Consciousness and cognition
February 1, 2019
Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn, Stefano Poletti et al.
44 citations
A meditation training protocol helped novices accurately describe their mental states during two types of meditation: focused attention and open monitoring. After several weeks of daily practice, participants' self-reported ratings of their experience (i) differed between the two meditation states, (ii) reflected how much they had practiced and how tired they felt, and (iii) matched changes in their reaction times during a task. These patterns were better explained by features of daily practice than by a tendency to give socially desirable answers. The results suggest that novice practitioners can reliably report their inner experience, supporting further study of this training approach.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 6, 2023
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Loïc Daumail et al.
5 citations
preprint
Short mindfulness-based interventions improve well-being, cognition, and clinical symptoms, but they are considered early steps on a longer transformative path that may produce lasting trait changes. Little is known about the brain correlates of these meditation traits.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
July 3, 2026
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun et al.
Nondual meditation, specifically Open Presence (OP) practice, is associated with reduced bodily self susceptibility and increased large-scale integration of functional brain networks. Expert meditators with over 10,000 hours of practice showed lower global network eccentricity during OP compared to novices, particularly in dorsal attention, ventral attention, and frontoparietal networks, indicating greater integration. These neural patterns correlated positively with measures of bodily self illusion and negatively with cognitive defusion, a construct reflecting reduced self-grasping toward thoughts. The findings suggest that nondual awareness involves alterations in self-representation and large-scale functional brain integration.