#115: Meditation Beyond the Brain - Idil Zezer, PhD

Speaker A: Uh, I indeed looked at different types of meditations, Yogic traditions, Buddhist traditions, transcendental meditation, loving kindness or more emotional focus meditation. We were looking at the connection and activation between different brain areas. Even with novices we could see that meditation was linked to modulations in regions related to attentional processes, emotional regulation, pain relief and ah, sense of self, self awareness. Neuroscience is getting more and more holistic. We also see that with long term meditation it's not just the brain. You have effects on physiological levels, cellular levels, genetic micro, your digestive systems. Indeed look at gut health in meditators and they see that they have better gut health. And there are also research coming on mental health and gut health and how linked it is several systems, mental systems that communicate with each other and uh, it's just not focused on the brain. It starts with a mental exercises but then you see why it changes.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Fit man podcast. Today's amazing guest is Idil Cesar, uh, a neuroscientist who began her research career with an internship at Harvard Medical School's center for Depression and Anxiety and now a postdoctoral researcher uh, in Geneva, splitting her time between the University hospital's neurosurgery department and the amazing Olaf Blanque's lab, known for its work on the bodily self and out of body experiences. We get into brain, heart coupling, ecstatic seizures, the real difference between long term and advanced meditators. And also how VR is being used to make dissolve the sense of self. Let's get into it.

Speaker C: Edel. Cesar, good to meet you and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker A: It's great to meet you. Thank you.

Speaker C: I'd love to start with a little bit about your background. You started in clinical neurology working with apathy and dementia patients. So what is it that got you here and looking at meditation research and contemplative research.

Speaker A: Actually before my PhD, I was in apathy in dementia patients. I did a end, uh, of master's internship in Harvard Medical School and there I uh, worked with Matthew Sackett and I was always interested in non pharmacological approaches, uh, to treat or at least help with neurological disorders or psychiatric disorders. So that's how I, I always had meditation, uh, mindfulness in the back of my mind. And that's why I applied to an internship on um, meditation and depression, um, at the center for Depression and Anxiety in Harvard Medical School. And that's where I worked with um, Mathieu that was focusing on depression and a bit of meditation and then he shifted to long term advanced meditation and that's how I came across this area of research. But I was also very interested in doing clinical neuroscience and trying to help um, discover things that could help help persons living with dementia or other disorders. So my PG was mostly focused on this with um, a part with new technology because I also think that new technology is very helpful uh, and can help us managing symptoms. So I had a project on virtual reality as well and I had a project on wearable response for patients with dementia and their uh, caregivers.

Speaker C: Was there anything in particular about meditation that was drawing you in?

Speaker A: The fact that you just have to have your brain and yourself and you can do it. The fact that you don't need external intervention and of course not everyone has uh, the bandwidth or ah, the life circumstances where they can meditate for one hour each day. But if you have a couple of minutes in your day and you try to do it, or if for individuals are not even able to do that, if we find ways to help them do that, you just need your brain. So I think that's wonderful.

Speaker C: Meditation, well it's right here. Like it's, it's the most direct approach to training the mind and it is zero cost. Once you know how being there with

Speaker A: your mind and your thoughts, trying to understand your thoughts, how they're related to each other, where they come from. Why do you think the way you think etc. Is exercise, I mean is the name of your podcast. So it's exerc, right?

Speaker C: That leads into your, your 2025 paper. Actually you were I think in some ways challenging that, uh, meditation is relaxation. I think that's very in vogue now that a lot of people are using meditation for de stressing or becoming better at their jobs or maybe be in higher performance, what would you say is like the more accurate picture?

Speaker A: I mean you can also use meditation if you have other gains from it or other ones from it. You can also use meditation to work better. I don't want to say that that is the wrong way of meditating. But then yes, if you get lost on the performance aspect, it's a bit counterintuitive to how meditation is. But people can use it for other things. And also for example, in advanced meditation there is um, distancing between just mindfulness based stress reduction programs where meditation is only targeting stress reduction, uh, and they want to explore more altered state of consciousness. And that's great. I love working on that as well. But if people only want to use it to just reduce their stress, everyday life stress, this, this is also great because there is an ongoing, ongoing discourse on meditation is not just stress reduction. That's true, but stress reduction is also great if it can help people.

Speaker C: Definitely. And you can't really get to any of the other possibilities without reducing stress anyway.

