Table 1.
Psychophysical and cortical measures of tactile sensitivity throughout the body.
Figure 1.
Subjective sensitivity scale used for self-reported sensitivity of 20 body regions after BSM session.
Figure 2.
Line diagrams used in the Subjective Sensory Sensitivity questionnaire.
Participants provided a rating (on a scale of 1–9; Fig. 1) of the relative, subjective sensitivity of each region during their meditation experience. The 20 regions were simply numbered from top to bottom and front to back of the body; this pattern of numbering bore no relation to the rankings of objective sensitivity measures with which subjective reports were compared. All body regions listed in Table 1.
Table 2.
Average correlations with each objective measure for MED-Expert and MED-Novice meditators.
Table 3.
Average correlations with each objective measure for BSM-Expert and BSM-Novice meditators.
Table 4.
Introspective Accuracy compared between groups of Experts and Novices.
Table 5.
Introspective accuracy as predicted by various measures of meditation expertise.
Figure 3.
Introspective accuracy (individual correlations between subjective sensitivity reports and adjusted area of primary somatosensory cortex [A] and 2-point discrimination threshold [B]) as a function of overall meditation experience.
Filled data points indicate practitioners whose introspective accuracy correlations were significant at the individual level (p<.05, one-tailed).