Which psychologist viewed the study of consciousness as central to psychology?

Conclusion

At the time of writing, imagery is still a rather neglected topic within the broader, and growing, field of consciousness studies. This is in rather stark contrast to the importance it was accorded by earlier, pre-behaviorist students of consciousness. Indeed, the behaviorist revolt against consciousness, which led to several decades of scientific neglect of the topic, seems to have been fueled, in considerable part, by frustration at the factious and irreconcilable ‘imageless thought’ controversy, and it clearly involved the rejection of imagery quite as much as the rejection of consciousness itself. Perhaps recent students of consciousness have been reluctant to fully engage the topic of imagery because it has already proven so controversial within cognitive science, and because the best-known theories that have been developed in that context do little to illuminate imagery’s conscious nature. However, this situation may now be changing, and a developing understanding of imagery may come, once again, to be seen as an integral and essential aspect of our developing understanding of consciousness itself.

2 Behavioural selection

Attention has often been considered a component of the larger phenomenon of consciousness (James, 1890; Crick and Koch, 1990). As a result, any discussion of attention is often burdened with the accumulated paraphernalia of consciousness studies, such as free-will, thalamocortical loops, global workspaces, language and souls. Subjectively, it appears obvious that some attentional processes are under our conscious control: we selectively direct our attention to various targets in a fully conscious and motivated manner, as if attention were a “spotlight” of sorts. In contrast, our attention is often drawn, unconsciously at first, to salient stimuli such as loud noises, bright lights or movements.

Attention may thus appear to be evoked sometimes and motivational other times. The traditional view of attention-like processes in animals such as insects is that they are driven by immediate external events, whereby salient stimuli evoke a fixed motor pattern that could be interpreted as a form of selective discrimination. For example, a male fruit fly will court and mate with a female fly once pheromonal, visual and mechanosensory cues coalesce in the right pattern, above a certain threshold (Greenspan and Ferveur, 2000).

Yet, insects do not always respond to the same cues in the same way, partially because of the additional dimension of learning and memory. Insects (and most animals) actively probe their environment in an experience-dependent manner, and they react selectively to stimuli according to the behavioural relevance or “salience” of the stimulus, which is modulated by memory (Waddell and Quinn, 2001). There are several convincing demonstrations of experience-dependent selection (or learning) in flies, which include associative conditioning (Tully and Quinn, 1985) incidental learning (Dill and Heisenberg, 1995) and even second-order conditioning (Brembs and Heisenberg, 2001). But, whether these demonstrations of learning can be interpreted as involving selective attention-like mechanisms requires more than the measure of behavioural choice. One requires ways of monitoring simultaneously the suppression or uncoupling of other stimuli as the choice is being made; there may never have been any selection at all.

Unconscious Processes

Nevertheless, the nineteenth century encountered some difficult conceptual problems, as one might expect in a young science. For example, unconscious mental processes were often viewed as paradoxical.

From our current perspective, the experimental study of conscious events requires comparison conditions, such as comparisons between conscious and unconscious stimuli in dichotic listening or binocular rivalry. To study consciousness ‘as such’ we need to treat it as a variable of interest in its own right. Thus consciousness science goes hand-in-hand with the study of unconscious comparison conditions.

