Suspending the Embodied Self in Meditation Attenuates Beta Oscillations in the Posterior Medial Cortex.

Summary

The study investigated how long-term meditators can modulate their sense of embodied self during magnetoencephalographic monitoring. It involved 46 participants who experienced significant reductions in high-beta band activity in the frontoparietal and posterior medial cortices, particularly among those reporting profound disruptions in their sense of self. These neural changes correlated with meditation experience and qualitative interview outcomes, but not with traditional self-reports. This highlights the role of the posterior medial cortex in the embodied sense of self.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Human experience is imbued by the sense of being an embodied agent. The investigation of such basic self-consciousness has been hampered by the difficulty of comprehensively modulating it in the laboratory while reliably capturing ensuing subjective changes. The present preregistered study fills this gap by combining advanced meditative states with principled phenomenological interviews: 46 long-term meditators (19 female, 27 male) were instructed to modulate and attenuate their embodied self-experience during magnetoencephalographic monitoring. Results showed frequency-specific (high-beta band) activity reductions in frontoparietal and posterior medial cortices (PMC). Importantly, PMC reductions were driven by a subgroup describing radical embodied self-disruptions, including suspension of agency and dissolution of a localized first-person perspective. Neural changes were correlated with lifetime meditation and interview-derived experiential changes, but not with classical self-reports. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating in-depth first-person methods into neuroscientific experiments. Furthermore, they highlight neural oscillations in the PMC as a central process supporting the embodied sense of self.

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