• DOI:10.1017/CBO9780511816789.020
• Corpus ID: 2635196

Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness: An Introduction

@inproceedings{Lutz2007MeditationAT,
  title={Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness: An Introduction},
  author={Antoine Lutz and John D. Dunne and Richard J. Davidson},
  year={2007}
}

• A. Lutz, J. Dunne, R. Davidson
• Published 1 May 2007
• Art

The overall goal of this chapter is to explore the initial findings of neuroscientific research on meditation; in doing so, the chapter also suggests potential avenues of further inquiry. It has three sections that, although integral to the chapter as a whole, may also be read independently. The first section, “Defining Meditation,” notes the need for a more precise understanding of meditation as a scientific explanandum. Arguing for the importance of distinguishing the particularities of various traditions, the section presents the theory of meditation from the paradigmatic perspective of Buddhism, and it discusses the difficulties encountered when working with such theories. The section includes an overview of three practices that have been the subject of research, and it ends with a strategy for developing a questionnaire to define more precisely a practice under examination. The second section, “The Intersection of Neuroscience and Meditation,” explores some scientific motivations for the neuroscientific examination of meditation in terms of its potential impact