The nineteenth century found it very difficult to imagine unconscious information processing. A variety of unconscious brain events were known, such as habit formation after practicing a predictable mental task. But unconscious events were generally viewed as mechanical or ‘unintelligent’ physical phenomena, not as complex, symbolic processes involving language or reasoning. An intelligent, symbolic unconscious is very much a later twentieth century idea, one that only spread with the digital computer. Broadly speaking, the nineteenth century was still deeply committed to the Aristotelian notion of the conscious intellect as a rational faculty that served to control a lower, unconscious, instinctual, animal mechanism. For example, William James provides ten excellent empirical arguments for unconscious mental processes, but then maintains that all ten phenomena are not really unconscious. Seemingly unconscious mental events were either fleetingly conscious (but too fast to be recalled), or they had become ‘physical’ – they had somehow jumped the divide from the conscious mind to the physiological brain. Thus James, for all his remarkable insights, still thought that the mind must be entirely conscious, and that unconscious events must correspond to the physical brain. He thereby opened himself up to metaphysical dualism, a smoking stick of dynamite for later generations. The period of behaviourism can be seen as a resolute stand for a consistent physicalistic foundation for psychology and brain science. It was a reaction to the towering figure of William James.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century other scientific thinkers – notably Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud – began to infer unconscious processes quite freely, based on observable events such as posthypnotic suggestion, conversion hysteria, multiple personality, slips of the tongue, motivated forgetting, and the like. Freud's insights have achieved extraordinary cultural influence. While Freud popularized the unconscious in the years after 1900, the Freudian unconscious was considered to be a ‘cauldron of seething excitations,’ a source of primitive, magical, dreamlike images and impulses. Scientific agreement on unconscious information processing arrived quite late in the twentieth century. This made it difficult to study conscious experiences ‘as such,’ since there were no plausible comparison conditions for conscious visual percepts, for example. That difficulty has only been overcome in the last several decades of research.

The Cognitive and Executive Aspects of Conflict

A concept from cognitive psychology that has been frequently applied to the study of conflict is called attribution. The notion of attribution concerns the type of rationalizations that are given by individuals as explanatory hypotheses for their behavior. If the explanation for one's behavior is said to be attributed to environmental causes and therefore beyond the control of the individual, then it is said to be externally determined. This contrasts with the attribution of personal responsibility for behavior whence the individual is said to be internally determined. Research indicates that the type of attributions individuals make predicts behavior. The positive loading of the events that are being attributed are of course crucial. For instance, patients who externally attribute positive events to others (external attribution) and negative events to themselves (internal attribution) are reported to score higher on scales of depression and hopelessness. By contrast, those who persistently attribute positive events to themselves and negative ones to others and to external forces, are more likely to score high on paranoia.

The growth of attribution theory has been a major factor in leading to what is sometimes called the cognitive revolution. This is a mark of progress in psychology which to some extent stands in contrast to the other revolution taking place, that of reducing behavior to neurobiology. The pivotal question is of course “is the individual a victim of his neurology” or can major changes in our concepts of ourselves and the world lead to changes in behavior and even in our neurological processes. Some leading authorities in the area of emotion, such as clinical psychologist Arne Öhman, are impressed by the findings that argue that the brain appears to respond about a half second before consciousness reports making the decision (See Libet Effect) and conclude therefore that the role of consciousness is merely to tidy-up afterward by creating meaning out of what has in fact already been decided by the brain.

Yet, it cannot be denied that the recent history of psychology supports the cognitive revolution by the upsurge of interest in “consciousness” as an object for scientific study. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, the editors of a recent volume on Consciousness Studies, note how the field, during its 15 years of existence, has increased to 600,000 books and articles. Consciousness Studies gives organizing structures such as “the self” and state of consciousness the individual is in, as having a determining influence on behavior.

The issue, which naturally arises here concerning so-called nonconscious roots of behavior, is the supposition that not all the contents of experience and perception are represented in the self-concept. Perceptions, which are in conflict with how the person has been taught to view himself and behave, are either reinterpreted in accordance with this or denied and therefore not given verbal identification. They are nevertheless present in the form of so-called nonverbal feelings.

While the principles involved in this process appear similar to those postulated by the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories of Freud, the descriptive language is clearly different in terms of being a more humanistic and existential one. Defenses are thus seen as styles for handling perceptual data and arise in order to enable the self, as the organizing principle in consciousness, to cope with the demands of the environment. Defenses arise when the more biological side of personality (temperament) is in conflict with the “conditions of worth,” that is the conditional demands from the environment governing the expression of love and care toward the individual. These demands lead naturally to the learning of self-concepts, social skills, and roles but, in doing so, lead also to the dissociation of the incongruous, nonaccepted self-experiences that are in conflict with the learned role.

