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199
S. Schmidt and H. Walach (eds.), Meditation – Neuroscientifi c Approaches
and Philosophical Implications, Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality 2,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_11, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
Abstract Many personal reports from experienced meditators exist on how subjective
time slows down in meditation practice as well as in everyday life. However, hardly
any empirical work exists regarding this exceptional experience. In this theoretical
chapter we discuss cognitive and neural models of time perception. We aim at showing
how the subjective passage of time and duration are modifi ed by functional states of
mindfulness, i.e. by attention regulation, body awareness and emotion regulation.
The ability of expert mindfulness meditators to focus more strongly on sensory
experiences and to be more strongly aware of feelings and of body states leads to a
slowing down of time in the present moment. Moreover, as a consequence of more
effi cient attention regulation capacities, memory formation is enhanced which in
Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience
of Time
Marc Wittmann and Stefan Schmidt
M. Wittmann (*)
Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health , Wilhelmstr. 3a ,
Freiburg 79098 , Germany
e-mail: wittmann@igpp.de
S. Schmidt
Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy , University Medical
Center Freiburg , Hauptstr. 8 , Freiburg 79104 , Germany
Institute for Transcultural Health Studies, European University Viadrina ,
Frankfurt (Oder) , Germany
e-mail: stefan.schmidt@uniklinik-freiburg.de
Walking is very calming. One step after another,
one foot moving into the future and one in the past.
Did you ever think about this? It’s like our bodies are
caught in the middle. The hard part is staying in the
present. Really being here.
Janet Cardiff (
2005 , p. 75)
200
retrospect leads to a subjective lengthening of past duration. Empirical studies
concerning time perception in meditation practitioners would help to understand
meditative states and at the same time would foster knowledge on cognitive- emotional
as well as neural processes underlying the experience of time.
Introduction
In experienced meditators conscious awareness is altered during meditation while
attention is being focused on the experience of the present moment. Essentially, mind-
fulness meditation is understood as bringing awareness to each moment in time. Being
mindful entails attending to sensory experiences in the outside world, thoughts,
emotions and body sensations by curiously observing them with a warm- hearted
attitude of openness and acceptance (Kabat-Zinn 2005 ). One aspect that is noticed
by individuals during mindfulness meditation as well as by experienced meditators
in everyday experience is that subjective time slows down considerably – in the
present moment as well as experienced for longer periods of time (see the chapter
“The ‘sense’ of time passing” in Kabat-Zinn 2005 ).
In phenomenological analyses of subjective time by Edmund Husserl, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty or William James the dual experience of temporality is prominently
discussed as encompassing (1) the sense of a present, the feeling of nowness and (2) the
feeling of a fl ow of time leading to the experience of duration (Wittmann 2009a ).
On the one hand, we perceive the unity of the present, a fundamental temporal
window of consciousness that defi nes our sense of an extended now . On the other
hand, we experience the passage of time, best described by a stream or fl ow. The
fl ow constitutes itself as an event which is anticipated, then experienced, and later
remembered, and by this way generating a sense of duration. The sense of the
present moment and of the fl ow of time constitutes our experience of temporality
as complementary phenomena. Whereas there are indications that the subjective
present might be expanded in experienced meditators (Carter et al. 2005 ; Sauer et al.
2012a ), systematic studies on the passage of time and of subjective duration have
hardly been undertaken so far (but see Chihara 1989 ). In the following passages we
will concentrate mainly on this second aspect of temporality, on the perception of
the passage of time leading to the feeling of duration, although the two aspects of
temporality – the sense of the present moment and the feeling of the fl ow of time –
are intertwined phenomena.
However essential the dimension of time is for human experience, by viewing
the research literature on time perception it becomes clear that no consensus exists
on how humans experience the passage of time; many different psychological and
neurophysiological models exist (Wittmann and van Wassenhove 2009 ). Therefore,
we address the issue of time perception in meditation practice for two reasons: For one,
a better understanding of the phenomenon that time slows down for meditators – both
during meditation and in everyday experience – could lead to a better understanding
of the meditation practice itself. Second, knowledge about this phenomenon could
M. Wittmann and S. Schmidt
201
foster the understanding of how we as humans perceive time. The two aspects
underlie the motivation for this theoretical account of bringing together research
on time perception and on the effects of meditation practice. In the following
paragraphs, essential features of mindfulness meditation will be highlighted. It will
be shown how these characteristics are decisive for changes in the subjective
experience of time in meditators.
