Brain scientist at Cambridge & Helsinki | Assistant Professor U Catolica del Maule | Creator of 'Talking Brains' 🧠🎙️
https://www.ccc-lab.org/canalesjohnson.html
Andres Canales-Johnson
7. For cognitive and consciousness neuroscience, and meditation research, the takeaway is that pure awareness can be studied empirically as a temporally dynamic experience with measurable, distributed neural signatures.
6. This suggests that pure awareness is not a simple global increase or decrease in one EEG marker. It appears as a distributed multivariate neural pattern that depends on whether we compare meditation to ordinary cognition or to baseline rest.
1. What does “pure awareness” look like neurophenomenologically?
In our new study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, we combined EEG and experience tracing to study Transcendental Meditation as an empirical model of minimal phenomenal experience: awareness with minimal content.👇🏽
3. We then asked: Which neural signatures best distinguish TM from ordinary cognitive engagement? We screened theoretically inspired EEG neural markers: entropy, complexity, aperiodic activity, linear phase coherence, and nonlinear information sharing.
2. TM practitioners reported stronger, more dynamic pure awareness than matched controls who were doing mental counting. Crucially, this was not just a single rating: participants reconstructed how the experience unfolded over the full 30-min session.
4. The key result is that TM vs counting was best discriminated by temporal entropy and aperiodic dynamics. In other words, the neural signature of pure awareness was not reducible to classic “brainwave coherence.”
5. But when TM was compared against its own resting baseline, the picture changed. Low-frequency functional connectivity became the strongest discriminator, revealing a double dissociation between “TM vs cognition” and “TM vs rest.”
Link to article: direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...
What makes a body feel like our own? The sense of body ownership is a core aspect of self-awareness, and it depends on the integration of multiple sensory signals. What role do visual predictions play in body ownership? Check out our new paper in Royal Society Open Science: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉)
📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
🧵 : 👇
