From Subject to Scientist: A Developmental Path for Contemplatives in Consciousness Research

Slide 1 — Title

My name is Nicholas Matiasz. I’m the Scientific Program Director at the Center for Contemplative Research in Crestone, Colorado, and this talk is joint work with Alan Wallace.

Slide 2 — The asymmetry

Like other fields within science, contemplative science looks for instances in which multiple lines of evidence converge. For example, if first-person data and third-person data agree, this agreement across two lines of evidence is often more persuasive than replication within either one.

Now consider how the research projects within contemplative science are actually staffed. In most studies, the contemplative supplies the first-person data. It’s now common to refer to the contemplative as a “participant,” but they’re typically participating in only a very narrow sense of that term. It’s more realistic to use the term “subject,” in that the contemplative rarely informs the study’s conceptual framework, writes the protocol, selects the measures, or interprets the results.

So in many if not most studies of meditation, the only people with advanced contemplative training may be the subjects being measured. Contemplative training qualifies a person to be a subject, not to design or interpret the study.

Slide 3 — Four problems

This current arrangement invites at least four problems:

• The first problem is that scientists equivocate in their use of the term “meditation.” In a single paper, some authors treat meditation as both (a) an object of investigation (the phenomenon being investigated) and (b) a method of investigation (the empirical strategy by which we gather observations to be analyzed and interpreted).
• The second problem is that a team of researchers who lack advanced contemplative training have no reliable way to distinguish subjects’ genuine contemplative attainment from inflated or erroneous self-reports.
• The third problem is that established contemplative knowledge may be restated using contemporary scientific terminology and reported as new scientific discoveries.
• The fourth problem is that scientists may not experience significant pressure to question the assumptions they uncritically absorbed during their training.

I’ll say a bit more about the first problem: treating meditation as both the phenomenon under investigation (something characterized from the outside), and as an empirical tool (a method for investigating consciousness from the inside).

Note that these two framings assign epistemic authority to different people:

• if meditation is an object of investigation, the scientist holds the authority, and the contemplative’s reports are data for the scientist to explain, often by relating them to behavioral and physiological correlates; and
• if meditation is a method of investigation, the contemplative should hold some authority as a true research participant, because a trained contemplative may discover something about the mind through meditation alone, and the contemplative may be better placed than the scientist to interpret that discovery.

Both framings involve the collection of first-person reports. But they differ in whether a report can be a genuine finding about the mind. Scientists without contemplative training can collect first-person reports, but they may not be able to intersubjectively verify whether a report is a genuine first-person discovery about the mind, because doing so would likely require at least the same level of training as that of the contemplative who made the report.  Scientists without this training can carry out only the “object” framing, even when their work relies on the “method” framing. Scientists equivocate between these two framings when they cite contemplatives’ discoveries to establish that a mental state exists, and then give contemplatives no part in interpreting the data. This is why contemplative expertise (both theoretical and experiential) is needed among the scientists, not only among the subjects.

Slide 4 — Four phases

How does a contemplative fulfill the role of a scientist? We’re proposing a developmental path with four phases, in which the contemplative’s role evolves from that of a subject — or “participant” in today’s parlance — to researcher–participant, then to Co-Principal Investigator, and finally to Principal Investigator.

1. In phase one, the contemplatives are just subjects. Their training is what qualifies them to be measured, but this training plays no part when the measurements are interpreted by scientists.
2. Phase two is known as “researcher–participant” though for the reasons I shared, “researcher–subject” may be a more accurate term. The same person occupies two roles: providing data for the study and participating in the analysis and interpretation of data. For example, contemplatives may serve as subjects by providing third-person EEG data for scientists to analyze, while also providing first-person journal entries that they help analyze. 
3. In phase three, contemplatives join the study leadership to serve as Co-Principal Investigators. They help frame the research questions, design the protocol, and interpret the findings. Any equivocation between the object and method framings that I described can be identified and corrected while the study is being designed.
4. In phase four, the contemplative serves as the principal investigator. The contemplative directs the work, and researchers and participants alike may be drawn from the contemplative and scientific communities.

Slide 5 — Recommendation

Our recommendation is therefore to develop training pathways to bring contemplatives to phase four, much as doctoral and postdoctoral training prepares a neuroscientist to direct a lab.

Advanced contemplative training is of course an essential requirement of this sort of training. But the practical work also includes the creation and IRB approval of new protocols designed to have contemplatives fill these various roles.

What remains to be specified are the methodological competencies, mentorship arrangements, and publication norms that each transition will require.

We think this work is critical because the evidential convergence between first-person and third-person methods will remain mostly one-sided for as long as only one side is granted epistemic authority.