When I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith recently, I was struck by some of the things he said about meditation and consciousness, like the following:
“Meditation,” in the sense that I use it here, refers to any means whereby our sense of “self”—of subject/object dualism in perception and cognition—can be made to vanish, while consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience.
Some recent research seems to have located a part of the brain involved in accessing that sense of self during introspection, and even watched that part of the brain go quiet when people were intensely engaged in processing sensory input. Researchers used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan the brains of people who were performing two tasks, one requiring that they focus on the characteristics of either an image or a piece of music, and the other requiring that they focus on their own feelings about the image or the music. Different brain areas were involved in these two tasks; furthermore, when people were most intent on the sensory task, the part of the brain active in the self-evaluative task was quiet. There are some interesting parallels here with what Harris said about meditation. I’m intrigued by this look into what goes on in the brain during moments of absorption in what is going on around us rather than our reaction to it. A friend of mine recently told me that one reason people enjoy physically demanding activities like rock-climbing is that you have to pay such close attention what you’re doing that there’s no room for worry or depression in your mind. I’m not going to take up rock-climbing, but I think that kind of absorption might be similar to what I find in playing the piano.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-04/cp-wtb041406.php
