Briana Alcindor¹, Amy Patel², Lekhana Ramachandra³, Jovelis Toribio⁴, Melisa B. Sharkly⁵, Robert G. Alexander⁶; ¹New York Institute of Technology

Meditation has been linked to many changes in perception, including colors becoming more vivid, changes in brightness, and the blurring of boundaries between objects. The mechanisms behind these perceptual changes are unknown. Here, we describe a “meditation” task that we conducted in the lab, which we can use to test different possibilities. In the current experiment, we presented an image of a clay pot on a computer monitor for 15 minutes. Participants sat at a fixed distance in front of the monitor and were told to focus all their attention on the clay pot and exclude all other thoughts or feelings. This task strongly resembles many forms of meditation. We then asked participants a series of debriefing questions designed to elicit comments about perceptual effects that might have occurred but without the potential for participants to simply agree with our expectations. While many participants reported that nothing happened during the task, 27 participants (out of 58) reported perceptual changes. Consistent with our predictions, the eye tracking data revealed that participants who reported perceived changes to the boundary had both smaller and fewer saccades. This suggests a connection between reduced eye movements and perceptual fading of object boundaries during meditation. The reduction of eye movements was not found in participants who reported other perceptual changes such as brightness. These other changes are presumably driven by some other underlying mechanism. By knowing when the effects occur during the experiment, we can explore whether other physiological events happen around those times and thus begin to determine the mechanisms underlying these experiences.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by a New York Tech Institutional Support for Research and Creativity grant.