Compassion As an Intervention to Attune to Universal Suffering of Self and Others in Conflicts: A Translational Framework.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2020 S Shaun Ho, Yoshio Nakamura, James E Swain 15 citations
Compassion meditation, rooted in Buddhist philosophy, may help protect mental health amid intensifying conflicts. The practice involves attuning equally to friend, enemy, and neutral person, aiming to suspend identity-based conceptual thoughts and ego-preserving biases that obscure reality. A Bayesian active inference framework models the person as a Bayesian Engine that constructs phenomena from aggregates (forms, sensations, discriminations, actions, consciousness). Rigid identity-grasping beliefs cause the engine to malfunction by blocking updates from prediction errors. The proposed brain model has three components: Relation-Modeling (Default-Mode Network), Reality-Checking (Frontoparietal and Ventral Attention Networks), and Conflict-Alarming (Salience Network). Compassion meditation may strengthen brain regions that suspend prior beliefs and enhance attunement to others.