Suspending the embodied self in meditation attenuates beta oscillations in posterior medial cortex

Summary

The study examined how long-term meditators can modulate their sense of embodied self-experience while undergoing magnetoencephalographic monitoring. It involved 46 participants and found that those who reported significant disruptions in their sense of agency showed reductions in high beta band activity in the frontoparietal and posterior medial cortices. These neural changes were linked to their meditation experience and subjective reports from interviews, rather than traditional self-reports, indicating a unique integration of personal experience with neuroscientific measurement.

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: Forty-six 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 localised 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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