Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to “short” and “long” standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in (...) the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmpathy is commonly defined as the ability to feel another person’s emotion, and has previously received significant attention from various research communities. The third-person nature of...

Objectives Practitioners in contemplative traditions commonly report experiencing an awareness that is distinct from sensory objects, thoughts, and emotions (“awareness itself”). They also report experiences of a void or underlying silence that is closely associated with this awareness. Subjects who carry out the Headless Way exercises frequently report an experience of emptiness or void at the same time as other contents (void-like experiences). The goals of this study were to (1) assess the reliability of these methods in eliciting the recognition (...) of awareness and void-like experiences in participants who had no prior exposure to these techniques, (2) investigate the prevalence of these experiences in these tasks, and (3) to differentiate these experiences from closely related and potential precursor experiences. -/- Method Twenty adults participated in in-depth individual interviews in which they were guided through the Headless Way exercises. A thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts. -/- Results Twelve of the participants reported a void-like experience, and five participants reported an experience of awareness itself. These experiences were respectively categorized as subsets of the more general categories of perceptual absences and the sense of not being person-like. Another novel finding was the real-time reports of awareness and void-like experiences during the exercises. -/- Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the Headless Way exercises can effectively induce experiences of emptiness and awareness in participants without prior experience. The findings suggest that such experiences can be elicited outside of a traditional meditation context, including in non-meditators. Furthermore, the experience of not being person-like and of perceptual absences may be precursors and more general forms of recognizing awareness itself and the void-like nature of the mind. (shrink)

Individuals who experience stereotype threat – the pressure resulting from social comparisons that are perceived as unfavourable – show performance decrements across a wide range of tasks. One account of this effect is that the cognitive pressure triggered by such threat drains the same cognitive resources that are implicated in the respective task. The present study investigates whether mindfulness can be used to moderate stereotype threat, as mindfulness has previously been shown to alleviate working-memory load. Our results show that performance (...) decrements that typically occur under stereotype threat can indeed be reversed when the individual engages in a brief mindfulness task. The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

Traditionally, conceptual thinking is explored via philosophical analysis or psychological experimentation. We seek to complement these mainstream approaches with the perspective of a first person exploration into pure thinking. To begin with, pure thinking is defined as a process and differentiated from its content, the concepts itself. Pure thinking is an active process and not a series of associative thought-events; we participate in it, we immerse ourselves within its active performance. On the other hand, concepts are also of an experiential (...) nature. And yet, little is known about what is it like to have or produce a thought, a concept, or an idea? Is a concept our own construction, a product of our own activity, or is it something we merely discover instead of producing it? We address these issues in a systematic first person enquiry into pure thinking. (shrink)

Traditionally, conceptual thinking is explored via philosophical analysis or psychological experimentation. We seek to complement these mainstream approaches with the perspective of a first person exploration into pure thinking. To begin with, pure thinking is defined as a process and differentiated from its content, the concepts itself. Pure thinking is an active process and not a series of associative thought-events; we participate in it, we immerse ourselves within its active performance. On the other hand, concepts are also of an experiential (...) nature. And yet, little is known about what is it like to have or produce a thought, a concept, or an idea? Is a concept our own construction, a product of our own activity, or is it something we merely discover instead of producing it? We address these issues in a systematic first person enquiry into pure thinking. (shrink)