Speaker A: So yes, and then it can be a stepping stone and if you want to explore it further, you can, but you can also just do that uh, and step there and that's also totally fine.

Speaker C: Have you done any, any research on like the different types of meditation and the different effects?

Speaker A: I've done um, literature reviews on several articles where they had uh, for the first one it was different ways of you looking at what meditation does. So for example they took long term meditators versus novices or people that haven't meditated in lives and they compare their brain or they take people that didn't meditate, make them meditate for a couple of weeks and then compare their brain pre pass. So those are different design experiments. And my idea was to look at the uh, similarities between all of these. And then on another project I indeed looked at different types of meditations. So yogic tradition, Buddhist traditions, transcendental meditation, loving kindness or more emotional focus meditation. I looked at all of these, the articles and their findings related to all these different types of meditation. And I was interested in trying to see if there were similarities even though the, on the first side the experimental design was different and if the type of meditation was different. And what was interesting to see that you could actually see similarities even though the research was very heterogeneous.

Speaker C: What kind of similarities?

Speaker A: I did one that was mostly focused on the brain research. Uh, so it was in resting state functional mri, which means that people are in the MRI and they don't do anything, they just rest. And we were looking at the connection and activation between different, different brain areas. And basically I can sum it up saying that even with novices we could see that meditation was linked to modulations in regions related to attentional processes, emotional regulation, pain relief and sense of self, self awareness. These were the differences. So for example for the self awareness it was less rumination that we can see, for example for increase in depression and more related to uh, attentional processes, cognitive processes and so less related to rumination about the self, your autobiographical memory, et cetera. And for the other project it was uh, looking at the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system regulates our heart and other organs. It has two branches, the parasympathetic neurons nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system and is the fight or flight response for the Sympathetic nervous system. And it's the rest and digest response for the parasympathetic nervous system. So it has two branches where one is used for survival and the other is used mostly for relaxation. Even though it's a bit more complicated to that than that in the physiological sense. But yeah, I, I also saw patterns across different types of meditation where meditators had similar uh, heart patterns related to their meditation.

Speaker C: Yeah, that leads into my next question actually. So I've heard you talk about uh, cardiac spectral peaks. What, what are they? I believe you found them in advanced meditators and I guess. Why, why are they interesting? Because they sound, they sound extremely fascinating.

Speaker A: They are actually. So during my pg, also empirically I uh, worked on cardiac spectral peaks. And for me they are the most, currently the most level of information that you can get from your heart rate. So you have your uh, basic heart rate, you have your heart rate variability which is variations between different peaks. You may be uh, familiar with heart rate variability and basically the more variable it is, the better it is for physiology, uh, stress level, so you're more relaxed, uh, you also better in sports, et cetera. And so based on heart rate variability, you can get spectral information about the heart that are the low frequency and high frequency components. I can say that it's a bit similar. In eeg you have alpha, beta, uh, gamma theta, uh, brainwave. So it's similar to having, to looking at waves of the heart. And so I looked at low frequency and high frequency components of the heart and as I said there are two branches. So rest and digest, fight and flight. And high frequency mostly related to relaxation, parasympathetic system. Whereas uh, low frequency is mostly related to activation. So sympathetic system, fight and flight. Low frequency also has a bit of components, uh, in the two branches, so they're a bit mixed, but you can still get general information. And then you have resonant peaks that are the coupling of the cardiovascular system and the respiratory system. And so usually you see these resonant peaks, you see a burst in the Signal at around 0.1Hz. And this is because uh, this is usually your normal respiratory cycle of 10 seconds. And so those bursts happen when the heart is in sync with the respiratory system. And we saw those in long term meditators. And what was interesting to see, and of course this is very preliminary because in this particular review we saw it in only a couple of articles and also because this is a very niche side of research. So there aren't many studies yet on this, but in people referred to as advanced meditators. So entering advanced stages and mastery related to m meditation. We saw that there's this Ah, 0.1 Hz peak was shifted towards another heart wave that is in uh, the very low frequency components, so in different spectral band. And they had feelings of warmth in the feet and hands, which is also a very common experience in advanced meditators entering advanced stages of meditation. And what was very neat to see is that we saw a hard component of this feeling. So we see that the very low frequency peak occurs at the same time of those feelings of warmth.

