PsyCh journal
March 1, 2019
Sylvie Droit-Volet, Michael Dambrun
72 citations
People often describe time as passing quickly or slowly. This article examines how judgments of time passage relate to judgments of physical durations, including during meditation when consciousness is altered. The authors distinguish between the "self-time perspective," "self-duration" (internal duration), and "world-duration" (external duration). They link self-time perspective to the narrative self and self-duration to the minimal self, a connection supported by qualitative analysis of testimonials from four meditators. Awareness of self-duration is tied to awareness of the embodied self; when bodily consciousness decreases, the subjective experience of internal time changes. The mechanisms by which the sense of self disappears and one feels outside time during meditation remain unclear.
Mindfulness
May 1, 2020
Adam W Hanley, Michael Dambrun, Eric L Garland
66 citations
Five sessions of mindfulness training, compared with an active listening control, led healthy young adults to report a decreased sense of body boundary dissolution and a more allocentric (less self-centered) spatial frame of reference. The effect on spatial frame of reference was mediated by the reduction in perceived body boundaries. The findings suggest that even brief mindfulness practice can shift the experience of self, relaxing the boundary between self and environment and extending the spatial frame of reference beyond the physical body.
PeerJ
January 1, 2020
Sylvie Droit-Volet, Sophie Monceau, Michael Dambrun et al.
17 citations
People who experienced an out-of-body illusion in virtual reality judged time intervals as longer when they felt a stronger sense of body ownership over a mannequin. Participants viewed a mannequin's arm as if it were their own while receiving synchronous or asynchronous strokes on their actual body. After synchronous stroking, they felt touches on the mannequin more intensely and estimated the interval between two touches as longer. The more pronounced the out-of-body experience, the greater the time distortion. These results suggest that awareness of the body-self is important for time perception, supporting the theory of embodied time.
Psychological reports
April 26, 2024
Pierre De Oliveira, Catherine Juneau, Céline Stinus et al.
11 citations
A two-stage study examined how metacognitive processes of decentering—meta-awareness, (dis)identification with internal experiences, and (non)reactivity to thought content—relate to self-transcendence experiences in daily life, including self-transcendent emotions, flow proneness, and an interconnected identity. The first stage validated the French version of the Metacognitive Processes of Decentering Scale (MPoD-t) with 374 participants. The second stage, with 294 participants, found that meta-awareness mediated the link between meditative practice and self-transcendent emotions or flow, while (dis)identification with internal experiences mediated the link between practice and an interconnected identity.