The brain is constantly creating and updating models of reality, anticipating future events and adjusting to minimize surprises. Although this mechanism is essential for our adaptation, it can also lead to an unsettling awareness of mortality. To avoid this discomfort, the brain has developed automatic ways to distance death, attributing it to the "other" rather than oneself. A team led by Aviva Berkovich-Ohana investigated whether meditation could reduce this natural tendency to deny death. The study revealed that experienced meditators react differently compared to novices: instead of rejecting the idea of their own mortality, they seem to accept it more naturally. Thus, the results provide evidence that meditation can transform the way the brain processes death, shifting from denial to acceptance. Furthermore, this change was associated with greater well-being and advanced states of self-transcendence. This suggests that integrating meditation into clinical contexts could be a promising approach to dealing with the fear of death, complementing psychological and pharmacological therapies that more radically affect self-perception. This study was published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, in the article Training the embodied self in its impermanence: Meditators evidence neurophysiological markers of death acceptance, as part of the research project 191/20 - Understanding the brain mechanisms of death-denial for fostering mindfulness-based existential resilience, supported by the BIAL Foundation.
ABSTRACT
Background
Human predictive capacity underlies its adaptive strength but also the potential for existential terror. Grounded in the predictive processing framework of brain function, we recently showed using a magnetoencephalogram visual mismatch-response (vMMR) paradigm that prediction-based self-specific neural mechanisms shield the self from existential threat—at the level of perception—by attributing death to the ‘other’ (nonself). Here we test the preregistered hypothesis that insight meditation grounded on mindful awareness is associated with a reduction in the brain’s defensiveness toward mortality. In addition, we examine whether these neurophysiological markers of death-denial are associated with the phenomenology of meditative self-dissolution (embodied training in impermanence).
Methods
Thirty-eight meditators pooled from a previous project investigating self-dissolution neurophenomenology underwent the vMMR task, as well as self-report measures of mental health, and afterlife beliefs. Results were associated with the previously-reported phenomenological dimensions of self-dissolution.
Results
Meditators’ brains responded to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating acceptance rather than denial, corresponding to increased self-reported well-being. Additionally, degree of death acceptance predicted positively valenced meditation-induced self-dissolution experiences, thus shedding light on possible mechanisms underlying wholesome vs. pathological disruptions to self-consciousness.
Conclusions
The findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying the human tendency to avoid death are not hard-wired but are amenable to mental training, one which is linked with meditating on the experience of the embodied self’s impermanence. The results also highlight the importance of assessing and addressing mortality concerns when implementing psychopharmacological or contemplative interventions with the potential of inducing radical disruptions to self-consciousness.