Speaker C: So that would be just naturally arising warmth in. Because like what comes to mind is like pre, like the way to, to get into some jhanas, which would be like an advanced meditation, uh, stage. They might like rest their attention on tingling in the hand or uh, or feet. Is that kind of what you describe?

Speaker A: It's naturally arising and that is why you have the subjective experience. So they're saying I see a feeling of warmth inside my body. And then being able to couple this with objective markers of physiology is very interesting. And um, they didn't particularly focus. Usually it's in deep absorption. So samadhi stage for example. So they didn't particularly focus on anything at that stage. And they still get the feeling of warmth.

Speaker C: It's like spontaneous happiness or something. But normally like parasympathetic would be high frequency. It's so fascinating that you can measure the heart like that for so many reasons. I always remember the story, I think it was Richard Davidson when he first started measuring the monks, um, like it was like the first wave of the, the more recent meditation research. And when he went in with the EEG caps and whatnot to, to work with the monks, they were all laughing that it was going on the head. And he was like, what are you, what are you laughing about? And they were like. They were saying for them the mind, the source of the mind is the heart or the mind is in the heart. So why would you not be measuring there? I just think that's quite, it's quite funny. Of course it might not be exactly

Speaker A: true, but I love that neuroscience is getting more and more holistic and I love looking at other areas. And the brain has a lot of electrical, uh, information to give, but also the heart. And also looking at how the brain and the heart talk to each other, how they communicate. I also had a project on that. So it's neat that we're seeing a more holistic approach now and we're not just only focusing on the Brain, for example. I have a recent project too where, where it's on long term meditation and, and mental health. And it hasn't been submitted yet. But uh, we also see that with long term meditation it's not just the brain. You have effects on ph, physiological levels, cellular levels, genetic, epigenetic, micro, microbial, so digestive system. So you see that there is um, the, the, it's the several systems, mental systems that communicate with each other and it's just not focused on the brain. It starts with the um, mental exercises. But then you see why changes.

Speaker C: So yes, I've heard you distinguish between long term meditators and advanced meditators. What, what would be the difference?

Speaker A: Long term meditators are people that have meditated for years. There are still not a uh, clear scientific consensus on um, what should be called a long term meditator. What is a threshold in duration to be called a long term meditator? But I would say generally it's linked to the duration of uh, practice. Whereas advanced meditators are individuals that uh, were able to achieve advanced levels of meditation and mastery of meditation. That is not uh, linear with duration of practice. So that is also the distinction because um, advancement teacher does not mean that it's long term meditators that uh, meditated even for a longer time and then became advanced. They unlock um, stages of meditation through their practice. So it's linked to, it's a sense of mastery.

Speaker C: Okay. And it's not time dependent. It would, that would be a factor I imagine.

Speaker A: It's really not linear. The research shows that it's not linear at all.

Speaker C: Right, that's, that's fascinating as well for so many reasons. I mean of course you see it in many other disciplines. Some people just pick up tennis really quickly and. Maestro. Or the, the Beethoven of meditation.

Speaker A: Exactly. And then advanced meditators can have brain correlates and heart correlates are different than long term meditators. So that's also why we want to look at them more specifically and hopefully later on have two groups of meditators instead of just long term meditators. And this is more, the literature is more or less going towards that, but um, is still ongoing and this is a big part of Matthew's research as well. The what? The third wave of meditation. So research specific on advanced meditation.

Speaker C: And before we jump any further, I just want to let you know that our amazing founder, my friend Liam McClintock's book, Fitbind, has just released. I finally have a physical copy and honestly I cannot recommend it. Enough. This is genuinely incredible. He's somehow woven his story, which is absolutely fascinating with both the contemplative science practice and the western science. And it is just genuinely an incredibly unique book. You can order your copy right now@fitmind.org to support the mission and help elevate your mind. Thank you so much. And back to the episode with the review that you did of the um, the long term meditation and positive mental health effects. What have you found there? Uh, what's emerging from that?

