Chapter 5

DISCUSSION

5.0 Introduction

This chapter focuses on the discussion of the methodology and results from the perspective of the research questions. The implications of the results together with the limitations of the study will also be discussed. The chapter will conclude with possible future research directions.

5.1 Discussion of the Methodology

Empirical research on the subject of consciousness is still in its infancy, primarily because it is only now that adequate methodologies are starting to be utilised to explore the subject. Researchers have only just begun to take advantage of cognitive science, clinical neuropsychology, and the development of a neuroscience methodology, including electroencephalographic and functional brain imaging techniques, to explore human consciousness (Pawlik, 1998). Consequently research undertaken on this subject will still inevitably find difficulties in formulating a satisfactory methodology.

In this dissertation this difficulty was perhaps even more pronounced since the aspect of consciousness being focused upon, has traditionally pertained more to religious literature than to empiricism. Mystical consciousness is still linked to the esoteric, and standardised tests to explore its effects on higher cognitive functions have, as far as has been ascertained, not been created. The mystical experience itself, cannot be forcibly induced nor maintained over lengths of time, making its possible study with imaging techniques slim. Baars' (1988), whose Global Workspace (GW) theory of consciousness is very influential, does not even mention the mystical state. However he highlights the concept of attention which is also pivotal to mysticism.

Therefore, the research has focused on studying the particular conditions necessary for a mystical experience to occur, that is, focused attention, from the perspective of two disciplines, meditation and contemporary theatre, which correspond to the trophotropic and ergotropic pathways to mysticism. The effect of training in meditation and contemporary theatre was then explored through standardised tests, which measure higher cognitive functions, notably working memory. The strength of such a methodology is its simplicity since the meditators and actors could be compared with matched controls on their performance on the standardised tests. Its simplicity, however, is also its major limitation.

Training in meditation and contemporary theatre, even for prolonged periods of time and over a number of years, does not necessarily make the practitioners experience mystical consciousness any more often than control participants do. Deikman (1966) has specified that mystical states can occur suddenly in all individuals even without prior training. The rationale behind the methodology, however, was that there is a greater probability, though not a certainty, that trained individuals, like meditators and contemporary actors, experience the mystical state more frequently.

Similarly, results produced by the participants on the CANTAB tests cannot necessarily be attributed to having experienced mystical states, but can be linked to having undergone particular exercises which have the potential of inducing a mystical experience. The methodology of this research does not differentiate whether any possible effects on working memory were due to the training in attention through meditation or contemporary theatre, or to having experienced mystical states. Nevertheless, since both meditation and contemporary theatre seem to have the potential of inducing the mystical experience, the methodology employed could still shed light on the possible effects of mystical consciousness and attention exercises on higher cognitive functions, particularly on Baars' (1988) working memory stage in his Global Workspace theory.

The actual results produced on the CANTAB tests by meditators, contemporary actors and their controls will now be discussed.

5.2 Discussion of Results and their Possible Implications

There were few significant differences on the performance of specific CANTAB tests amongst the actors, meditators and their controls. A discussion of the results produced on each of the tests is presented.

There were no significant differences amongst the meditators, actors and controls on any of the measures in this test. However there were particular patterns in their performance which deserve to be highlighted.

Primarily, all groups of participants arrived at a lower stage than that expected from the CANTAB norms. This finding is interesting because it could well be showing a weakness in the test itself, since even though the CANTAB is supposedly culture-fair, there seemed to be a bias against the Maltese population on the IED. There also seemed to be differences amongst the performances of the participant groups. Although not statistically significant, meditators reached a higher stage on the IED than their controls. They even did better than the actors, who arrived at a similar stage to their controls, although at a higher stage than the meditators' controls. This pattern was most noticeable from the standard scores, which take into consideration important differences like age amongst the participants. Meditators and their matched control group, were on average ten years older than the actors and their controls, falling on the second age band on the CANTAB norms, between 35 and 49, when the younger groups' participants were all within the under-35 age bracket.

Therefore it is surprising that meditators did better in this test than the much younger actors and actors' controls, especially when their age counterparts, did worse than the younger groups, as expected. Consequently, it might be suggested that whilst meditators' controls scored lower than the younger groups because of the normal weakening of cognitive functions due to older age, in meditators, this cognitive deterioration seems to be less marked. Stoltzfus, Hasher and Zacks' (1996) findings that older adults find it more difficult to inhibit irrelevant thoughts and distractions could support this pattern. In the IED, which is an exercise of attention and dis-attention, meditators' controls were probably more distracted as predicted by Stoltzfus, Hasher and Zacks (1996).

