Meditation Research Program, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
2 papers in the library · 18 citations · publishing 2024
Aesthetic chills—pleasurable, cold sensations—are linked to self-transcendence, a state of ego-dissolution and connectedness that promotes well-being and prosociality. In a diverse sample of 2937 participants in Southern California exposed to chills-eliciting stimuli, both the likelihood and intensity of chills were positively associated with measures of self-transcendence, even after accounting for demographics, traits, and prior mood. Analyses of variance, mutual information, and correlation structure confirmed reliable interrelations across various audiovisual stimuli. The findings suggest aesthetic chills may indicate sufficiently intense feelings of self-transcendence, though generalizability to non-WEIRD populations and causal direction require further study.
A computational theory called adaptive narrative control explains how subpersonal processes shape conscious experience to enable adaptive behavior. Systems with an attention schema can anticipate the epistemic and pragmatic consequences of attentional states, using mental action—endogenous control of attention—to regulate affective states. This capacity also produces avoidant mental action or motivated inattention, which is argued to be a core mechanism underlying psychopathology, leading to rigid belief formation, reduced emotional recognition (alexithymia), and decreased subjective well-being under certain environmental conditions. The account partially echoes Freudian defense mechanisms and introduces a computational unconscious. It refines the REBUS model of psychedelic therapy and explains improvements in well-being from meditation.