How can this approach deal with the problem that has beset psychoanalysis: the dubious ontological status of the unconscious? If one follows the phenomenology-cum-functionalism of William James and Carl Rogers, the solution may be to simply accept that consciousness exists in many different forms. Some of these are dissociated from one and another, and the various forms may utilize different languages of symbolic representation for memories and ranges of experiences. Supporting this conceptualization are the now well-established findings relating to state-specific memories. The study of altered states of consciousness and dissociated states sometimes reveals that these memories are organized as distinct and conflictual self-representations.

According to this view, conflict and anxiety can then have a positive function since there is assumed to be a force for growth existing as a biological principle. This drive operates during the opportunity for change—in a crisis or in a therapeutic context—and strives after creating the reintegration of experiences and split-off parts of the self. Indeed, dissociated and altered states of consciousness have often been claimed to be associated with creative problem solving and therapeutic change.

For many years, a medicopsychiatric view dominated clinical psychology, and the findings from behavioral research had an explanatory input limited to anxiety and phobic states. Even psychoanalytic categorizations were based on an essentially 19th century Kraeplian system of medical classification. During the 1980s, although retaining the spirit of the Kraeplian system of category thinking, there has been an attempt to produce a theory-free system known as DSM-IV. While the scientific validity of DSM-IV has been severely criticized, it is nevertheless generally agreed that the system has incorporated a more sophisticated view of how predispositional and situational factors interact. The consensus view among psychologists appears to be that long-term conflicts in the form of stress-related events—so-called life events—interact with biological (predispositional) factors to produce a variety of psychotic and neurotic disorders.

In dealing with conflicts and ensuing stress, research has identified that there are some basic coping skills. Being successful at skilled performance, however, means not only learning from one's own experience and gaining positive feedback from successes, but also being inspired and learning from others and then becoming fully involved in meeting the challenge. It is this combination of factors which Albert Bandura calls self-efficacy beliefs and enables people to overcome obstacles and reach goals. Bandura was one of the first to emphasize that the most effective source of learning in mammals and humans is not that of the classical conditioning but that of imitation and observational learning.

1 Introduction

In the 1990s biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela proposed neurophenomenological methodologies as a path toward addressing the hard problems of studying consciousness (Chalmers, 1995; Varela, 1996). Due to the efforts of pioneers such as Varela, whose work was largely influenced by philosopher and founder of the school of phenomenology Edmund Husserl, we have seen a concerted effort to reintegrate first-person experiential accounts into behavioral and neuroscientific methodologies over the last several decades. The scientific investigation of meditation and contemplative traditions, which specifically leverage these individual accounts of direct experience to study state related changes in brain and physiological activity, has now gained the attention of researchers from broad number of academic disciplines, ranging from neuroscience, psychology and medicine, to researchers interested in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC; Rees et al., 2002). While most contemplative traditions are comprised of spiritual practices that aim to bring the practitioner closer to self-actualization, transcendence, or enlightenment, from a neuroscientific and clinical perspective meditation is usually considered as a set of diverse and specific methods of distinct attentional training in order to bring mental activity under improved insight into one's own mental activity (Cahn and Polich, 2009). Through the observation of ongoing mental and physical experience, this training is thought to improve the mechanisms underlying self-regulation (Hölzel et al., 2011b; Kabat-Zinn et al., 1985; Lutz et al., 2008; Shapiro et al., 2006; Tang et al., 2007; Vago and David, 2012) and can manifest as changes in mental states or as longer lasting traits (Cahn and Polich, 2006). Now known as contemplative neuroscience, this young but rapidly growing multidisciplinary field investigates the underlying neural mechanisms of ancient contemplative meditation traditions and practices, alongside their clinical, psychological, and neurological manifestations. While advancements in this field are in part due to improvements in neuroimaging methods, they are also due to the variety of medical practices incorporating meditation into therapeutic protocols. Some of the most notable research findings suggest that the mental activity involved in meditation practices can facilitate neuroplasticity and connectivity in regions in the brain specifically related to emotion and attention regulation (Hölzel et al., 2011a; Lazar et al., 2005; Lutz et al., 2004; Shapiro et al., 2006; Vago and David, 2012).

