Self, Me and I in the repertoire of spontaneously occurring altered states of Selfhood: eight neurophenomenological case study reports

By “the background mechanisms of consciousness” we consider, following Revonsuo (2006), the “immediately lower-level [in relation to consciousness] entities [at the level of brain organization] on which consciousness as a whole is ontologically dependent, meaning that consciousness could not exist without them to be present” (Fingelkurts et al. 2013; p. 14). However, phenomenologically only contents are experienced and not the content-formation process itself (background mechanisms of consciousness), so called “phenomenal transparency” (Metzinger 2003; 2014).

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that ordinary visual illusions do not count as evidence for an ASC, even though they also misrepresent reality, because they are not temporary or reversible: particular types of stimuli invariably elicit illusions (Revonsuo 2006). Further, momentarily fleeting misperceptions due to noisy signal are obviously not an ASC either. The same goes for the neuropsychopathology: during such disorders, the alterations of self-consciousness have a long-term or permanent presence (Parnas et al. 2005; Beck 2008) and therefore such disorders do not count as evidence of ASC (Revonsuo 2006), even though they may share similar mechanisms (Dittrich 1998). Therefore, pragmatically, ASCs are the nonpathological states (Kokoszka 1999).

It is important to keep in mind that meditation and related contemplative practices, by themselves, do not represent altered states of consciousness, but rather facilitate them (Newberg and Yaden 2018).

In the neurophenomenological research paradigm, the ability to become aware of lived experience is considered a special skill, that requires a certain way of reflection toward the one’s own subjective experience, and that it can and should be trained and learned (Froese et al. 2011). This is why subjects in such studies are usually phenomenologically trained (Thompson et al. 2005). This training is rather effortful and time-consuming. At the same time, experienced, long-term meditation practitioners have been repeatedly proposed as subjects suitable for such inquiry, because due to their long-term practice they already acquired the needed skill (“pre-trained”) that enables the systematic gathering of reliable phenomenological reports (Varela et al. 1991; Varela and Shear 1999; Bitbol 2019; Kordeš et al. 2019; Berkovich-Ohana et al. 2020).

The other names found in literature are “minimal self” (Gallagher 2000; Gallagher 2005), “proto-self” (Panksepp 2005; Panksepp and Northoff 2009), or “bodily self” (Damasio 1999; Legrand 2006; Blanke 2012).

In the literature other terms have been used: “narrative self” (Gallagher 2000), “conceptual self” (Neisser 1988; Demiray and Bluck 2011), “autonoetic self” (Gardiner 2001; Klein 2016), or “autobiographical self” (Damasio 1999, 2010).

Case studies have been crucially important in shaping the psychophysiology science since its initiation (Zhou et al. 2016; Pöppel et al. 2013). Further, a case study approach is frequently utilized to investigate meditation-induced alterations in the subjective experience (see, for example, Lehmann et al. 2001; Engström and Söderfeldt 2010; Hagerty et al. 2013; Ataria 2015; Modestino 2016; Berkovich-Ohana 2017).

Subjects felt as if the experience ‘comes to them’. They did not purposely make the experience happen.

This sequence was repeated 3 times for 3 target mental states (“Self”, “Me” and “I”) with 2 variant each (Up- and Down-regulation), thus resulting in 108 trials for 6 participants.

The questionnaires were used to facilitate (confirm or correct) the interpretations across the different types of data (see also Gallagher et al. 2015).

This strategy guarantees a sufficient trustworthiness of reports (Windt 2013) and also minimizes reliance on episodic recall inference, misremembering or confabulation (Jack and Roepstorff 2002; Windt 2013).

The exact meditation technique routinely used by these participants was not important, because during an experiment the participants were instructed to voluntary reach particular pre-defined mental states (see Fingelkurts et al. 2020) instead of practicing a specific meditation. So, they did not meditate in the traditional sense of the practice (Nash and Newberg 2013).

We used a mixed visual analogue scale (VAS; Costa et al. 2016) with discrete scale, where VAS was complimented with temporal markers in seconds and minutes to help the participants to locate time-period of ASoS. One may argue that such post-hoc ASoS timing may be imprecise. While this is certainly a possibility, it is an established fact that the ability to accurately detect the temporal order of events is a stable human trait (Grabot and van Wassenhove 2017). Further, the temporal accuracy is higher for new, unusual or remarkable events that appear within a given time period (James 1890; Block and Zakay 1997), which was exactly the case in the present study. Taking these observations together, one can have trust in the reliability of the temporal stamps for the ASoSs. Moreover, the fact that participants of the present study were experienced mediators adds additional assurance that the ASoSs timing was assessed reliably, since long-term experienced meditators are known for having enhanced skill to provide detailed and accurate first-person descriptions of their experiences (Lutz et al. 2007; Fox et al. 2012; Berkovich-Ohana et al. 2013; Dor-Ziderman et al. 2013; Ataria et al. 2015). It is also important to note that meditation and related practices, by themselves, do not represent ASCs, but rather facilitate them (Newberg and Yaden 2018).

A brief note has to be made here: it is sometimes claimed that EEG analysis performed at the sensor level is prone to volume conduction and it may present an obstacle in interpreting EEG data in terms of brain functional connectivity. The operational synchrony measure used in the current study has been specifically tested through previous modelling experiments to address this issue. These tests show that operational synchrony values are sensitive to morpho-functional organization of the cortex as opposed to volume conduction, EEG signal power, and/or choice of the reference electrode (for further details, we refer the reader to Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts 2008, 2015).

The usefulness and advantage of such an approach was illustrated in the seminal work of Lutz (2002) and Lutz et al. (2002), which received much attention (Gallagher 2003b; Bayne 2004; Overgaard 2004).