Nevertheless meditators still did as many errors as their controls in the IED. The standard scores' graph showed a distinct, though not significant, difference between the number of errors made by the older groups and the errors registered by the younger groups. The actors' controls made most of their errors at ED-shift, when their task was to shift attention to the previously irrelevant dimension. Actors seemed to find less trouble with this task, perhaps because their training in being attentive to their surroundings gave them an added advantage.

Actors also made fewer errors up to ED shift, when the task was to shift their attention between two similar stimuli. Interestingly the meditators made most errors in these preliminary stages of the test. Perhaps the meditators' training in keeping fixed attention on a single object hindered them from shifting their attention at first, but gradually they learnt to attend and dis-attend according to the task at hand, improving their performance, ultimately reaching the highest stages in the IED.

This was another attention test, requiring the participants to focus on three distinct number series and press a button when they appeared. Once again there were no significant differences amongst the groups' performance on this test. Actors' controls showed a higher probability of hit than any of the other groups, but meditators scored higher than the actors did, and the meditators' controls scored lowest. The previous suggestions regarding the possible beneficial effects of meditation in old age seem to be relevant again.

It is interesting that the actors, though they also train in attention exercises, did not manage to score better than their controls. Two reasons could be suggested for this:

• Contemporary theatre does not produce cognitive effects as marked as meditation does. This could be either because training in contemporary theatre relies less on attention than meditation does, or because as d'Aquili and Newberg (1993a) have suggested, ergotropic, or physically engaging attention exercises induce a mystical experience with more difficulty than trophotropic exercises like meditation do.

• Alternatively, it could also be suggested that the positive effects of attention exercises, be they ergotropic or trophotropic, only appear after long years of training and at an older age, when the practitioner would otherwise experience a slight loss in cognitive functions.

Unfortunately, since the actors were much younger than the meditators and less experienced in their training, these possible reasons cannot be explored adequately from the results available.

In this test which explored the cognitive functions of attention and working memory capacity, it was interesting to note that there was a significant difference between the performance of meditators and their controls. Whilst actors, meditators and actors' controls resolved the test by undergoing a similar number of trials, meditators' controls had to do significantly more trials. On the standard scores, whilst actors and their controls scored within the average norm for their age, meditators scored significantly higher than their controls and higher than the average norm for their age. This finding strengthens the suggestion that attention exercises like meditation produce beneficial effects on higher cognitive functions, which become more significant later on in life when they counterbalance the loss of cognitive functions due to old age.

Meditators' controls also had a greater average amount of errors than any of the other groups. Once again a significant difference was evident between the meditators' and their controls' performance, both on the paired t-test and in a one-way ANOVA. Standard scores showed that meditators did better than the actors group and the actors' control group.

The fact that significant results were found on the PAL, rather than the other tests is also highly interesting, since the PAL tests for working memory capacity. Consequently, this could suggest that attention exercises like meditation have an effect specifically on working memory capacity. This is significant because Baars (1988) highlighted working memory as the stage over which the spotlight of attention roams, in his Global Workspace theory of consciousness. Indeed from this finding it can be suggested that training this attention mechanism, can produce a strengthening of working memory capacity especially in old age, when it would otherwise deteriorate.

This test explores the capacity of spatial working memory and planning. No significant results were obtained from this test. Actors, however, did markedly better than all the other groups, making the least errors in solving the tasks, although from the standard scores it was revealed that interestingly enough, it was the meditators' controls who did best, closely followed by the meditators.

The reason for this was that meditators' controls had the best strategy score throughout. Interestingly, meditators had the lowest strategy score, closely followed by the actors. The difference between the meditators' and their controls' was almost significant. This is an interesting pattern since Stoltzfus, Hasher and Zacks (1996) suggest that older adults compensate for their lowered working memory capacity by planning more accurately their actions. This is a rational, and consequently, a left-brain task. The practice of meditation, however, has been shown to sharpen more intuition (Wulff, 1997), and d'Aquili and Newberg (1993a) have shown that trophotropic arousal, induced by practices like meditation, relies more on right-brain functioning. Perhaps, meditators were relying more on their intuitive functions during this task, thus failing to create an adequate strategy leading to a lot of errors.

Actors however, who also had a poor strategy, still managed to make few errors. This might be because their training, which is focused on the movements which the body creates in space, sharpens their capacity to note spatial relations, which is another right-brain function (Cytowic, 1995). It could be suggested that actors were chunking the boxes on the screen just as expert chess players have been shown to chunk the pieces on a chess-board (de Groot, 1965). This has a similar effect to increasing working memory capacity but only in the practitioner's particular area of expertise.

Consequently, from the results achieved from the CANTAB tests the following points could be summarised:

• Attention exercises seem to produce a positive effect on working memory capacity and its attention mechanism as hypothesised by Engle, Kane and Tuholski (in press), especially by limiting the deterioration of cognitive functions in old age. This effect was shown by meditators, but it is not clear whether contemporary theatre could have produced a similar effect had the actors been older and with more experience in their training.