A significant number of fundamental neuroscience research findings suggest that consciousness reflects a series of perceptually cyclical and discrete neural processes (Baumgarten et al., 2015; VanRullen, 2016). However, our direct perception is that of a continuous and unified experience. According to William James, if we truly want to scientifically study consciousness, we must rigorously observe our personal experience of consciousness by means of introspection like Galileo, Planck, Einstein, and Darwin whose discoveries were rooted in rigorous, exhaustive, and precise “observation” of the phenomenon they studied (James, 1890). For scholars such as Alan Wallace, in order for a science of consciousness to exist, it can only progress after the establishment of the necessary means and refined instruments that can measure and observe consciousness with rigor and precision. Wallace argues that the only principal instrument humanity has ever possessed for directly observing the mind or consciousness is the mind itself. Thus, the mind itself is the instrument in need of refining through the practice of meditation. When attention is not trained, it is habitually prone to mind wandering, agitation, and dullness. Thus, if the mind is to be used as the instrument for exploring and experimenting with consciousness, these perhaps less desirable cognitive states can be replaced with greater attentional stability and vividness (Wallace and Shapiro, 2006). Indian and Hindu contemplative practitioners developed the initial methods for obtaining deeper levels of insight into the nature of the mind and consciousness by cultivating highly focused, stable and sustained attention, or “Samadhi” (Wallace, 2014). The Buddhist tradition later went on to refine and develop rigorous methods for stabilizing attention by using them in new and novel ways (Wallace, 1999).

Contemplative neuroscience and the broader study of contemplative practices not only offers insight into the scientific, phenomenological and philosophical understanding of the nature of consciousness, but they also shed light on the highly plastic neural circuitry underlying attention, emotion, sensory perception and self-awareness. In the medical and clinical community, mindfulness (which is a spiritual or psychological faculty that forms an essential part of Buddhist meditation practice) is defined as the “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1982, 1990) The first Mindfulness-based intervention was initially developed by Dr. John Kabat-Zinn for a group of chronically ill patients who were unresponsive to traditional medical treatments. Having developed an 8-week protocol based on the fundamental teachings of Buddhist mindfulness and then secularized for western behavioral and clinical contexts, mindfulness practices are now practiced by hundreds of thousands of people and have been integrated into an enormous number of public, clinical and psychotherapeutic programs (Baer, 2003; Grossman et al., 2004; Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Kabat-Zinn et al., 1998).

Mindfulness-based interventions have been widely implemented throughout various clinical contexts. The strongest positive effects are evident for brain structure and function, immune responses, mental health, chronic pain, and sleep. Numerous psychoneuroimmunology measures have also been evaluated for mindfulness meditation demonstrating improvements in immune and endocrine markers (Pascoe et al., 2017). For example, one meta-analysis of 4 randomized controlled trials of 190 participants found that mindfulness meditation leads to increased telomerase activity in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (Schutte and Malouff, 2014) demonstrating that meditation (or the associated mental activity) can influence the immune system. Many (but not all) studies of mindfulness meditation for mental health conditions or symptoms have shown some degree of positive benefit. Mindfulness meditation for psychiatric disorders was superior to various control conditions immediately post-intervention and also at long-term follow-up (Goldberg et al., 2017). Anxiety and depression symptoms have also been shown to improve after participating in mindfulness-based interventions (Goyal et al., 2014; Hofmann et al., 2010; Khoury et al., 2013, 2015; Roemer et al., 2008; Salters-Pedneault et al., 2008), in addition to new evidence suggesting improvements in post-traumatic stress disorder related symptoms (Colgan et al., 2016, 2017; Kearney et al., 2013; Wahbeh et al., 2016). Chronic pain can also be improved from mindfulness meditation (Bawa et al., 2015; Grossman et al., 2007; Hilton et al., 2017; Wells et al., 2017), with strong evidence for its role in reducing the perceived pain intensity of primary headache (Gu et al., 2018). Finally, multiple studies have shown some improvements in sleep quality and insomnia (Gong et al., 2016; Neuendorf et al., 2015).

