ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
Losing Ourselves: Active Inference, Depersonalization, and Meditation.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 83 citations in OpenAlex.
- A cross-sectional survey on depersonalization/derealization and meditation-induced alterations of the self.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Computational spirits: a neuroscientific account of psychedelic entity encounters.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- The experiential self state as affective salience: a dual-self states framework for consciousness and self-transcendence.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Decoding the Self: Single-Trial Prediction of Self-Boundary Meditation States From Magnetoencephalography Recordings.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Towards an active inference account of deep meditative deconstruction.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Modulation of sensory attenuation by intensive meditation practice: an active inference perspective.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Health-related quality of life related to diabetes multisensory deficits and derealization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Experienced meditators show greater forward traveling cortical alpha wave strengths.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Temporal depth in a coherent self and in depersonalization: theoretical model.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- On the varieties of conscious experiences: Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics (ALBUS).Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- When the interoceptive and conceptual clash: The case of oppositional phenomenal self-modelling in Tourette syndrome.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- On Predictive Planning and Counterfactual Learning in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Examining the association between depersonalisation traits and the bodily self in waking and dreaming.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Arousal coherence, uncertainty, and well-being: an active inference account.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Review
- Digital Being: social media and the predictive mind.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Touching and being touched: where knowing and feeling meet.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- AI ethics in computational psychiatry: From the neuroscience of consciousness to the ethics of consciousness.Behavioural brain research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of selfhood underpin both pathological and "enlightened" states of consciousness. People suffering from depersonalization can experience the loss of a sense of self as devastating, often accompanied by intense feelings of alienation, fear, and hopelessness. However, for meditative contemplatives from various traditions, "selfless" experiences are highly sought after, being associated with enduring peace and joy. Little is understood about how these contrasting dysphoric and euphoric experiences should be conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a unified account of these selfless experiences within the active inference framework. Building on our recent active inference research, we propose an account of the experiences of selfhood as emerging from a temporally deep generative model. We go on to develop a view of the self as playing a central role in structuring ordinary experience by "tuning" agents to the counterfactually rich possibilities for action. Finally, we explore how depersonalization may result from an inferred loss of allostatic control and contrast this phenomenology with selfless experiences reported by meditation practitioners. We will show how, by beginning with a conception of self-modeling within an active inference framework, we have available to us a new way of conceptualizing the striking experiential similarities and important differences between these selfless experiences within a unifying theoretical framework. We will explore the implications for understanding and treating dissociative disorders, as well as elucidate both the therapeutic potential, and possible dangers, of meditation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.