On consciousness, between the lab and the cushion
A long conversation with a cognitive scientist who spent a decade studying meditators — on what the data can and cannot reach.
We sat down with a cognitive scientist who has spent a decade bringing experienced meditators into the scanner — and who is unusually candid about where the instruments stop.
On what the data reaches: "We can see attention networks quieten, default-mode activity drop, the markers of a settled nervous system. What we cannot see is what it is like — and the practitioners are the first to say the measurement is not the thing."
The conversation kept returning to that seam: a science that can describe the conditions of an inner state without touching its interior, and a tradition that has mapped the interior for millennia without the instruments. Neither, she argued, makes the other redundant.
Also in the Review
Full contents →Narada Muni and the Art of Liberation in Motion
Devotee, cosmic messenger, philosopher, divine mischief-maker. What the wandering sage with the vina teaches about remaining free while wholly engaged in the world.
The breath that steadies the mind
A verse on prāṇāyāma from the Yoga Sutras, set beside what contemporary neuroscience now understands about slow exhalation and the parasympathetic state.