Speaker A: So there's uh, teams are uh, emerging in the um, in the literature. It was a huge project where we looked at uh, more than 50 articles on long term meditation and mental health outcomes. So they have changes related to sense of self again uh, interpersonal relationships, emotional irregulation, sensory and effective uncoupling of pain. So experiencing pain but uh, not having the affective negative aspect of pain and just the sensory aspect of pain. Stress reduction, which is a big thing of course in mental health. Psychiatric illness prevention. So mechanism, so neuroprotection that will help prevent psychiatric illnesses. So the research is organized in key themes and as I said it's on multiple levels. So not just brain physiology, cellular so increases for example in uh, uh, neuroprotective factors. Uh factors are uh, against neuroinflammation because there is a strong link between neuroinflammation and psychiatric and neurological disorders. We even see it now. For example for people having long Covid, there is an increase in neuroinflammation that could explain the clinical aspects of long Covid. Yeah, it's a neat project where we see that is just not one thing, one, not one team. And it's across levels.

Speaker C: It's like a big um, excellent sales pitch for meditation.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: What about gut uh, health? Have you, have you seen, I don't know if you know much or how much you know about that but there seems to also be an effect on gut health. Is that right?

Speaker A: On this particular review I think there were uh, only one article where it met the inclusion criteria of the article. And they indeed look at gut health in meditators and they see that they have better gut health. And there are also research coming on mental health and gut health and how linked it is. But also there is uh, there are major moderating factors where uh, long term med stators usually have other lifestyle uh changes that could explain gut health such as being vegan, vegetarian. Uh, so do you have confounding factors? So for now, or maybe I'm not aware of the Research I can't clearly link, causally link meditation to gut health, but there are strong findings related to that.

Speaker C: How do you even make sense of that? That just purely if everybody was eating the same and the environment was the same. Just that the, I mean we know there's a strong connection between the mind and the body, but it would still be pretty mind blowing if it was affecting the gut health so directly.

Speaker A: It is even in um, cellular factors, molecular factors. How come with meditation you have more uh, good uh, uh, molecules so growth factors such as the bdnf, so brain factor. So how can you explain that with meditation you have right. Those wide changes on the cellular impact. So I would say for gut health it's similar where it's cellular, microbial, molecular mechanisms, but it's clear, it's, it's hard to establish a clear, clear link with how come meditation affects uh, us on a cellular level. So we don't know yet.

Speaker C: I would say the more we look at biology, I don't know if you're across Michael Levin's work as well. I find that particularly interesting. He's making particularly interesting findings in biology relating to like bioelectric fields that at least in like planarian worms, they will like teach the worms a maze and then they can chop off the brain, but the brain can regrow in those worms, but it still remembers how to do the maze even though its brain is gone. So that starts to point to like where is the, where is the memory stored? At least again just in a small scale example. But uh, he has a bunch of other really mind blowing findings.

Speaker A: I think more and more see that memory is stored on a cellular level because for example they did experiment, um, I don't remember the team on rats or mice where they were traumatized and so they would have an aversive reaction to the cue that's traumatized them. And then the same mice had offspring that themselves had offspring. So we're talking about grandkids of the first mice and they would get traumatized by the same cue without having had traumatic uh, experience. So we have clear findings related to the thing that trauma is stored on a molecular level and it can be passed on to offspring and it's just not just related to behaviors. And they actually I think found epigenetic mechanism that could um, explain the passing of trauma. So epigenetic is related to the DNA, but it's related to methylation. So you can modify your DNA. So the idea, the scientific hypothesis is that the DNA was modified uh, because of the trauma and Then this modified DNA was passed on to future generations. So we're still stolen a lot in ourselves and we don't know it.

Speaker C: That's amazing. I, I, I think that might have been Nikolai Kushkin. He found something similar. It might have been his lab maybe so Fascinating for so many reasons. Like particularly I wonder the relationship as well. This is just pure speculation now, so you don't even have to answer but just it's interesting that we use the body so much for meditation for like, we use like a somatic aspect for for instance we might use the breath in the, in the horror like the belly area. I just find that interesting that that then might relate back to, to mhm. Like the body or the cells having some form of, of memory.

Speaker A: Yes, it could be. And also on a consciousness level we think so. We always, we see ourselves as stored in our brain, but consciousness could also be stored in our whole body and we don't know yet.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a hot topic and a deep 1m consciousness right now.

Speaker A: So yeah, there's a lot of neuroscience studies on consciousness and there are three theories that want to explain consciousness in different ways. So it's currently a very hot topic in neuroscience.

Speaker C: You talk about the brain, heart, uh, connectivity in your work and you found that the brain to heart coupling predicts who responds to VR anxiety interventions. What do you think that suggests about personalizing treatments?

