoni (2012) noticed differences in the skewness of the fMRI blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in ventral posteriomedial cortex (vPMC), a region of the DMN, between experienced Zen meditators and meditation-naïve controls who were engaged in…”

“Recent studies have found that, indeed, mindfulness training reduces mind-wandering indexed by self-report and task performance measures (Morrison, Goolsarran, Rogers, & Jha, 2014; Mrazek et al., 2013; Zanesco et al., 2013).”

“For instance, the Object Orientation dimension could be sub-divided along different aspects of attention (sustained, selective, disengagement) or implicit or explicit working memory (see Teasdale & Chaskalson, 2011a–b).”

“The technical interpretation of mindfulness within Buddhism has engendered considerable debate among Buddhist theorists (Dreyfus, 2011; Dunne, 2011; Gethin, 2011; Olendzki, 2011; Teasdale & Chaskalson, 2011a–b), but contemporary accounts from within psychology converge around some key themes.”

“In addition to its role in externally directed attention to guide input-level perceptual processing, endogenous orienting is critical for internally directed attention via encoding and maintenance of information in working memory (see Jha, 2002).”

“In line with these results, in a randomized active control (health education) longitudinal study of compassion-based meditation, Pace et al. (Pace et al., 2010; Pace et al., 2009) found decreased IL-6 and cortisol activations after the TSST in the meditation training group, but only for those who practiced above the m…”

“As is the case with “self-distancing” (Kross, Duckworth, Ayduk, Tsukayama, & Mischel, 2011; Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012), Dereification may facilitate elimination of an earlier interpretation of mental content and enable the new interpretation provided by the reappraisal process.”

“Recent studies have reported a high degree of correspondence between mindfulness scores and stress (Goldberg, Del Re, Hoyt, & Davis, 2014; Stanley, Schaldach, Kiyonaga, & Jha, 2011), personality factors (Siegling & Petrides, 2014), as well as other composite psychological factors such as quality of…”

“This specific aspect of object orientation has also been studied, for instance, in the so-called omitted stimulus paradigm using event-related potentials (Tarkka & Stokic, 1998).”

“org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.08.003 Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal”

“The first is to use a multimodal approach wherein first-and third-person (i.e., neurobiological and/or behavioral) assessments are used to mutually inform and identify one another (cf. Lutz et al., 2015; Lutz et al., 2002).”

“And, as mentioned previously, other mechanistic models of mindfulness training describe additional underlying processes that may be equally important in fostering mindfulness and influencing its associated outcomes (e.g., Lutz et al., 2015).”

“The word “mindfulness” corresponds to the translation of the original terms smrti (from Sanskrit) or sati (Pali), which captures the capacity to retain an object in the mind, but in a broad sense also implies being aware of and attentive to the present moment (Lutz et al., 2015).”