Functional Characteristics of Mindfulness Meditation as
Modulators of Subjective Time
At least four functional aspects encompass the state of mindfulness, as summarized
by Hölzel et al. ( 2011 ), namely attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regu-
lation, and changes in the perspective of the self. As will be shown, these aspects
are also dominantly involved in modulating and generating our experience of time.
Therefore, a discussion on the relationship between meditative states and time
perception will be grouped according to these domains.
1. Attention regulation
The state of meditation can be described as deliberately and continuously focusing
attention on the present moment and some authors even take attention regulation as
one of the defi ning features of meditation and mindfulness (Bishop et al. 2004 ;
Shapiro 1982 ). One way of learning attention regulation is to keep the focus of attention
on a single object, e.g. the breath, by observing the breathing in and breathing out.
The ability to focus attention on an object continuously encompasses the disregard
of distractors such as upcoming thoughts and sensations for an extended period of
time. In experimental studies experienced meditators indeed perform with higher
accuracy and speed in many components of attention such as focused attention,
sustained attention and alertness as assessed with computerized attention tests.
That is, regular meditation practice enhances the ability of attention regulation in
everyday non-meditative states (e.g., Chan and Woollacott 2007 ; Jha et al. 2007 ;
Lutz et al. 2009 ; MacLean et al. 2010 ; Valentine and Sweet 1999 ; van den Hurk
et al. 2010 ; van Leeuwen et al. 2009 ; Zeidan et al. 2010 ). This ability of meditators
to maintain focused attention over time is assumed to lead to an increased awareness
of external and internal processes and events. Thus, mindfulness practice leads to a
stronger awareness of sensory experience in the here and now as well as to an
increased ability of sustained attention (Brown and Ryan 2003 ; Sauer et al. 2012b ).
In phenomenological analyses, consciousness is understood as an island of
presence in the continuous fl ow of time (Husserl 1928 ). In more mechanistic terms,
mental presence is based on working memory function integrating perceived events
over time to form a unifi ed experience (Wittmann 2011 ). Since meditation practice
leads to an increased awareness of sensory and mental experience through heightened
attentional capacities, this ability will also infl uence memory formation because
there are fewer slips of attention and distractions from the focus of attention.
Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience of Time
202
Interestingly, the ancient Pali word for mindfulness sati has also the meaning of
‘to remember’ (Analayo 2004 ), and this is interpreted by the fact that full attention
to the present moment will facilitate memory function. As has indeed been shown,
working memory capacity is enhanced in individuals who regularly meditate;
meditators recall more learned items after a certain time span during which distractor
items are interfering (Jha et al. 2010 ; Zeidan et al. 2010 ). These attention and memory
effects of meditative practice have consequences for subjective time.
Two fundamental perspectives in time perception can be discerned: prospective
and retrospective estimates of duration (Zakay and Block 1997 ). In prospective time
experiments participants have to judge the duration of an interval they are presently
experiencing. They direct more or less attention to the passage of time while a par-
ticular duration has to be judged. If more attention is directed to time during an explicit
duration estimation task, duration is experienced as being comparatively longer than
when attention is distracted from time. The time spent waiting for a bus (when one
strongly attends to the passage of time) feels much longer than the same time interval
chatting with a friend (when being distracted from time). Studies show how an
increased working memory capacity and greater attention regulation abilities are asso-
ciated with greater accuracy in many different temporal judgment tasks (Brown 1997 ;
Pütz et al. 2012 ; Ulbrich et al. 2007 , 2009 ). That is, the ability of attention regulation in
mindfulness meditators is the key factor for explaining performance accuracy in
explicit time estimation tasks in the seconds-to-minutes range – similar to meditation
effects on general perceptual discrimination accuracy (MacLean et al. 2010 ).
