Altered States of Consciousness

Recent research has uncovered that altered states of consciousness are much more common
among those who practice meditation and mindfulness than previously thought. While many individuals report positive and even transformational outcomes, a significant minority experience negative effects that can range from moderate to severe. The findings have been published in the journal Mindfulness.

The popularity of meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and similar practices has surged due to their potential health benefits. However, the experiences and effects of these practices, particularly the altered states of consciousness they can induce, remain underexplored. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital sought to investigate how common these altered states are and their impact on well-being, given the rising number of people engaging in these practices.

To achieve this, they developed a detailed questionnaire in collaboration with a team of experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, meditation, and survey design. The survey was designed to capture the diverse range of experiences associated with these practices and their impact on well-being.     READ MORE...

Coffee Has Unique Cognitive Benefits

Scientists testing coffee against plain caffeine found that plain caffeine only partially reproduces the effects of drinking a cup of coffee, activating areas of the brain that make you feel more alert but not the areas of the brain that affect working memory and goal-directed behavior.

For many people, the day doesn’t start until their coffee mug is empty. Coffee is often thought to make you feel more alert, so people drink it to wake themselves up and improve their efficiency. Portuguese scientists studied coffee-drinkers to understand whether that wakefulness effect is dependent on the properties of caffeine, or whether it’s about the experience of drinking coffee.

“There is a common expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning,” said Prof Nuno Sousa of the University of Minho, corresponding author of the study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience and Field Chief Editor of the journal. “When you get to understand better the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the factors that may modulate it and even the potential benefits of that mechanism.”

A caffeine kickstart
The scientists recruited people who drank a minimum of one cup of coffee per day and asked them to refrain from eating or drinking caffeinated beverages for at least three hours before the study. They interviewed the participants to collect sociodemographic data, and then did two brief functional MRI scans: one before and one 30 minutes after either taking caffeine or drinking a standardized cup of coffee. During the functional MRI scans, the participants were asked to relax and let their minds wander.

Because of the known neurochemical effects of drinking coffee, the scientists expected that the functional MRI scans would show that the people who drank coffee had higher integration of networks that are linked to the prefrontal cortex, associated with executive memory, and the default mode network, involved in introspection and self-reflection processes. They found that the connectivity of the default mode network was decreased both after drinking coffee and after taking caffeine, which indicates that consuming either caffeine or coffee made people more prepared to move from resting to working on tasks.  READ MORE...

Reducing Prosocial Reparative Behaviors

A series of studies have uncovered a causal relationship between mindfulness meditation and decreased feelings of guilt. The findings have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Several studies have found that mindfulness meditation draws people’s focus inward and reduces negative emotions. But some negative emotions provide useful social feedback. For example, feelings of guilt help to push individuals to atone for their transgressions against others. The new study provides evidence that mindfulness can lead to undesirable outcomes by dampening feelings of guilt.

“I was interested in doing this research because, after I started studying meditation and meditating myself, I noticed that I was using it as almost a default way of reacting to stressors,” said study author Andrew C. Hafenbrack, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. “This was great when I was overly ruminating or overreacting to some minor problem, and is a powerful sleep aid. Sometimes, however, this meant that I would meditate or focus on my breath in situations that there was actually a significant problem and it would have been better if I had faced it directly and immediately.”

“I had some confidence that I was not alone in this when I read a Harvard Business Review article by medical doctor and executive coach David Brendel in 2015, where he described that he ‘worked with clients who, instead of rationally thinking through a career challenge or ethical dilemma, prefer to disconnect from their challenges and retreat into a meditative mindset. The issue here is that some problems require more thinking, not less.'”

“I also know several people who are into mind-body practices, including but not limited to mindfulness meditation, but who are unusually flaky or otherwise don’t treat other people particularly well. So I wondered what was going on. It seemed to go against the essence of what I thought mindfulness and meditation were supposed to do, which is largely due to the associations I had based on the traditional or religious forms.”

The researchers conducted eight separate experiments, which included more than 1,400 participants. In the studies, the participants were randomly assigned to either listen to an 8-minute guided meditation recording created by a professional mindfulness meditation instructor or an 8-minute recording by the same speaker in which they were instructed to think of whatever came to mind.  READ MORE...

Underpinnings of Consciousness

Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. 

But while we all know what it is like to be conscious – meaning that we have personal awareness and respond to the world around us – it has turned out to be near impossible to explain exactly how it arises from the hardware of the brain. 

This is dubbed the “hard” problem of consciousness.

Solving the hard problem is a matter of great scientific curiosity. But so far, we haven’t even solved the “easy” problems of explaining which brain systems give rise to conscious experiences in general – in humans or other animals.

This is of huge clinical importance. Disorders of consciousness are a common consequence of severe brain injury and include comas and vegetative states. And we all experience temporary loss of awareness when under anaesthesia during an operation.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we have now shown that conscious brain activity seems to be linked to the brain’s “pleasure chemical”, dopamine.  READ MORE