Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.

The article proposes that body-scan meditation, a practice of systematically attending to different parts of the body, can lead to a dissolution of bodily boundaries—a sense of the body's limits becoming less distinct. It uses predictive processing theory, which frames perception as the brain's active inference about sensory input, to explain how such meditation might reduce the precision of predictions about bodily states. By learning to attenuate or down-weight these predictions, practitioners may experience a blurring of the self-other boundary. The account integrates philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives to describe how meditative training can reshape the sense of bodily self.

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Abstract

Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.