Summary

I helped research, theorize, design, and write an R21 grant proposal to study the mechanisms by which meditation training can lead to positive emotional outcomes.

study

The Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, under the direction of Principal Investigator Dr. Nicco Reggente, is interested in studying the mechanisms by which meditation leads to positive outcomes for meditators, with the goal of bringing these benefits to more people.

The literature on meditation mechanisms primarily looks at neural correlates of meditation, e.g. through EEG studies. However, meditative and yogic traditions actually focus quite heavily on the body – cultivating the capacity to notice sensations in the body, as well as the capacity to regulate the body. These skills range from the seemingly mundane (“notice the feeling of the inhale”) to the extraordinary (such as monks who can precisely control their body temperature). Moreover, it’s widely accepted within practice communities that these somatic aspects of meditative/yogic practice are integral to the benefits of the practice.

We therefore saw a need to study the how the capacity for interoception mediates the positive emotional outcomes from contemplative practices – in this case, Vipassana in particular. We hypothesize that Interoceptive Awareness, a construct characterizing interoception (see below), mediates the relationship between Vipassana training and the positive impacts of Vipassana on wellbeing. In particular, we hypothesize that attention improvements from Vipassana training improve Interoceptive Awareness.

The proposed study

  1. uses a haptics body suit to facilitate attention to specific body locations during a body-scan meditation, and

  2. rigorously measures a battery of interoception and emotional outcomes measures over the course of meditation training.

Interoception background

“Interoception” refers to the brain/nervous system’s process of sensing and regulating what’s happening in the body. As studied and modeled, interoception is often considered from (at least) two different perspectives, one leaning psychological, and the other physiological:

Compare Murphy et al. (2019)’s description of interoception:

Perhaps the most well-known model (Garfinkel et al., 2015) proposes that interoception is a three-dimensional construct, comprising (1) interoceptive accuracy (as measured by performance on objective measures of interoception; e.g. heartbeat counting or detection tasks; Dale & Anderson, 1978; Katkin, Reed, & Deroo, 1983; Schandry, 1981; Whitehead, Drescher, Heiman, & Blackwell, 1977); (2) interoceptive sensibility (self-reported beliefs concerning one’s own interoception; measured using confidence ratings or questionnaires); and (3) interoceptive awareness (a metacognitive measure reflecting the correspondence between interoceptive accuracy and interoceptive sensibility, also referred to as interoceptive insight; Khalsa et al., 2018).

with Chen et al. (2021)’s language:

Interoception starts with interoceptive signals, which are signals originating from within an organism. Interoceptive signals can generally be categorized into three major types. The first type includes biochemical signals that range from inorganics, such as acidic ions, to organic molecules and small peptides. The second type includes mechanical forces that alter structures, such as cellular shape, through stretch or tissue extension. The third type are thermal and electromagnetic signals, which may be delivered in various wave frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum.

An additional perspective, which has emerged more recently, is a computational angle on interoception in which interoception is modeled according to the predictive processing / active inference view of the brain/body. For example, Smith et al. (2020) write:

Recent neurocomputational theories have hypothesized that abnormalities in prior beliefs and/or the precision-weighting of afferent interoceptive signals may facilitate the transdiagnostic emergence of psychopathology. Specifically, it has been suggested that, in certain psychiatric disorders, interoceptive processing mechanisms either over-weight prior beliefs or under-weight signals from the viscera (or both), leading to a failure to accurately update beliefs about the body.