Consciousness

Chapter

Seven

Attention

and, like the PCC, is associated with introspective processing which diminishes
when attention is outwardly directed (Broyd et al., 2009). The DMN strengthens
during normal human development, but various forms of meditation can reduce
its activation and its connectivity, including by bringing about structural changes
in areas like the PCC, temporoparietal junction, and precuneus (Brewer et al., 2011;
Fox et al., 2014). Conversely, nondirective meditation, in which mind-wandering is
encouraged, shows enhanced activation of the DMN (Xu et al., 2014).

The concept of the DMN has made ‘mind-wandering’ a fashionable topic,
so we now know that the interference between primary task demands and
mind-wandering is not as straightforward as it first appeared (Thomson, Besner,
and Smilek, 2013), and that mind-wandering seems to be unique in involving
cooperation of both default and executive network regions, which are usually
opposed (Christoff et al., 2009). Another concept that has grown in importance
is interoceptive attention, or attention to bodily sensations related to digestion,
blood flow, breathing, and proprioception, which has been proposed as crucial
to mindfulness meditation. One study used brain imaging to try to distinguish
meditators from non-meditators on the basis of subtly different patterns of acti-
vation. This succeeded with thirty-seven out of thirty-nine participants (Sato et
al., 2012). The most informative areas in making this distinction were involved in
awareness and recognition of bodily sensations (see also Manuello et al., 2016).

Together, findings from this line of research suggest that meditation can bring
about rather profound changes in the brain’s global responses to the body and
the world, and that what we call attention must be crucial to how it does so.

Could this research go further and begin to build bridges across the explanatory
gap or the great chasm? The Churchlands argue that in past centuries people

‘Responsiveness to

the world, in action,

precisely involves a

way of attending to

the world, more often

unconscious than not’

(Wu, 2011, p. 112)

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FIGURE 7.9 • Effortful attention regulation during meditation. Panel (a) provides a schematic representation of the meditation process. The inner circle outlines
the phenomenological layer, presenting the typical sequence (clockwise) a meditator will go through. The middle circle relates the attentional
processes that lie underneath, while the outer circle represents the different brain networks that are involved in carrying out these functions. The
different attentional processes and the brain networks are represented as partially overlapping to indicate that in many instances more than one
process/network is involved. Panel (b) outlines the main brain areas involved in each of the five networks. Mindfulness training also seems to
reduce inattentional blindness (Malinowski, 2013, p. 4).