The biological correlates of meditation. For instance, the biological approach to meditation has expanded our understanding of this contemplative experience in terms of changes in cardiovascular system (e.g., heart rate, redistribution of blood flow, blood pressure and hypertension), activity of the brain and nervous system (e.g., alpha, theta, and beta brain wave activity, EEG hemispheric synchronization and dehabituation, specific cortical control), blood chemistry (e.g., adrenal and thyroid hormones, amnino acids and phenylalanine, plasma prolactic and growth hormone, lactate, white blood cell count and red blood cell metabolism, cholesterol levels), metabolic and respiration systems, muscle tension, skin resistance, and other physiological effects (e.g., brain metabolism, salivary changes, effectiveness in the treatment of disease such as cancer, body temperature, alleviation of pain). Using the biological approach we now know that advanced meditators show pronounced changes in brain wave patterns (high amplitude theta and delta waves, hemisphere synchronization).
Correlations mistaken for cause-and-effect. Many neuroscientists unfortunately take this key discovery (“All transpersonal experiences can be related to the activity of the brain and nervous system”) to its extreme (“All transpersonal experiences are caused by and result from the activity of the brain and nervous system”) and commit a category mistake by claiming that transcendent or spiritual experiences have no substantial reality on their own, but are nothing other than cognitive representations or emergent processes of neurobiological activity which alone are real (LeDoux, 2003; Damasio, 1994).
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The Environmental Perspective
The environmental perspective focuses on the external conditions and social circumstances assumed to act on individuals and condition their behavior, and relates all transpersonal events to perceptible environmental stimuli and behavioral responses. “The behavioral [environmental] perspective focuses on observable stimuli and responses and regards nearly all behavior as a result of conditioning and reinforcement” (Smith et al., 2003, p. 11). Learning is important in transcendental experience and the basic forms of learning known as associative conditioning (classical and operant) are emphasized in this perspective.
Examples of transpersonal research using the environmental approach. The environmental approach has been applied to the study of automatic writing, the placebo effect, hypnotic behavior, biofeedback training, out-of-body experiences, extrasensory perception, mystical experience, and other unusual, exceptional human experiences (Neher, 1990; Zusne & Jones, 1982).
It will help to understand the relevance of classical and operant learning to transcendental psychology if we show how ecstatic feelings, for example, can be brought about through both kinds of learning. First of all, we inherit the capacity to respond joyfully to certain stimuli, such as being cuddled and played with as a child. Then, years, later, some stimulus that was associated with those occasions (a melody, an odor, a photograph) evokes their memory in us. Through the mechanism of classical conditioning, this stimulus will reactivate in us the joyful feelings we experienced as a child. In fact, because of the numerous experiences this stimulus may have come to represent, our feeling may be even stronger than it was as a child; as a consequence, adults may be more able than children to experience profound ecstatic feelings. Much nostalgia probably arises from classical associations of this kind. (Neher, 1990, p. 58)
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The environmental approach to meditation. The environmental approach to meditation attempts to understand this contemplative experience in terms of habituation and dishabituation to stimuli, and the conditioning of mental and physical processes to stimuli present during meditation (Shapiro & Zifferblatt, 1976; Carrington, 1977).
First of all, meditation helps free us from learned fixations such as stereotyped ways of perceiving and obsessional thinking. In addition, the process of meditation conditions us in new ways. For example, one effect of meditation often reported is the learned ability to relax in the face of problems that previously provoked anxiety. Also, it is well known that meditation is a cumulative process and that practiced meditators achieve profound meditative states more easily than novices. This is largely a conditioning effect. With each meditation session, meditators classically condition themselves so that the stimuli present during meditation – the place, the posture, the focus of meditation, and so on – are increasingly effective in producing the meditative state. In addition, this conditioning of mental and physical processes is rewarding – or reinforcing in operant conditioning terms – to meditators; thus they are likely to devote themselves even more to meditation. Finally, most schools of meditation directly or indirectly offer suggestions about what psychological states meditators might experience during meditation, and these suggestions serve as additional conditioning to help produce these states. All in all, the effects of meditation truly would be minimal without the conditioning that occurs during the meditation process. (Neher, 1990, pp. 58-59)
The psychology of transcendence from an environmental perspective. Andrew Neher’s 1990 book The Psychology of Transcendence is an excellent example of the consistent application of the environmental approach to the investigation of various exceptional human experiences and behavior. It provides a comprehensive survey of how classical and operant conditioning principles and social structures, systems, and practices may play a role in shaping and influencing the manifestation of certain aspects of transpersonal experiences and behavior.
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Correlations mistaken for cause-and-effect. The environmental approach has made a valuable contribution to our understanding the environmental and social correlates of transcendent or spiritual experiences and behaviors, especially the role of learning, conditioning processes, social situations and influences. When the key idea of the environmental approach (“All psychological events can be related to observable environmental stimuli, social situations and behavioral responses”) is taken to its extreme (“All psychological events are caused by and result from conditioning and reinforcement”), however, then subjective experiences become reduced to its exterior ecological correlates. As Smith et al., (2003) note, “Historically, the strict behavioral [environmental] approach did not consider the individual’s mental processes at all, and even contemporary behaviorists usually do not conjecture about the mental processes that intervene between stimulus and the response” (p. 11).
“Empty organism” of radical behaviorism. B.F.Skinner (1904-1990), whose “empty organism approach” emphasized the idea that the motivating force of all behavior comes from the environment, the external world, not from forces within ourselves, declared that the human organism, like any machine, behaves in lawful and predictable ways in response to external stimuli that impinge upon it (Skinner, 1953).
The hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the application of the scientific method to the study of human behavior. The free inner man who is held responsible for the behavior of the external biological organism is only a prescientific substitute for the kinds of causes which are discovered in the course of a scientific analysis. …Science insists that action is initiated by forces impinging upon the individual, and that [freedom] is only another name for the behavior for which we have not yet found a cause. (quoted in Harman, 1998, p. 26)
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