• Contemporary theatre, as an exercise in spatial relations and attention, seems to strengthen the capacity for chunking spatial components. The capacity for chunking increases in activities were the practitioners are especially competent (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).

At this point it is important to discuss whether the amount and quality of training had any effect on the results produced.

Although there were no correlations between the total amount of hours of actors' training and meditation with the performance on any of the CANTAB tests, it is important to highlight particular differences between the two forms of attention exercises:

• The actors' training is mostly physical and consequently the form of attention employed in it involves being completely involved with the task at hand. Since the task is continuously changing, attention is consequently continually changing, although the change is limited to the particular task. In meditation, however the object of attention is fixed throughout, since all stimuli, including movement and sensations are excluded from consciousness. This is the main reason why d'Aquili and Newberg (1993a) suggest that a mystical experience can be more easily induced through a trophotropic rather than an ergotropic pathway. Since in this research meditators seemed, on the whole, to perform better than the actors, it could suggest that the meditators' performance is related to the higher probability that meditation has of inducing a mystical experience.

• Mean total training hours in meditators was 6075.729, whilst that of the actors was just 1135.333. This wide difference is due to the fact that meditators, on average, had been practising for more than eight years, whilst most actors had only trained for two years. Moreover meditators practice for seven hours weekly, whilst actors only train six hours a week. This is because meditators have a more consistent pattern of meditation with two daily thirty minute slots, whilst actors train three times weekly for two hours each time. This quantitative difference could also have produced the patterns described above. Indeed it could be argued that meditators tended to do better than actors because they have been training for more years and their training is more consistent. Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) suggest that the most effective activity for skill acquisition is consistent and sustained training. It could also be argued that, since meditators have been training longer than the actors, they have had more opportunity to experience mystical states of consciousness, which could be producing the positive effects on meditators' cognitive functions.

• Nevertheless, as has been already noted, meditators were, on average, ten years younger than the actors were. This fact should have contributed to make the actors perform better than the meditators on most tests. Therefore it does seem important that, although the results were not significant, meditators still managed to perform as well - and sometimes even better - than the actors and their controls. This pattern may be worth pursuing in view of its potential practical implications for old people who experience a decreased efficiency in working memory. Regular meditation from early adulthood could perhaps prove beneficial to slow down this cognitive degeneration. Since meditation is practised sitting down, it can be maintained even if the elderly becomes less physically able.

In conclusion it seems that although there were no significant results, meditation seems to be a better attention exercise than contemporary theatre, and can effect higher cognitive functions, especially working memory, better than contemporary theatre.

5.3 Limitations of the Study

In this section some limitations of the study will be explored.

Although the CANTAB is a sensitive battery for measuring higher cognitive functions, it also has a number of limitations:

• It tests only the visuo-spatial modality of working memory, excluding the phonological. Since the visuo-spatial modality was expected to be well developed in actors whose art reflects the use of the body in space, there could have been a bias in their favour. However, Engle, Kane and Tuholski (in press) argue that since working memory capacity is a measure of attention, the modality as such would not make a difference.

• Although the tests are user-friendly not all participants felt equally comfortable using a mouse. There could have been some bias against the older participants who generally felt less at ease with a computer.

Small sample size was a main limitation of the study, which could have biased the possibility of a clearer pattern of relationships between meditation and contemporary theatre and higher cognitive functions. Also, extraneous variables such as individual and environmental variation have a stronger bias on a small sample.

Another limitation is that the actors and meditators were not matched on the important variable of age. Having two matched control groups tried to eliminate this bias. However possible patterns of relationships between meditation and contemporary theatre and their possible effects at different ages on higher cognitive functions, could not be explored adequately.

The sample was not matched on IQ, since it was not deemed feasible to test the participants on the NART when most of them were not native English speakers. Engle, Kane and Tuholski (in press), however, argue that differences in psychometric intelligence reflect differences in controlled attention capabilities, which are in turn similar to differences in working memory capacity. Consequently it would have sharpened the research to match the participants on IQ. Instead they were matched on their level of education, which was taken as a rough measure of possible psychometric intelligence.

A possible limitation lies in the choice of participants. Although the particular practitioners' groups chosen in this dissertation satisfied the criteria for trophotropic and ergotropic arousal which can lead to a mystical experience, they were not necessarily the best disciplines which could have shown possible effects on higher cognitive functions. Even the participants who accepted to participate in the study were not necessarily the best representatives of their own disciplines. Moreover the quality of the actors' attention in their training and the meditators' proficiency to maintain focused attention could not be assessed.

