Episode 29: Flow States and Meta Awareness
Episode 29 of M3CS’s Contemplative Science Podcast saw Dr David Vago come on to the show to talk about meta-awareness as demonstrated in meditation, flow states and our daily lives.
For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
How meta-awareness means we have a secondary interpretation of our experience.
Flow states: the basal ganglia, feelings of awe and brain-body-environment dynamics.
How Hindu and Buddhist perspectives on self (and no self) relate to meta-awareness.
Dr David Vago is a Research Associate Professor at Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Research Associate at Harvard Medical School. Currently a Fellow at Mind and Life Institute, he is a renowned researcher in the field, serial meditator, and one of Dr Mark Miller’s personal research heroes!
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
Meta-awareness is awareness of awareness.
”In the most fundamental way, you can say that it's the old homunculus argument: who is doing the watching? It's the watcher that's inside of our bodies, our minds, our brains... that is able to observe the processes that are happening not only inside our mind as we think and do, but what's happening around us. And not only have that insight into what's happening around us and inside of us, but how do we relate to those things? How do we switch between things that are competing for our attention and stay focused?”
David references the work of Benjamin Libet and Evan Thompson to explore our understanding of awareness and the self...
”And if you look at Benjamin Libet's work, he was basically trying to experiment with the timing of sensory experience and awareness. And what he basically concluded was that our awareness is always about 500 milliseconds behind where the experience truly was. So everything that we experience in awareness is really just a construction of what happened in the past.”
The height of human experience is feeling connection.
”If you think about the experience of non-duality or just being in non-propositional or non-conceptual awareness, there is an experience of unity. An experience of oneness. It's the ultimate experience to feel connected to everything.”
