Meditation and hypnosis at the intersection between phenomenology and cognitive science

Michael Lifshitz

Emma P. Cusumano

Amir Raz

pp. 211-226

in: Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach (eds), Meditation, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Cognitive scientists increasingly turn to contemplative practices such as hypnosis and meditation to shed light on consciousness and cognition. By their very nature, such practices call scientists to address the qualitative, lived experience of the subject. Yet, while the rise of contemplative techniques in neuroscience research has highlighted the importance of incorporating subjective experience within the empirical sciences of mind, the practical reality of marrying first- and third-person methods remains largely unactualised. Given that hypnosis and meditation exert powerful influence on subjective experience, we propose that they can serve as potent instruments for elucidating the structures and mechanisms of conscious experience in cognitive science settings. Here we discuss the motivation for a so-called "neurophenomonological" approach and outline recent findings from the domains of hypnosis and meditation. Concrete examples illustrate how such contemplative practices can go beyond their place as objects of investigation to emerge as complementary experimental tools, thereby advancing the synthesis of scientific and phenomenological studies of mind (This article draws on ideas and expositions that ML and AR authored in the introduction of a 2012 special issue on hypnosis and meditation in The Journal of Mind-Body Regulation (see volume 2, issue 1)).