Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Sucharit Katyal
16 citations
Consciousness is often described as having a subject-object structure, but studying its subjective aspects empirically is challenging. Meditation traditions, particularly Buddhist ones, have been used to manipulate this structure. This paper presents the Tantric Yoga tradition, especially the Ananda Marga school founded by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, as an alternative framework. It translates Tantric Yoga philosophy into a systematic phenomenological account of consciousness divided into four structures spanning from subject to object. Stepwise meditation procedures are detailed that allow a practitioner to experientially reduce these structures from object to subject, aiming for self-realization. The paper discusses how these states overlap with those from other traditions and could advance empirical consciousness research.
Scientific Reports
May 2, 2024
Sucharit Katyal, Oussama Abdoun, Hugues Mounier et al.
4 citations
Long-term meditators in an open monitoring (OM) state show reduced automatic mental processing of objects that imply actions, compared to their baseline state. Novice meditators did not show this reduction. The study used EEG to measure µ-rhythm desynchronization, which correlated with how long objects were perceived. The findings suggest OM meditation can help decouple automatic cognitive processing of action-related mental content.
November 18, 2024
Sucharit Katyal
preprint
Meditation training improves mental well-being by engaging a metacognitive process. During meditation, a person tries to maintain a target content in consciousness, requiring monitoring and regulation of conscious contents. This involves a metacognitive template of the target; comparing this template to actual conscious content generates a "metacognitive prediction error" (MPE). MPE helps fine-tune the frequency of monitoring, unconscious processing, and the template itself, enabling efficient regulation. The framework explains existing neuroscientific findings on meditation and generates testable hypotheses.
Front Psychol
February 26, 2024
Christopher Gutland, Sucharit Katyal, Kelin Li et al.
No Summary
Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science
January 1, 2025
Eleftheria Pistolas, Boris Quétard, Sucharit Katyal et al.
A Ganzfeld, a homogeneous visual field without focal points, induces altered states of consciousness and immersive full-body experiences, including bodily effects. Using eye-tracking, EEG, interviews, and questionnaires, the study identified two cognitive processing types: a perceptually grounded type with inward- or outward-directed focus, and an abstract type with introspective focus and meditative experiences. Perceptual decays were accompanied by decreased eye movements and increased theta activity preceding them, suggesting a link to mind blanking. Decays also showed more alpha activity, associated with attenuated sensory processing and reduced external engagement. These findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the rich Ganzfeld experience.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
December 13, 2023
Shaozhi Nie, Sucharit Katyal, Stephen A Engel
During binocular rivalry, when each eye sees a different image, perception alternates unpredictably between them. Models propose that neural signals for each image change gradually until reaching a threshold that triggers a switch, but direct evidence was lacking. Measuring steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) via EEG in 84 human participants (62 females, 22 males) viewing orthogonal gratings flickering at different frequencies, the amplitude of the suppressed stimulus's signal increased and the dominant stimulus's signal decreased throughout each percept. Longer percepts corresponded to more gradual changes in these signals. The findings match a model where perceptual transitions arise from accumulating noisy signals, providing the first physiological evidence for such threshold-crossing dynamics in human visual cortex.