Speaker A: Nice question. So this was a project I did during my Ph.D. where uh, individuals with ongoing anxiety, so they weren't stressed in a uh, uh, artificial scientific laboratory environment but they had anxiety. So they answered a questionnaire related to their state anxiety at that specific time before and after undergoing the virtual reality intervention. And in virtual reality they were in a calm environment with a script that uh, would help them calm down. And then they answered the questionnaire again. And what was interesting to see is that some people were helped by this and others were not. And then I was interested in brain correlates, hard correlates and, and brain to heart connectivity correlates related to differences between treatment responders and non responders. And I saw that responders had an increase in, without getting into details in a specific region of the brain, midline region of beta waves. And they also had an increase in low frequency and high frequency components of the heart. And so it's sympathetic and parasympathetic both. And it's also why it's not a direct link clearly established saying high frequency is parasympathetic etc but they had also an overall increased autonomic Functioning and when looking at directionality. So was the brain beta wave, um, modulating the heart or the opposite? We saw that there was an increase in brain to heart modulation coupling. Whereas for non responders they didn't have those brain correlates in the heart, they only had low frequency increase which can be linked to stress response as I explained previously. And they did not have a brain to heart coupling. So this gives us two answers. Was it the brain that was modulating the heart? On the opposite, it was the brain that was modulated the heart. And this can be also opposite in other contexts. It's not that straightforward because the heart can give information to the brain, for example in emotional context. So this was answered, it was the brain that was mediating the effect. And the uh, issue was that we also had our second answer where people that were not responding to the treatment, it was because they didn't have this brain to heart modulation. And then the idea is to target the brain, the region that we found the waves that we found and try to do for example neurofeedback based training to see if this can help them relax in this specific context. And it could also be to give them something that would help better. This is also an ongoing area of research in psychiatry where not all treatments are going to fit. Everyone depends on the treatment, depends on the context, the disorder. Uh, but you can have for example 30% or 50% of non responders. So instead of trying everything, can you find objective neural or physiological markers that could then tell you if this individual. So predict if this individual is going to answer to this treatment or another treatment, for example. So it could be modulating your brain to get there or even finding other treatments that would help them better.

Speaker C: Uh, what does the treatment look like? What would they be doing in the, in the VR.

Speaker A: So also I uh, want to say that we call it a treatment because it releases pain or anxiety. But this was done on healthy subject and it wasn't tested on um, individuals with psychiatric symptoms. So this remains to be seen. So I want to be cautious about that. But in the case of this article, so it was uh, in virtual reality and they were in a Zen garden for. So and they had a script that was related to hypnosis and was a hypnotic script, but they weren't on full on hypno hypnos and the scripts told them to focus on the environment, the, the grass beneath their feet, the, the sound of the lake was, et cetera. And they also had uh, strong breathing exercise just at the beginning of the, of the of the virtual environment. And this is called a cardiac coherence. You might be familiar um, with it. So they had to breed heart coherence or cardiac coherence is similar to what I found in meditator is linking the respiratory system to the heart's functioning. So you have to breed in exactly 10 second cycles and in some example crisis it's 6 second in inhalation, 4 second exhalation for example. But it can be worse or it can be 5, 5. So you have to breathe in specific 10 second cycles and this gives a uh, querence between a coupling between the respiratory system and the heart system and it helps to relax the individual, it cuts the brain and it goes directly to the physiological functioning and then you more relaxed than you were. And so they did this exercise at the beginning of the virtual environment. And in my findings I actually saw that there were the, this brainwave induction at the beginning when they did this breathing exercise. But they only did it for a couple of minutes at the very beginning and not later on the 12 on the 20 minutes of the experiment. But we can, we could still see a long standing effect of this exercise in responders, whereas in non responders it depth just after the exercise. So it's a bit of a synergistic effect where we don't know exactly if the treatment helped because of the eye environment, because of the breathing user side, because of the hypnotic script. It could be all of them together, we don't know.

Speaker C: With the brain heart coupling, what does that actually look like? How do you know that they're, they're coupled or how do you look at the relationship there?

Speaker A: There are several matters to, to look at it. So it's mathematical equations where you see for example the brain waves and you look at if they can predict the next low frequency high frequency components of the heart or the opposite. You look at low frequency high frequency components and their data points, time series and you see if those can predict the brain waves that you're going to get. And you also have, this was not my method but you also have other types of analysis like that for example dynamic causal modeling. So you can see a causal relationship between the two and with that you can get an indication or coefficient of coupling. Where if you're able to predict then it means that brain is connected to the heart or the opposite.