Research investigating contemplative practices began to surface in the broader mainstream neuroscientific community in the late 1990's, and now almost a quarter of a century later, research on the effects of meditation research publications have increased dramatically (from 30 papers published in 1975 to 428 published in 2017 in PubMed). This is in large part due to advancements in neuroimaging methodologies, in addition to advancements in contemplative neuroscience that come from our rapidly evolving understanding of neuroplasticity; our brains are continuously changing in response to the environment, past experiences, and various forms of training. A large body of literature also suggests that there is an ongoing bidirectional communication between the mind, brain, and body, implying that psychological well-being is directly related to the physical health of both the body and brain (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2002). While the exact mechanisms are not yet fully understood, research consistently demonstrates the downstream effects that occur in the body as brain circuits are transformed (Vitetta et al., 2005).

With this brief introduction of the history of contemplative neuroscience, this chapter aims to give an overview of phenomenology, classification, and neural correlates of various meditation traditions. The meditation traditions included are not exhaustive but we have made an attempt to include all major types of meditation. We will first address the classification of various meditation techniques. We will then examine the structural, functional, and oscillatory correlates of meditation (i.e., MRI, fMRI, EEG) in addition to providing an overview of the current research highlighting the primary mechanisms by which contemplative practices are thought to affect well-being, namely attention and emotion regulation.

Problems with Definitions

Consciousness is notoriously hard to define. This makes ASC even harder to capture in a single neat definition. Several attempts have been made to crystallize the concept into a usable definition but, to put it bluntly, these efforts have not been widely adopted. In consequence, we have a poor understanding of the subject matter under investigation and a lack of agreement about the type of phenomena or states that should be counted as examples of ASC. From an empirical perspective, the matter gets worse due to the ephemeral nature of these altered states. Altered mind states are difficult to induce reliably in the laboratory and any effect an induction procedure might have on consciousness is even harder to observe, let alone quantify. In short, the independent variable cannot be readily manipulated and the outcome measures rely on introspective verbal report – a set of circumstances that has led to little research being done on the subject.

In addition, ASC is a topic that most neuroscientists do not see as a suitable subject for building a scientific career. There are, of course, exceptions – sleep research or experimental hypnosis, most prominently – but by and large research on altered states is not supported by funding agencies and, as a consequence, few psychologists or neuroscientists can afford to make them their primary area of interest. This polite neglect is also due to the bad reputation of ASC. Many view them with suspicion – some sort of abstruse psychopathology at the lunatic fringe frequented mostly by potheads and meditating yogis. This bias is made worse by the excessive use of esoteric language used to describe these mind states. Thus, an undeserved aura of lawlessness and unscientific hogwash sadly surrounds them. However, studying altered states is probably one of the best ways to study consciousness itself because most phenomena, mental or otherwise, are usually studied by manipulating them. As is the case for consciousness as a whole, there has been a resurgence of sound research on altered states in recent years. This is motivated also by evidence pointing at bona fide medicinal benefits for some altered states, such as hypnosis, meditation, or cannabis use. The advantage of this progress, apart from restoring some scientific legitimacy to the topic, is much exciting new data that informs our understanding of the phenomenology and brain mechanisms of ASC. The prospect of understanding altered states in terms of their neural substrates holds the great promise that we might clarify at a deeper level questions regarding the nature of altered states, such as, for instance, how ASC differ from normal consciousness and how they are all related to one another.

Trying to fit states of consciousness into some kind of system – a continuum or hierarchy, perhaps – is not novel but the recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have made this prospect more possible than ever. Two earlier models, one by Charles Tart and a more recent, neurobiologically informed attempt by Allan Hobson arrange conscious states by positioning them in a multidimensional space. Hobson’s AIM model maps states of consciousness in a brain–mind space along three parameters: Activation, an energy dimension that depends on the activity of the reticulo-thalamo-cortical system; Input–output gating, an information source dimension that estimates the extent to which external and internal information is being processed; and Mode, a chemical modulation dimension that estimates the mix of aminergic (norepinephrine and serotonin) and cholinergic (acetylcholine) influences, which runs from low aminergic to high aminergic. This is particularly useful for drug states as the mechanisms of action of most psychoactive substances that induce profound alterations to consciousness are well known.

