Several contemplative traditions offer detailed maps to guide meditative progress towards enlightenment and liberation from psychological suffering, highlighting their potential to promote mental health and well-being. In Theravada Buddhism, one of these maps is known as the Stages of Insight (SoI), a comprehensive framework that describes meditative progress from the initial understanding of mind and matter to the reaching of Nirvana. This journey, experienced through advanced meditative practices, allows for a series of profound psychological transformations, such as changes in perception, self-experience, cognition, and emotional processing. An innovative study led by Matthew Sacchet used high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (7T MRI) to explore brain activity during the SoI. The research team identified specific brain activity patterns associated with the SoI, different from non-meditative states. SoI deactivated regions related to self-processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and activated regions associated with perception and awareness (such as the parietal and visual cortices). Additionally, the SoI were associated with changes in emotional states, such as greater peace and equanimity, characterized by self-transcendence and mental stability. In conclusion, these results suggest stronger awareness and perceptual sensitivity and acuity during the SoI, with positive implications for psychological well-being and opening new horizons for the understanding of advanced meditation. This study was supported by the BIAL Foundation, in the scope of the research project 99/20 - Beyond "mindfulness" and toward a modern science of meditative mastery and spiritual transformation, and published in the journal NeuroImage, in the article Deconstructing the self and reshaping perceptions: An intensive whole-brain 7T MRI case study of the stages of insight during advanced investigative insight meditation.
ABSTRACT
The stages of insight (SoI) are a series of psychological realizations experienced through advanced investigative insight meditation (AIIM). SoI provide a powerful structured framework of AIIM for understanding and evaluating insight-based meditative development through changes in perception, experiences of self, cognition, and emotional processing. Yet, the neurophenomenology of SoI remains unstudied due to methodological difficulties, rarity of suitable advanced meditation practitioners, and dominant research emphasis on attention-based meditative practices. We investigated the neurophenomenology of SoI in an intensively sampled adept meditator case study (4 hr 7T fMRI collected in 26 runs with concurrent phenomenology) who performed SoI and rated specific aspects of experience immediately thereafter. Linear mixed models and correlations were used to examine relations among the cortex, subcortex, brainstem, and cerebellum, and SoI phenomenology. We identified distinctive whole-brain activity patterns associated with specific SoI, and that were different from two non-meditative control states. SoI consistently deactivated regions implicated in self-related processing, including the medial prefrontal cortex and temporal poles, while activating regions associated with awareness and perception, including the parietal and visual cortices, caudate, several brainstem nuclei, and cerebellum. Patterns of brain activity related to affective processing and SoI phenomenology were also identified. Our study presents the first neurophenomenological evidence that SoI shifts and deconstructs self-related perception and conceptualization, and increases general awareness and perceptual sensitivity and acuity. Our study provides SoI as a foundation for investigative, and advanced meditation in particular.
