Abstract
An essential aspect of counsciousness is rooted in the subjectivity of the human experience. Such subjectivity implies that we are all individual beings, and each moment is unique. This uniqueness of each moment is a fundamental wisdom taught in many meditation schools. However, most research focusing on uncovering the psychophysiological correlates of meditation practice reports on statistical averages across subjects and across the time of the meditation task. Such averaging cannot show individual states and unique peak experiences within an individual. On the other hand, such statistics seem to be necessary for generalization. This chapter illustrates the inter-individual differences among 50 meditation participants with various meditation proficiencies. The inter-individual differences were measured with 64 channels of EEG plus peripheral measures during meditative practice. The results show that meditation brings about highly individual brain patterns. Furthermore, they illustrate how meditative states vary over time. Finally, methodological suggestions are given as to how an intra-individual and inter-individual analysis could be presented. Therefore, this chapter is dedicated to present details of the data which are invisible in common statistical analysis.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the Samueli Institute of Information Biology (SIIB, VA, USA) as well as the BIAL foundation and the Beckley foundation for the support of this project. I also acknowledge the support in discussions and data acquisition from Tsutomu Kamei and Harald Walach, and, finally, all the participants worldwide who have contributed to these results.
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Hinterberger, T. (2014). I Am I From Moment to Moment: Methods and Results of Grasping Intersubjective and Intertemporal Neurophysiological Differences During Meditation States. In: Schmidt, S., Walach, H. (eds) Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_6
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