Therefore a core limitation is that the inclusion criterion was quantitative rather than qualitative, with the underlying assumption that with more training, there would be more possibilities to experience mystical states and improve the capacity to maintain focused attention. It should also be noted that the distribution of training hours for both actors and meditators was markedly skewed, since a few participants in both experimental groups were much more experienced than the rest. Consequently, because of this skewness, statistical significance on the performance of the tests was more difficult to extract.

It should also be noted that there is the possibility that any positive effects on higher cognitive functions from meditation and contemporary theatre could be limited only to the same particular area of expertise (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). This could be particularly true for actors whose discipline entails learning particular motor skills. However Conway and Engle (1996) argue that the correlation between measures of working memory capacity and higher cognitive tasks is not a result of skill in the specific tasks but rather of controlled attention, which represents an abiding characteristic of the individual.

Finally the main criticism which can be directed to this work is that it dealt with concepts which are wide and difficult to define. All constructs mentioned in this dissertation, consciousness, mystical experience, working memory, attention, even the disciplines of meditation and contemporary theatre, are abstract and consequently their working definition had to be restricted to reflect the objectives of this dissertation.

Perhaps the work can be repeated by focusing first on an in-depth theoretical presentation of the possible common elements between these different constructs. A group of neophytes could then be chosen randomly, be tested on the CANTAB and interviewed on their possible experience of mystical consciousness. Later, they could be trained in meditation or contemporary theatre and after a number of years of regular practice, be tested again on the CANTAB tests and interviewed on the frequency with which they now experienced mystical states. This long-term research, with a pre-test post-test methodology, could be repeated with various disciplines which could fulfil the requisites of attention in trophotropic and ergotropic arousal. Obviously such a research was beyond the scope of this dissertation and consequently could not be undertaken.

In the following section, further research directions will be suggested.

5.4 Research Directions

• Notwithstanding the growth in popularity of consciousness studies, there is still much scope to explore and create new and exciting theories of human consciousness. Although such studies are already being pursued by scholars of various disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience, cognitive psychology to computer science, greater interdisciplinarity should be encouraged. This is especially true for the study of mystical consciousness where the need is still felt for greater co-operation between psychologists and theologians, science and religion. This route has started to be pursued, slowly but decisively, with the publication of various specialised journals (e.g. Sharpe & Bryant, 1990-) and books (e.g. Austin, 1998).

• Similarly, closer theoretical links need to be established between art and religion. Psychoanalytic theorists like Pruyser (1983) have suggested that art and religion tap into similar states of consciousness through which creativity and inspiration can flow. Such a theoretical endeavour could strive to further explore human creativity and to tap into the cognitive benefits it could provide.

• This dissertation has also explored the possibility that attention exercises like meditation could limit extensive deterioration of higher cognitive functions, like working memory in old age. Further research into this area could be relevant in view of the increasing number of patients suffering from senile dementia as our life expectancy rises. The possibility of enhancing higher cognitive functions could also be explored with recovered substance abusers who show deterioration in cognitive functions like attention and working memory.

• The mystical experience has been compared to psychotic states which are common in schizophrenia (Lukoff, 1985). Further research into the mystical states could shed more light on the aetiology of schizophrenia in the brain.

• Finally, as Conway and Engle (1996) have suggested, studies into attention mechanisms are deeply related to psychometric intelligence. This could be an exciting area of research whose implications are very wide.

5.5 Conclusion

The study of consciousness offers new and exciting opportunities to study some of the intrinsic qualities which make us human. Mystical consciousness touches remarkable depths into the human person: that which has traditionally been described as spirit, soul, psyche. Consequently, any research into these subjects will necessarily enlighten our knowledge about ourselves and urge us to look into our being with awe, wonder and respect.

This study however, has perhaps dared to go a step further. Not just to stand in awe at the way the mystical experience marks the human person, but to actually pinpoint towards some of these 'marks' in our cognitive framework and attempt to analyse them empirically. Studying mystical consciousness within the realm of cognitive psychology, bridging the mystical experience to the cognitive processes of attention and working memory was, in my opinion, an enticing effort to analyse and translate into working terms, the richly experiential and intuitively known, but which had as yet defied words and logic.

Above all, the aim was to offer a space of synthesis, where the empirical and experiential, could be brought together to be explored and scrutinised on a common workspace, such that both would be enriched with the encounter with the other. My desire is that this dissertation might be held as another small step towards the current resurgence in this post-modern era, where all forms of knowledge, ancient and modern, rational and intuitive, are being brought back together and viewed holistically.

Finally, this work was but a humble attempt, pursued with eagerness and enthusiasm, to glimpse at the drama of daily life: a drama which inspires our attention, permeates the theatre of consciousness, and gives birth to that timeless performance... our Staged Present.