Controlling Consciousness

The title of this post is identical to the title of a section in Ships at Sea: Exploring the Mysteries of Self and Consciousness by Kim Armstrong in psychological science.org/observer/jan-feb22.

“In addition to changing our perspective on the self, research suggests that mindfulness practices can improve our ability to self-regulate emotion and attention and or interoception, or bodily awareness.

‘Our model suggests that mindfulness decreases the threshold of conscious access by supporting attention,’ wrote Charles Verdonk (French Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute) and colleagues in a 2020 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science.’ Mindfulness, therefore, facilitates the conscious processing of information that comes from the within the body (body awareness and self-awareness) and outside the body (world awareness).’

This process allows individuals to more effectively filter out thoughts and feelings that aren’t relevant to their goals, the authors continued, and may strengthen the ability to engage nonjudgmental with irrelevant information that does rise to conscious awareness.

The researchers examined these processes through a review of 29 articles involving event-related potential (ERP) studies of mindfulness. The studies involved a total of 1,185 participants ages 17 to 80 who engaged in some form of mindfulness—from regular meditation to weekly 10-minute mindfulness interventions. In each case, electro-encephalography was used to observe variances in electrical activity in the brain related to information processing based on exposure to mindfulness practices. The ERPs, which occurred 100 to 600 ms after participants were exposed to a stimulus, included the following:

ERN (error negativity, which peaks about 100 ms post stimulus) is thought to reflect a comparison between the intended and actual performance of an action. If the two do not match, this is then followed by Pe (error positivity; 200-500 ms post stimulus), which is thought to reflect error awareness and is stronger when an error rises from unconscious to consciousness. About a third of studies found a link between mindfulness and increased ERN and Pe, but most found no evidence of a relationship.

N2 (200-350 ms post-stimulus) is associated with conflict monitoring (noticing discrepancies between expectations and reality) and the inhibition of planned responses. On average, this ERP was stronger in participants who were more dispositionally mindful, had more experience with meditation or had completed a Mindfulness intervention.

P300. This was the most completely studied ERP, Verdonk and colleagues noted, and can be broken down into several parts.

P3a (roughly 250 -289 ms post-stimulus) is thought to reflect automatic, unconscious attention to information. This ERP was found to be lower when participants were meditating than when they allowed their minds to wander. If a stimulus rises to conscious perception, P3a is followed by P3b (300-500 ms post stimulus). Across studies that measured this ERP, mindfulness interventions were associated with a greater P3b amplitude in response to irrelevant stimuli and a lower P3b amplitude in response to irrelevant stimuli, indicating that more mindful participants paid more attention to relevant stimuli and less attention to irrelevant stimuli. Finally, the no-go P3 (300-600) ms post stimulus) which reflects response inhibition, was found to be stronger in relation to mindfulness.

LPP (late positive potential; (340-600) ms post-stimulus), overlaps with P3b and is used in research on emotional arousal. It tends to be stronger in response to images perceived as positive or negative in comparison to neutral images. Findings on LPP and mindfulness were mixed. Studies on dispositional mindfulness, meditation experience, and longer-term mindfulness interventions seemed to suggest an association between mindfulness practices and decreased LPP amplitude, indicating decrease emotional reactivity. Experiments that provided a brief mindfulness intervention in the lab before participants viewed emotional stimuli, on the other had found no evidence of an effect or reported increase emotional reactivity.

All in all, Verdank and colleagues concluded that these findings suggest that mindfulness practices may have some ability on people’s ability to block irrelevant information from conscious awareness and to dissociate from emotional responses, decreasing their emotional reactivity.

‘Bringing information to consciousness could be viewed as a decisional process, a choice between leaving information unconscious or helping it to reach consciousness,’ Verdonk and colleagues explained. ‘The idea of a lower threshold of conscious access is congruent with this hypothesis because attentional amplification helps to keep information under the threshold or bring it above the threshold de[pending on its relevance to the context.’

Additionally, long-term mindfulness practice was found to be more strongly associated with cognitive control than brief laboratory interventions. It may take a significant amount of time and effort to learn these strategies, Verdonk and colleagues explained, which means that inexperienced participants may show no change or even reduced attentional control.

‘These findings suggest that although the development of mindful cognitive abilities is resource-consuming, mindful functioning is beneficial because it becomes more economical with the level of expertise,’ Verdonk and colleagues concluded.