EVAN THOMPSON
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Embodied self-awareness and the 'resting state': a neurophenomenological approach

Neuroimaging studies that examine spontaneous fluctuations of activity in task-free conditions (the so-called resting state) suggest the brain is always active in self-generated and organized ways. But what is the meaning of this intrinsic distributed activity? According to one proposal, a unifying concept for understanding this activity is that of the self: During rest when one has no task to perform one is in a state oriented towards the self. Yet both the notion of the self and the notion of the resting state remain ill-defined. The resting state is defined in a purely negative way by the absence of task instructions ('lie still, stay awake'). Most likely this means subjects think about whatever they tend habitually to think about, so the precise mental processes and their timing remain essentially uncontrolled. How much of the observed intrinsic activity is due to unconstrained behaviour (e.g., mind wandering) and how much is due to activity that persists across states and conditions? It is difficult to know without more information about mental processes during 'rest'. This lecture makes the following neurophenomenological proposal: Individuals who can stabilize and flexibly switch between various modes of self-awareness, including nonintrusively monitoring their own mental activities from moment to moment, can internally modulate the resting state and provide detailed phenomenological information about its various components. Certain types of meditation train these abilities, so by working with meditators as experimental participants, neuroscientists may be able to probe intrinsic activity via the resting state in more precise ways. This lecture will present evidence to support this proposal.

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