Speaker C: So it can become almost more synchronized, more coupled. Could you, could you use that uh, interchangeably? And would there be a state where the heart and the brain look this coherent or something like that?

Speaker A: You can Also have the idea of coupling. So those are coherence analysis. And then yes, you, you look at if they are coupled or uncoupled. So they do that for example with heart components and alpha waves in the brain. And you can also look at analysis of couple connectivity where you look at if the brain is informing the heart or the other. So you can look at both? Yes. And I think it's more common for them to be uncoupled um, than coupled. So when you're coupled it, when the brain and the heart is coupled it's more related to deep relaxation or absorption than functioning day to day functioning.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's what I would have predicted. But it's interesting, I don't think that the most people would know that. And you recently moved to uh, Olaf Blanque's lab. So for those of the people that don't know, that's the lab that spent I think well decades now studying the bodily basis of the self. Um, so what will you be doing there?

Speaker A: So there I uh, will have a project on um, meditation in the context of virtual reality. So I will have two projects. One on self compassion meditation in virtual reality where it's in a room with cameras. So in, in the virtual reality you can see yourself as yourself. So the clothes that you have on that day because it's based on the images of the camera. And for example we can investigate uh, meditation related to self compassion where you see yourself in front of you in VR as another person because when you move your right arm you are also in front of you moving the right arm. So it's not a mirror self but it's an um, older person self we call it in VR. So I'm going to investigate heartbeat evoked potential and brain changes related to those. And we have also another project on the, on nature of mind meditation. So where participants are going to go on each retreat. I think the first one is one week and then it goes up to three year retreat and we're going to look at brain differences related to the retreat and they're going to do the um, a measure that was developed by Olaf Blanque, that is the full body illusion. It's I don't know if you've heard of the rubber hand illusion. I'm not exactly sure how exactly they did that where they tricked the brain in thinking that the rubber hand was their own hand. But they had an experiment where they were stroking the rubber hand and the participant's hand at the same time. And this tricked the brain into thinking that the Rubber hand was their own brain. And so in Olaf Blenka's team they do this with the full body illusion. So in VR you see your own body as a third person perspective this time. So you see more your backside in VR and then they take a stick and they stroke your back. So you see because of the camera as you see it in front of you and they do uh, sync condition and asic conditions so stroking and you see it at the same time that it's exactly the same stroking or async conditions of this more of a control condition where there is a small delay and people get a sense that their, their body is located there and they have a, a drift in self location and that is the illusion. So they're going to do this uh, we are going to do this measure as well in advanced meditation. And the idea is that advanced or long term meditators get less tricked with those types of measures than non meditators. We'll see.

Speaker C: What do you think that uh, those, those studies, what, what do they suggest about the self?

Speaker A: Well this is the, actually the investigation of the team where they're trying to understand the self and where the minimal self. So uh, this, the self, when you move away from all experiences, what, what, what are you left with? So where this minimal self is located. So then they look at self identification changes under experimental conditions and self location changes for example under experimental condition. And the scientific idea is that in the self you have the cognitive self, so autobiographical memory, I was born on that day, I lived there, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have a more experiential bodily self, uh, where it's the self that is stored in your body and with experimental manipulation you can manipulate it. And they're trying to find and see changes related to those uh, manipulation.

Speaker C: Do you or did they have a running hypothesis?

Speaker A: They're very exploratory. So for example, they want to see for example in stages of non dual awareness. And that's why we have another project in VR where we want uh, to try to get meditators quicker to a stage of non dual awareness. When you're on this where you feel as if you're one with everything, do you still get a sense of self in your body and where is it located? So in the team historically they were mostly interested in heartbeat evoke potential. So this is also similar to brain heart connectivity but on another aspect where it's more related to interoception. So it's the brain computation of oh my, I just got a heartbeat the heartbeat evil potential. So they're looking at those changes related to changes of self identification or ourselves.

Speaker C: So it's very within the, the headset. What would you be doing to explore like non dual awareness or.

