Traditional Buddhist meditations reduce mismatch negativity in experienced monk- practitioners.

Thousand-year-old Buddhist traditions have developed a wide range of methods for the subjective exploration of consciousness through meditation. Combining their subjective research with the possibilities of modern neuroscience can help us better understand the physiological mechanisms of consciousness. Therefore, we have been guided by specifically Buddhist explanations when studying the physiological mechanisms of altered states of consciousness during Buddhist meditations. In Buddhism, meditations are generally divided into two large categories: (1) one-pointed concentration and (2) analytical meditation. Maintaining both one-pointed concentration and analytical meditation on 'bodhicitta' ("the thought of awakening") and 'emptiness' is a necessary condition for transitioning into tantric practices. Tantric practices involve sophisticated visualizations of Buddhist deities, the 'energy structure' of the human body, and the visualization of the stage-by-stage process of dying accompanied with the dissolution of body elements. According to Buddhism, these meditations are characterized by the gradual withdrawal from "gross levels" of consciousness associated with the five senses. From a psychophysiological perspective, this withdrawal of sensory consciousness can be considered as the decrease of sensory stimuli recognition and attentional disengagement from the external world. We concentrated on how considered meditations affect sensory and cognitive processing of external stimuli. Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in the passive oddball paradigm were studied both during meditations and in a controlled state of relaxed wakefulness. It was shown with a group of 115 Buddhist monks that during meditation, mismatch negativity amplitudes, amplitudes of N1 and P2 components of ERPs to deviant stimuli, and the amplitudes of the P3a component to novel stimuli all decrease. These outcomes suggest that the considered Buddhist meditations, compared to the control state of relaxed wakefulness, are accompanied by a decrease in physiological processes responsible for maintaining attention on the outside world and recognizing changes in the stream of sensory stimuli.

Tibetan Buddhist monastic debate: Psychological and neuroscientific analysis of a reasoning-based analytical meditation practice.

Analytical meditation and monastic debate are contemplative practices engaged in by Tibetan Buddhist monastics that have up to now been largely unexplored in Western contemplative science. The highly physical form of contemplative debating plays an important role in the monastic curriculum. Based on discussions and recorded interviews Tibetan monastic teachers and senior students at Sera Jey Monastic University and preliminary experiments, we outline an initial theory that elucidates the psychological mechanisms underlying this practice. We then make predictions about the potential effects of this form of debating on cognition and emotion. On the basis of initial observations, we propose that successful debating requires skills that include reasoning and critical thinking, attentional focus, working memory, emotion regulation, confidence in your own reasoning skills, and social connectedness. It is therefore likely that the many cumulative hours of debate practice over 20+ years of monastic training helps to cultivate these very skills. Scientific research is needed to examine these hypotheses and determine the role that monastic debate may play in terms of both psychological wellbeing and educational achievement.