Dissociating the Neural Basis of Conceptual Self-Awareness from Perceptual Awareness and Unaware Self-Processing

The mindful leader: a review of leadership qualities derived from mindfulness meditation

Mindfulness has been practiced by global leaders and companies as an efficient way to build effective leadership. Because of its popularity, plus the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework that explains it in a leadership context, the research literature has called for a coherent account of the qualities that is derived by those leaders that practice mindfulness. Here, we aim to answer that call, by clarifying what leadership qualities can develop from practicing mindfulness. We report on a semi-systematic literature review of extant research, covering 19 research articles published between 2000 and 2021, plus other relevant supporting literature from the disciplines of leadership and neuropsychology. Our proposed framework consists of three main qualities of the mindful leader: attention, awareness, and authenticity. We call them the "three pillars of mindful leaders." We also propose that mindfulness meditation must be integrated into our proposed framework, as we are convinced that leaders who hope to benefit from these qualities must integrate a regular mindfulness meditation practice into their daily leadership life.

Toward reframing brain-social dynamics: current assumptions and future challenges

Evolutionary analyses suggest that the human social brain and sociality appeared together. The two fundamental tools that accelerated the concurrent emergence of the social brain and sociality include learning and plasticity. The prevailing core idea is that the primate brain and the cortex in particular became reorganised over the course of evolution to facilitate dynamic adaptation to ongoing changes in physical and social environments. Encouraged by computational or survival demands or even by instinctual drives for living in social groups, the brain eventually learned how to learn from social experience via its massive plastic capacity. A fundamental framework for modeling these orchestrated dynamic responses is that social plasticity relies upon neuroplasticity. In the present article, we first provide a glimpse into the concepts of plasticity, experience, with emphasis on social experience. We then acknowledge and integrate the current theoretical concepts to highlight five key intertwined assumptions within social neuroscience that underlie empirical approaches for explaining the brain-social dynamics. We suggest that this epistemological view provides key insights into the ontology of current conceptual frameworks driving future research to successfully deal with new challenges and possible caveats in favour of the formulation of novel assumptions. In the light of contemporary societal challenges, such as global pandemics, natural disasters, violent conflict, and other human tragedies, discovering the mechanisms of social brain plasticity will provide new approaches to support adaptive brain plasticity and social resilience.

Relating different Dimensions of Bodily Experiences: Review and proposition of an integrative model relying on phenomenology, predictive brain and neuroscience of the self

How we mentally experience our body has been studied in a variety research domains. Each of these domains focuses in its own ways on different aspects of the body, namely the neurophysiological, perceptual, affective or social components, and proposes different conceptual taxonomies. It is therefore difficult to find one's way through this vast literature and to grasp the relationships between the different dimensions of bodily experiences. In this narrative review, we summarize the existing research directions and present their limits. We propose an integrative framework, grounded in studies on phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness and bodily self-consciousness, that can provide a common basis for evaluating findings on different dimensions of bodily experiences. We review the putative mechanisms, relying on predictive processes, and neural substrates that support this model. We discuss how this model enables a conceptual assessment of the interrelationships between multiple dimensions of bodily experiences and potentiate interdisciplinary approaches.

The Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus Plays an Important Role in Unconscious Information Processing: Activation Likelihood Estimation Analysis Based on Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Unconsciousness is a kind of brain activity that occurs below the level of consciousness, and the masked priming paradigm is a classic paradigm to study unconscious perceptual processing. With the deepening of unconscious perception research, different researchers mostly use different experimental materials and different masked priming paradigms in a single experiment but not for the comprehensive analysis of the unconscious information processing mechanism itself. Thus, the purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive analysis through a cross-experimental paradigm, cross-experimental materials, and cross-experimental purposes. We used activation likelihood estimation to test functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, involving 361 subjects, 124 foci in eight studies representing direct comparison of unconscious processing with baseline, and 115 foci in 10 studies representing direct comparison of unconscious priming effects. In the comparison of unconscious processing and baseline, clusters formed in the left superior parietal gyrus, the right insular gyrus, and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) triangular part after correcting for familywise error (FWE). In the comparison of priming effects, clusters formed in only the right IFG triangular part after correcting for FWE. Here, we found that ventral and dorsal pathways jointly regulate unconscious perceptual processes, but only the ventral pathway is involved in the regulation of unconscious priming effects. The IFG triangular part is involved in the regulation of unconscious perceptual processing and unconscious priming effects and may be an important brain area in unconscious information processing. These preliminary data provide conditions for further study of the neural correlation of unconscious information processing.

Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory

How does our body affect the way we think about our personality? We addressed this question by eliciting the perceptual illusion that pairs of friends swapped bodies with each other. We found that during the illusion, the participants rated their own personality characteristics more similarly to the way they previously rated their friend's personality, and this flexible adjustment of self-concept to the "new" bodily self was related to the strength of illusory ownership of the friend's body. Moreover, a subsequent memory test showed that personality traits rated during the friend-body-swap illusion were generally remembered worse than traits rated during the control conditions; importantly, however, this impairment of episodic recognition memory was reduced for the participants who considerably adjusted their self-concept during the illusory body swapping. These findings demonstrate that our beliefs about own personality are dynamically shaped by the perception of our body and that coherence between the bodily and conceptual self-representations is important for the normal encoding of episodic memories.

Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change

Gender identity is a collection of thoughts and feelings about one’s own gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth. How this sense is linked to the perception of one’s own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments conducted on a large group of control volunteers (N = 140), we show that a perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body is associated with a shift toward a more balanced identification with both genders and less gender-stereotypical beliefs about own personality characteristics, as indicated by subjective reports and implicit behavioral measures. These findings demonstrate that the ongoing perception of one’s own body affects the sense of one’s own gender in a dynamic, robust, and automatic manner.

Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness

In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness induced by classical psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, whose effects are mainly mediated by agonism of serotonin receptors. Few attempts have been made at bridging these two domains of inquiry, despite intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states. In particular, many contemplative traditions explicitly aim at dissolving the sense of self by eliciting altered states of consciousness through meditation, while classical psychedelics are known to produce significant disruptions of self-consciousness, a phenomenon known as drug-induced ego dissolution. In this article, we discuss available evidence regarding convergences and differences between phenomenological and neurophysiological data on meditation practice and psychedelic drug-induced states, with a particular emphasis on alterations of self-experience. While both meditation and psychedelics may disrupt self-consciousness and underlying neural processes, we emphasize that neither meditation nor psychedelic states can be conceived as simple, uniform categories. Moreover, we suggest that there are important phenomenological differences even between conscious states described as experiences of self-loss. As a result, we propose that self-consciousness may be best construed as a multidimensional construct, and that "self-loss," far from being an unequivocal phenomenon, can take several forms. Indeed, various aspects of self-consciousness, including narrative aspects linked to autobiographical memory, self-related thoughts and mental time travel, and embodied aspects rooted in multisensory processes, may be differently affected by psychedelics and meditation practices. Finally, we consider long-term outcomes of experiences of self-loss induced by meditation and psychedelics on individual traits and prosocial behavior. We call for caution regarding the problematic conflation of temporary states of self-loss with "selflessness" as a behavioral or social trait, although there is preliminary evidence that correlations between short-term experiences of self-loss and long-term trait alterations may exist.

Prioritization of arbitrary faces associated to self: An EEG study

Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that people process preferentially self-related information such as an image of their own face. Furthermore, people rapidly incorporate stimuli into their self-representation even if these stimuli do not have an intrinsic relation to self. In the present study, we investigated the time course of the processes involved in preferential processing of self-related information. In two EEG experiments three unfamiliar faces were identified with verbal labels as either the participant, a friend, or a stranger. Afterwards, participants judged whether two stimuli presented in succession (ISI = 1500ms) matched. In experiment 1, faces were followed by verbal labels and in experiment 2, labels were followed by faces. Both experiments showed the same pattern of behavioral and electrophysiological results. If the first stimulus (face or label) was associated with self, reaction times were faster and the late frontal positivity following the first stimulus was more pronounced. The self-association of the second stimulus (label or face) did not affect response times. However, the central-parietal P3 following presentation of the second stimulus was more pronounced when the second stimulus was preceded by self-related first stimulus. These results indicate that even unfamiliar faces that are associated to self can activate a self-representation. Once the self-representation has been activated the processing of ensuing stimuli is facilitated, irrespective of whether they are associated with the self.