Tart’s phenomenal space consists of two dimensions: irrationality and ability to hallucination. Tart, who also coined the term and popularized the concept of ASC, sees states of consciousness as discrete entities. Some positions in this multidimensional space are stable and can be occupied for a long time, while others are unstable and cannot be occupied except for very brief moments. The twilight between sleep and waking is an example of such an unstable position. We cannot operate in this zone for long and consciousness quickly gives way to the stable state of either waking or sleep. This led Tart to propose the model of what he called state-specific sciences. The concept is that each state of consciousness (SoC) has its own reality, logic, and physical laws. Any one state of consciousness cannot, therefore, be understood by a person in a different state, as it is observer dependent. It follows that all knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is only relevant to the SoC in which it is produced and can only be understood by someone residing in that same state. This places consciousness in the center of science – a bold move indeed. If you find it challenging to wrap your mind around the idea of state-specific sciences and its implications consider that the reason for your doubts may have to do with you not being in the right states of consciousness! This position also argues against the commonsense notion that there is one normal state and all other states are altered states. There is, then, no qualitative difference among SoC, echoing the thinking of William James who wrote many years earlier: “Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness.” This is in tune with others who have also emphasized that ASC should not be considered higher, or lower, as the case may be, states of consciousness, because this introduces a value judgment without proper evidence.

Another upshot arising from the new evidence on the neural underpinnings of ASC is the old hope that altered states could be defined, in the future, by objective criteria, perhaps through better neuroimaging tools or an entirely new technology not yet invented, rather than by introspective self-report. In the meantime, ASC can only be defined in subjective terms. Two such definitions are commonly used in this context. The first comes from Tart, who defined ASC as “a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his consciousness is radically different from the way it functions ordinarily.” A nearly identical definition is proposed by William Farthing, who identifies ASC as “a temporary change in the overall pattern of subjective experience, such that the individual believes that his or her mental functioning is distinctly different from certain general norms for his or her normal waking state of consciousness.”

Although definitions such as these do seem to capture the essence of ASC, several obstacles arise that make it impossible to use them in scientific research. Because subjective definitions rely, by their very nature, exclusively on introspection, we can only determine for ourselves whether or not we have entered an altered state. This makes altered states unverifiable from an objective, third-person perspective. Consider a sample of troublesome questions that expose the problem clearly. To start, take two people who have the exact same level of alcohol intoxication (matched for variables such as tolerance, weight, etc.), but one claims to be in an altered state while the other vehemently denies it? Or what about antidepressant drugs? Is a Prozac state an ASC? It is easy to see that this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The same problem arises when trying to compare some altered experience to our default mode of consciousness. What is the default here, we might want to reasonably ask? Normal consciousness itself is highly variable and the baseline, if there is one for each person, differs not only among people but also with each person. Consider more examples highlighting this predicament. If someone is madly in love, should we consider this feeling an ASC? In light of the above, subjective definitions, it is certainly not easy, let alone clear, to decide on this. We can draw out the same predicament for other situations, such as PMS? Apart from bodily changes, women often describe their symptoms in terms of alteration to cognition and emotion. Does that count as an ASC?

As for drug states, scientists and users typically agree that drug states constitute ASC. However, even here this troublesome mess cannot be entirely avoided. There is an agreement – by consensus, not via objective criteria though – that psychedelics and opiates alter conscious experience, but what about some less spectacular substance, say, amphetamines, Valium, or ecstasy And even for the clear, putative cases – LSD, mescaline, PCP, etc. – we must consider factors such as dosage or tolerance before we can be sure that a person has entered an ASC.

One final aspect of defining ASC is that all definitions, those above included, emphasize that altered states are temporary phenomena. Permanent changes to mental status, such as those that occur in neurological and psychiatric disorders, are usually not considered ASC, although it is typically assumed that consciousness is altered in these conditions. Drug abuse can, however, result in permanent brain damage. How to classify these changes to consciousness is not clear either.

Who viewed the study of consciousness was central to psychology?

What is consciousness in psychology?

What is the place of consciousness in psychology's history?

Why was the study of consciousness questioned by Watson and James?