Overview
- Provides specific methods and methodological problems in meditation research
- Offers a unique overview of current approaches of meditation research by leading authors in the field
- First volume in this field to cover first person approaches from a neuroscience and a philosophical perspective
Part of the book series: Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality (SNCS, volume 2)
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Table of contents (20 chapters)
Keywords
- First-person perspective
- contemplative neuroscience
- contemplative science
- first person perspective
- intersubjective neurophysiology
- intertemporal neurophysiology
- mediation for health
- mediation for spirituality
- meditation research
- mindful meditation
- neuroscience and meditation
- science mediation connection
- spirituality and meditation
- spirituality and neuroscience
- subjective experience
- tri-guna
- ultimate reality
About this book
This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are so called “higher states of consciousness” that some people report during meditation pointing towards a new understanding of consciousness?
Meditation research is a new discipline that shows new inroads into the study of consciousness. If a meditative practice changes brain structure itself this is direct proof of the causal influence of consciousness onto its substrate. If different states of consciousness can be linked with properties and states of the brain this can be used to study consciousness more directly. If the sense of self is modifiable through meditative techniques and this can be objectively shown through neuro-imaging, this has profound implications for our understanding of who we are. Can consciousness, in deep states of meditative absorption, actually access some aspect of reality which we normally don't? Meditation research can potentially foster us with a new access to the phenomenological method in general. This has even been branded with a new catch-phrase: Contemplative Science. It brings together the most modern neuroscientific approach and the most advanced phenomenological methodology of studying the mind from within, through highly skilled self-observation that has gone through many thousand hours of honing the capacity to look carefully, without distraction.
This book addresses these issues by bringing together some of the leading researchers and thinkers in the field. The scope of the volume reaches from first person neuroscience to Indian philosophy, from pedagogic applications to epistemological aspects and from compassion meditation to the study of brainactivity.
Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications
Editors: Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach
Series Title: Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-01633-7Published: 03 December 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-37750-6Published: 27 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-01634-4Published: 19 November 2013
Series ISSN: 2211-8918
Series E-ISSN: 2211-8926
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VI, 411
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 19 illustrations in colour
Topics: Neuropsychology, Philosophy of Science, Religious Studies, general