In retrospective time, an observer estimates a time span that has already elapsed.
In this case, subjective duration is reconstructed from memory. That is, retrospective
duration depends on the amount of experienced contextual changes stored in memory.
The more experienced changes have been stored, the longer an interval is judged to
have lasted (Bailey and Areni 2006 ; Zakay and Block 2004 ). This relation between
memory storage and the estimation of duration holds for retrospectively judged
intervals in the seconds-to-minutes range related to working memory. But it is also
assumed to hold for long-term episodic memory where the amount of changes during
a life span is linked to the judgment of duration, i.e. how fast the last 10 years passed
(Wittmann and Lehnhoff 2005 ). Since individuals trained in mindfulness meditation
techniques are more strongly aware of sensory events and they process and store
more items in working memory, their retrospective judgement of past duration
will likely lead to the impression of longer duration and a slowing down of subjective
time. Being more strongly aware of what is happening now causes more experi-
enced changes to be stored in memory which in turn leads to a relative expansion of
retrospective duration.
2. Body awareness
The body is the vehicle or frame of reference for sensory and mental experience.
Many meditation techniques therefore incorporate instructions to focus on body
sensations. Attention is for example directed to the breathing process or to specifi c
body parts (such as in the “body scan”). Although not many studies exist in which
body awareness skills in meditators were objectively tested, experienced practitioners
M. Wittmann and S. Schmidt
203
report having a greater awareness of their body states (for an overview of empirical
fi ndings, see Hölzel et al. 2011 ).
Neuroimaging studies suggest that, among other regions, the insular cortex is
modulated through mindfulness meditation practice. The insula is the primary
receptive area for visceral input and for monitoring physiological states of the body
(Craig 2002 ). In two studies, experienced meditators, as compared to controls,
showed greater gray matter concentration (Hölzel et al. 2008 ) and greater cortical
thickness (Lazar et al. 2005 ) in the right anterior insula. In another study, the instruction
to concentrate on respiratory sensations lead to a greater increase in neural activa-
tion in the posterior insula in trained meditators as compared to control subjects
(Farb et al. 2012 ). Moreover, experienced meditators, who generated a loving-
kindness- compassion meditation state, showed neural activation in the right anterior
insula that was related to the degree of successfully entering the meditative state
( Lutz et al. 2008 ). Mindfulness practice can also be seen as training of interoceptive
awareness, and is thus related to changes in brain regions representing and integrating
body states.
The insular cortex, which integrates body signals over time, has in recent
conceptualizations been suggested to form the anatomical and functional basis for
the creation of the sense of time and of awareness in general (Craig 2009a ; Wittmann
2009b ). In his model, Craig ( 2002 , 2009b ) assumes that body signals received in the
dorsal posterior insula are processed and integrated in a posterior-to-anterior
progression, this progressive integration culminating in the anterior insula, when
brain activation becomes associated with the conscious awareness of bodily feelings.
Subjective feelings depend upon bodily signals, as visceral and somatosensory
feedback from the peripheral nervous system is integrated with contextual, i.e.
perceptual, motivational, social and cognitive information leading to the awareness
of complex feeling states (Damasio 1999 ; Craig 2009b ). A unifi ed meta-representation
of homeostatic feelings is built in the anterior insula which generates an experience
of the self at one moment. A succession of these meta-representations across time
would provide the continuity of subjective awareness, a series of elementary
emotional moments. Important for our context here, the experience of time would
be created by successive moments of self-realization (Craig 2009a ). The sense of
time thereafter would be related to the temporal integration of signals from the
interoceptive system.
In fact, the insular cortex has repeatedly been shown to be activated in neuroim-
aging studies of time perception (for a meta-analysis, see Wiener et al. 2010 ).
