Beyond the veil of duality-topographic reorganization model of meditation

Austin Clinton Cooper; Bianca Ventura; Georg Northoff

doi:10.1093/nc/niac013

Beyond the veil of duality-topographic reorganization model of meditation

Neurosci Conscious. 2022 Oct 11;2022(1):niac013. doi: 10.1093/nc/niac013. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Austin Clinton Cooper¹, Bianca Ventura², Georg Northoff^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Integrated Program of Neuroscience, Room 302, Irving Ludmer Building, 1033 Pine Avenue W., McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 1A1, Canada.
² Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit, Institute of Mental Health Research, University of Ottawa, 1145 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1Z 7K4, Canada.
³ Mental Health Center, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China.

Abstract

Meditation can exert a profound impact on our mental life, with proficient practitioners often reporting an experience free of boundaries between a separate self and the environment, suggesting an explicit experience of "nondual awareness." What are the neural correlates of such experiences and how do they relate to the idea of nondual awareness itself? In order to unravel the effects that meditation has on the brain's spatial topography, we review functional magnetic resonance imaging brain findings from studies specific to an array of meditation types and meditator experience levels. We also review findings from studies that directly probe the interaction between meditation and the experience of the self. The main results are (i) decreased posterior default mode network (DMN) activity, (ii) increased central executive network (CEN) activity, (iii) decreased connectivity within posterior DMN as well as between posterior and anterior DMN, (iv) increased connectivity within the anterior DMN and CEN, and (v) significantly impacted connectivity between the DMN and CEN (likely a nonlinear phenomenon). Together, these suggest a profound organizational shift of the brain's spatial topography in advanced meditators-we therefore propose a topographic reorganization model of meditation (TRoM). One core component of the TRoM is that the topographic reorganization of DMN and CEN is related to a decrease in the mental-self-processing along with a synchronization with the more nondual layers of self-processing, notably interoceptive and exteroceptive-self-processing. This reorganization of the functionality of both brain and self-processing can result in the explicit experience of nondual awareness. In conclusion, this review provides insight into the profound neural effects of advanced meditation and proposes a result-driven unifying model (TRoM) aimed at identifying the inextricably tied objective (neural) and subjective (experiential) effects of meditation.

Keywords: CEN; DMN; alignment; duality; meditation; neurophenomenological; nonduality; self.

Publication types

Review