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.
Neurophenomenology aims to bridge subjective experience and brain data by treating the body as central to consciousness. This paper argues that the Kantian concept of a priori structures, which make experience possible, can be grounded in biology through an extended theory of autopoiesis. Examples from simple models, bacteria, the immune system, mirror neurons, and the default mode network illustrate how knowledge is enacted. The free-energy principle is presented as a neural framework that fits these ideas. The authors maintain that first-person experience remains essential for understanding brain function because it shares the same transcendental structure, and they discuss how meditation can contribute to this research.