Within each of these phenomenological ASoSs there were patterns of subjective variability that uniquely characterize and distinguish distinct types of ASoSs.

Indeed, it has been argued, that in normal conditions, bodily proprioceptive and interoceptive processing, due to their constant presence, ground a basic sense of self, anchoring it in a body-centered spatial frame of reference (Metzinger 2004, 2008), thus making a tight link between self and one’s own body (Damasio 1999; Craig 2002; Seth 2013; Tsakiris 2017). It is also thought, that such dependence likely evolved evolutionary to help organisms maintain homeostasis (Herbert and Pollatos 2012; Craig 2013; Damasio and Carvalho 2013), thus intimately connected to self-regulation and eventually self-awareness (Seth 2013; Farb et al. 2015). Interpedently, the interoceptive dysregulation was systematically reported in relation to many “self-involved” disorders, including dissociative disorders (Michal et al. 2014; Sedeño et al. 2014), post-traumatic stress disorder (Wald and Taylor 2008; Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts 2018), affective disorders and depression (Paulus and Stein 2010; Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts 2017a), somatoform disorders (Schaefer et al. 2012), and addiction (Naqvi and Bechara 2010).

This and further reports of the ASoSs of the current study are admittedly concrete and without fine-grained and often esoteric or mystic phenomenological descriptions typical for the Advaita and Tibetan Buddhist traditions (Rgyal-ba-g'yung-drung et al. 2017; Rinpoche and Namgyal 2011). This is so because participants were encouraged to suspend their own beliefs, metaphysical interpretations and theoretical background assumptions while describing their experiences during ASoSs, thus avoiding the so-called “theory contamination” (see also Nash and Newberg 2013).

The feeling as an extensionless point in space was often reported during various bodiless states (Kjellgren et al. 2008; Berkovich-Ohana et al. 2013; Ataria et al. 2015; Windt 2010; Wittmann 2015).

This is in line with the observations done by Blanke and Metzinger (2009) and also Fingelkurts et al (2020) that bodily agency while a causally enabling, is not a constitutive condition, for phenomenal self.

Interestingly, functional disintegration of the posterior parts of the SRN was previously reported to be associated with decreased mental time travel (Speth et al. 2016), while strong SRN functional connectivity at rest was related to increased tendency for mental time travel (Godwin et al. 2017; Karapanagiotidis et al. 2017).

Such a proposition is compatible with the notion of “temporal thickness” (Friston 2018; Limanowski and Friston 2018), according to which a brain continuously predicts future states by embodying the tonic alertness within a certain temporal span with simultaneous creation of counterfactual depth—representation of possible future states of knowledge (Friston 2018).

One potentially interesting direction for future research is to use hypnosis as an instrumental means to produce—in controlled manner—an OBE—(or near-death-experience [NDE]) like phenomenology while monitoring the EEG. For some examples of such studies, see Palmieri et al. 2014; Facco et al. 2019; Martial et al. 2019.

Disembodiment is normally characterized by a loss of the geometrical self-location, which is the experience of oneself as located within one’s body that serves as a spatial (embodied) frame of reference (Metzinger 2013; see also Fingelkurts et al. 2020).

This experience is quite similar to the episodes of clear, effortless mindfulness with distant perception of the physical body and the environment with an entirely quiet mind (as for example in Vedic, Buddhist and Chinese traditions; Travis and Shear 2010; Ataria et al. 2015; Finnigan 2018).

In philosophy of mind, de se thoughts are referred to thoughts that involve the first-person concept and are naturally expressed using the first-person pronoun (García-Carpintero 2015). There is a spectrum of de se thoughts. For example, one may explicitly reflect on one’s personality traits or one’s life trajectory (so called narrative selfhood) or just has thoughts that include more mundane instances of mind-wandering about the current ongoing experience that is happening to oneself.

Curiously, and in agreement with the current results, the main neurophysiological correlate of the DIED is a decreased functional integrity of the SRN (Carhart-Harris et al. 2016), which is also reflected in the increased entropic brain activity (Lebedev et al. 2016) as well as increase in the neurophysiological signal diversity (Schartner et al. 2017).

Such a possibility is discussed in detail by Millière et al. (2018; pp. 6–7): “There are at least two ways in which narrative self-consciousness may be disrupted. First, the rate of occurrence of self-referential thought and mental time travel may be dramatically reduced, or altogether suppressed, during a certain time interval. […] While the temporary cessation of self-referential thoughts is one way in which narrative self-consciousness may be altered, it may also be disrupted by a total loss of access to autobiographical memories and self-related beliefs. […] However, the experience of losing access to these memories and beliefs might differ from the mere cessation of de se thought from a phenomenological point of view”.

Lack of body ownership causing the moments of OBE was also reported before during meditation practice (Ataria 2015).

Indeed, the subjective sense of effort presupposes some level of intentionality (Posner and Rothbart 1998) and is sufficient to form at least a minimal sense of ownership and agency (Millière and Metzinger 2020; Metzinger 2020; see also Ataria et al. 2015).

The use of the word “approached” here is done on purpose. It stresses the point that the participant did not in fact reach this state of “pure awareness”. If that state were to occur, then the complete absence of all phenomenological content would render the participant incapable of reporting such an episode. This is because during these episodes the self-referential mechanisms of forming an event in the subject’s inner life narrative would be suspended (Metzinger 2020). Therefore, the subjective experience during the full-fledged “pure awareness” ASS could not be reported, only the process of entering into it or of emerging out of it can.

This, could be conceptualized as a longer time production (indexed by a slower rate of functioning of the internal timer), subjectively experienced as if the time seems to be moving slower or stopped (Glicksohn 2001; Wittmann 2013; Berkovich-Ohana and Wittmann 2017).