The insula might specifi cally be implicated in the feeling of the passage of time of
several seconds duration: in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) study using temporal intervals of 9 and 18 s, activation in the dorsal posterior
insular cortex was linked to the temporal encoding of these intervals: neural activation
in this region increased with increasing interval length and peaked at the end of
the interval (Wittmann et al. 2010 , 2011 ). When these intervals had to be reproduced
as indicated by a button press, a similar linear increase of activation was seen in the
anterior insula as well as regions of the frontal cortex which peaked shortly before
the actual button press. In line with the model by Craig (
2009a ), it was suggested
Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience of Time
204
that this accumulator-like activity represented the integration of body signals over
time that was used to represent duration.
The conjecture that interoception might be at the base of time perception is
supported by a psychophysiological study showing a positive relationship between
time estimation accuracy and the slope of cardiac slowing during the perception of
temporal intervals with durations between 8 and 20 s (Meissner and Wittmann 2011 ).
This study is probably the fi rst observation of a direct association between changes
in heart rate, a measure of the autonomic body function, and the accuracy in interval
timing. That is, changes in cardiac activity, as registered in the brain, might be used as
a measure for subjective duration. Moreover, also conscious awareness of the own
heart beat as assessed with the heartbeat perception test (Pollatos et al. 2005 ) was
related to time perception accuracy. That is, individuals who are more sensitive to
their heart beat, i.e. who more accurately count the number of heart beats for a given
interval, were also more accurate in time estimation (Meissner and Wittmann 2011 ).
This summary of fi ndings implies a clear hypothesis related to meditators who
are trained to be aware of their body processes. First of all, if the sense of time is so
strongly related to the awareness of body processes, then the focus on subjective
time will inevitably lead to a slowing down of the passage of time in meditators who
are more aware of their body processes. Two factors of meditation procedures are
dispositional for becoming aware of the fl ow of time, possibly through body
awareness. The instruction to focus on the present moment is inherently time
related. The meditator deliberately guides his or her awareness to the temporality of
experience. One could even say, during meditation the sense of time passing is
heightened, extremely so especially for beginners who often experience time as
passing much too slowly, sometimes provoking inner restlessness and boredom.
Moreover, the rhythmical nature of breathing and the heart beat constitutes a bodily
meter that refers to the passing of time. In fact, the breathing cycle of a relaxed state
with a period of approximately 3 s corresponds to the duration of an experienced
moment in the fl ow of time (Wittmann 2011 , 2012 ). Moreover, there are some tasks
in meditation which explicitly direct present moment attention to bodily signals,
i.e. performing the so-called body scan in mindfulness meditation, or full bodily
attention in a wide-focused mindfulness state. In this sense meditation is a state of
body awareness in the present moment. Understanding the state of being mindful
will lead to an understanding of the sense of time as embodied experience.
3. Emotion regulation
Mindfulness meditation enhances emotional well-being. Healthy individuals
who meditate regularly report fewer negative mood states, fewer ruminative thoughts
as well as more positive states of mind (Jain et al. 2007 ; Jha et al. 2010 ). In clinical
settings, structured group programs of mindfulness-based stress reduction reduce
negative affect in patients with physical, psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders
(Fjorback and Walach 2012 ; Grossman et al. 2004 ; Piet and Hougaard 2011 ) and the
same can be seen in non-clinical populations (Sedlmeier et al. 2012 ). Experiential
openness and acceptance of thoughts and feelings in mindfulness meditation, in
essence, means that upcoming mood states are in the focus of attention, even when
M. Wittmann and S. Schmidt
205
negative emotions are experienced (Hölzel et al. 2011 ). Mindfulness practitioners
expose themselves to their affective experiences in a non-reactive manner and thus
learn to cope with their mood states. Sustained attention to these states leads to a
situation of exposure, which in turn and over time may lead to the decrease or even
extinction of an emotional reaction. However, emotion regulation in this sense does
not necessarily imply a down-regulation of emotion but a greater awareness of
mood states and an increased ability of emotional control while experiencing these
states. Indeed, one of the mechanisms of mindfulness seems to be the reduction of
avoidance behavior (Sauer et al. 2011 ). An individual learns to accept his or her
automatic emotional reactions and thus not to enhance them by aversion or attraction.
