Suspending the embodied self in meditation attenuates beta oscillations in posterior medial cortex

Abstract

Human experience is imbued by the sense of being an embodied agent. The investigation of such basic self-consciousness has been hampered by the difficulty of comprehensively modulating it in the laboratory while reliably capturing ensuing subjective changes. The present preregistered study fills this gap by combining advanced meditative states with principled phenomenological interviews: Forty-six long-term meditators (19 female, 27 male) were instructed to modulate and attenuate their embodied self-experience during magnetoencephalographic monitoring. Results showed frequency specific (high beta band) activity reductions in frontoparietal and posterior medial cortices (PMC). Importantly, PMC reductions were driven by a subgroup describing radical embodied self disruptions, including suspension of agency and dissolution of a localised first-person perspective. Neural changes were correlated with lifetime meditation and interview-derived experiential changes, but not with classical self-reports. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating in-depth first-person methods into neuroscientific experiments. Furthermore, they highlight neural oscillations in the PMC as a central process supporting the embodied sense of self.Significance statement Human consciousness is not only characterised by the contents of experience, but also by an implicit sense of subjectivity, delineating the perceiving, embodied agent from her environment. The current study addressed this basic sense of self by scrutinising meditation-induced states of self-boundary dissolution using a neurophenomenological approach: In-depth phenomenological interviews assessed core dimensions of self-experience during such states (agency, self-location, first-person perspective), while magnetoencephalography monitored neural oscillatory activity. Full-blown suspension of self-experience was associated with robust reductions of beta-band power in the posterior medial cortex. These results pinpoint a neural candidate mediating our embodied perspective on the world and highlight the unique potential of integrating rigorous phenomenological methods with neuroscientific experiments for the study of consciousness.