Speaker A: Okay, so I'm just in the, in the time where we're actually implementing the virtual reality sequences. So because the population that we're going to test are long term meditators, we're actually deeply thinking about that and we want to destabilize them a bit and shift a bit their mental constructs. Uh, so we're doing remodulations for example at the beginning. So they're in their embodied self where it's first person perspective in VR. Well when you look down you see exactly yourself and there's no changes. Then we get them out of their body so third person perspective. And they see themselves exactly how they are seated on that specific room. Then we get back into the body for example, and so this time they're in first person perspective but they're inverted. So if they move the right arm, it's the, what they're seeing in VR is that this, it's the left arm that's moving. So there is a conflict between what they're doing and the visual stimuli. So we're breaking a bit the mental patterns of being used to being in your own body. And then um, they can also have for example themselves inverted in VR and then themselves as another person in VR. At the same time we can also play with multiplic multiplicity in VR. So yes, we're trying to, to destabilize the mental contracts related to embodiment. The sense of embodiment coupled uh, with the virtual reality and with the virtual reality would be a meditative script where the guide um, is asking questions related to their sense of ownership of their body or the body location. When they have two bodies in VR. Uh, which body do you feel being yours? Is it the one that is inverted in front of you? Is it the one in front of you or is it the one that you see on first person perspective inverted? So stuff like that.

Speaker C: I was wondering in my mind like how you could possibly do it with VR. But that's a really good idea. Just knowing what some of the like non dual pointing out exercises might entail. That's like, that feels like it might. Because the, the visual um, like system is so dominant for most people, I think.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: So to bring that in, particularly if somebody maybe has difficulty with just doing it themselves internally, I think it's such a good idea yes.

Speaker A: And even for meditators it's interesting to have a mismatch between what you're doing and the visual stimuli. So they put uh, expert meditator, long term meditator and when it was flipped in third person, he was moving his right hand very slowly and looking at left hand move in VR for a long time. So you can even meditate on those conflicts for a long time. VR is very interesting to use in those contexts.

Speaker C: My next question is just where do you think that the field of contemplative neuroscience is heading in the next like five to ten years?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, that's a great question. Um, I think we're going to see more and more correlates of different stages of advanced meditation and get a better idea of what they mean for consciousness. It's a very tricky question. So, so I don't know if we're going to have, especially in only five or ten years, clear, uh, answers to consciousness and consciousness questions. But yes, I think it's going towards a, ah, deeper understanding of what advanced meditation means in the brain and the body. But I wouldn't know where.

Speaker C: Yeah, we're, we're at such an inflection point in general, particularly with AI and societal changes and it's terrifying and extremely exciting

Speaker A: understanding of our experience as humans or existence. I don't know.

Speaker C: Let's hope so. And, and for someone that's listening and is wondering, maybe they have a mental health challenge and they're wondering about meditation and VR, uh, or something else, what would you say is the right entry point? Do you have any advice for them?

Speaker A: I would say that they should try what works for them. It could be an application. It could be, yes, it could be a VR headset. They have some applications in VR headsets or uh, going on walks. You can also meditate, being outside, walking, yoga, uh, and it's okay if one particular thing doesn't work. You can try other things. You can try it for some time to see if you have changes after a specific time. Because sometimes it can take a bit of getting used to the practice to see the effects, or sometimes you don't see the effects but they're actually happening. And um, it's okay to try different things. It's okay to have some time define before finding, uh, what works. And this is actually the same in psychotherapy. You have wide ranges of different, uh, psychotherapies and uh, applications. And it's okay to try some and take a bit of time before finding one that actually work for you. And if it doesn't you can always switch. It's okay. I know that's a big thing. It's, uh. Not everyone is the same, so it takes a time to find something that really works for you. For example, if you don't like sitting around, meditation might be very hard for you, and that's fine. You can try yoga, for example, and you can even try active types of yoga, such as vinyasa. Word. It's exercise.

Speaker C: I massively agree. And I. I love. One of my teachers gave me the advice that the practice that you should be doing is the one that you enjoy and that you'll come back and do. I think it's do it important. If you're not gonna. If you're not gonna do it and you can't find enjoyment in it, then it might be difficult to practice. You do. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Keep going with your work. I think it's fascinating and really, really important. And yeah, we wish you the best of the luck.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me here. It was a pleasure to be here, especially as a young researcher. It's so nice.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for listening to the episode. If you enjoyed it, please, if you could give us a like a subscribe and hit the notification bell, that would really help us out. Or just share this episode with a friend. Share the course with a friend. Anything would go such a long way. Thank you so much and I hope to see you soon.