As a consequence, higher levels of positive affect can be experienced (Ekman et al.
2005 ; Jha et al. 2010 ).
The sense of time is intimately linked to affective states. In periods of severe
mental distress such as in depression or anxiety the passage of time slows down
considerably and time intervals are overestimated (Bschor et al. 2004 ; Wittmann
et al. 2006 ). In everyday life, boredom is the prototypical mood state in which time
passes too slowly. The feeling of an existential vacuum directs attention to time
since no meaningful distraction is experienced which in turn leads to a (painful)
feeling that subjective time slows down. Moreover, in experimental settings,
subjects overestimate the duration of emotional stimuli which last several hundred
milliseconds to a few seconds, bodily arousal, attention, and sentience being
discussed for explaining these effects of time experience (Droit-Volet and Gil 2009 ;
Schirmer 2011 ; Wittmann 2009b ). Specifi cally, it is assumed that increased physi-
ological arousal leads to a faster speed of an internal pacemaker underlying time
perception (Gil and Droit-Volet 2012 ). A faster speed of such an internal clock
would lead to the accumulation of more pulses emitted by a hypothetical pacemaker
operating in the seconds range (Zakay and Block 1997 ). There is ample evidence of
an overestimation of duration in the sub- and supra-second range of mostly negative
emotional stimuli which is related to higher physiological arousal. However, also
the presentation of positive emotional stimuli, associated with higher physiological
arousal, can lead to a relative overestimation of duration as compared to neutral
stimuli (Lambrechts et al. 2011 ).
By trying to integrate the aforementioned fi ndings on the relationship between
emotion and time perception, a tentative hypothesis would be that experts in meditation
practice who experience a positive emotional tone and who are more sensitive to
their upcoming mood states, while attending to the temporal aspects of perception,
will feel a general slowing of the pace of time. A stronger awareness of emotional
states is related to an increase in accumulated pulses of an assumed pacemaker-
accumulator and thus would lead to a relative prolongation of subjective time. In
addition, also a retrospective account of time perception can explain why time slows
down for experienced meditators. A stronger attentional focus on present experience
coupled with a positive emotional tone will lead to an enhanced encoding of events.
This in turn results in more items collected in memory. When looking back in time
more memories can be retrieved which amounts to a relative prolongation of a perceived
time span as opposed to a situation where less memorable events are retrieved.
Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience of Time
206
Summary
Contemporary philosophical conceptions of the self which take into account fi ndings
from the neurosciences and psychology have a striking resemblance to Buddhist
teachings concerning the perception of a self (Hölzel et al. 2011 ). The programmatic
title of the book Being no one . The self-model theory of subjectivity (Metzinger
2004 ) summarizes the notion that there is no static self as a permanent entity or
substance, but that ongoing mental processes are engaged in producing a transient
model of the self. On a basic level, the bodily self, as created by the continuous
visceral and proprioceptive input from the body, is the functional anchor of phenomenal
experience (Damasio 2003 ). According to the model proposed by Craig ( 2009a , b )
integration processes of body signals culminating in the anterior insula as meta-
representations of successive emotional moments are associated with the experience
of an embodied and extended self in time. Importantly, phenomenological concep-
tualizations have put forward the idea that subjective time emerges through the
existence of the self across time as embodied entity (Kiverstein 2009 ; Zahavi 2005 ).
Mindfulness meditation is the enhanced awareness of the present moment and this
psychological state is associated with brain areas involved in processing of the
bodily self (Farb et al. 2007 ).
In mindfulness meditation a practitioner focuses on the experience of the embodied
self at the present moment. Being mindful in everyday life is equivalent to being
conscious of one’s body states and feelings, of oneself at this particular moment in
time. Because the feeling of time is created through attending to the embodied self
at the present moment, being exceptionally mindful slows down the passage of time.
Moreover, subjective time slows down in retrospect because greater awareness of
one’s experiences leads to enriched memory contents, which in turn expands sub-
jective duration. An increased focus on an experienced self at the present moment
slows down the subjective passage of time – now and in retrospect.
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