William & Mary is home to an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative practice. Bringing together faculty from Religious Studies, Psychological Sciences, Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Applied Science, the project combines humanistic, social-scientific, and neuroscientific approaches to investigate contemplation from multiple perspectives. The research began with support from an Interdisciplinary Research Innovation Fund grant from the William & Mary Office of the Provost.
What is meditation? What do people hope to gain from contemplative practice? How do culture, personality, spirituality, and prior experience shape what happens when we meditate? And how do the subjective experiences reported by meditators relate to measurable changes in the brain?
Rather than treating meditation and mindfulness simply as standardized techniques whose effects can be measured in isolation, our research asks how contemplative practices are shaped by the people who practice them and by the cultural worlds in which they acquire meaning. Our approach combines humanistic inquiry into the religious, philosophical, and cultural histories of contemplation with psychological research, qualitative and quantitative methods, and neuroscientific investigation.
The project began with a large survey of 877 W&M students and community participants, examining understandings of meditation and mindfulness alongside contemplative experience, personality, spirituality and religiosity, psychological characteristics, cultural orientations, and motivations for practice. Subsequent experimental research brought experienced meditators into W&M’s EEG laboratory, where participants practiced their customary forms of meditation while researchers measured brain activity and collected detailed reports of their subjective experiences.
Together, these studies investigate contemplation simultaneously as a cultural practice, subjective experience, psychological process, and neurophysiological phenomenon—an approach that exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary inquiry at the center of Contemplative Studies at William & Mary.
Research Team
The project was initiated by an interdisciplinary team of William & Mary faculty:
Adrian J. Bravo — Psychological Sciences
Patton Burchett — Religious Studies
Christopher A. Del Negro — Applied Science
Cheryl L. Dickter — Psychological Sciences & Neuroscience
Matthew Haug — Philosophy
Mark McLaughlin — Religious Studies
Kevin Vose — Religious Studies
Numerous students have also contributed to the research, assisting with data collection for the survey studies, running the EEG lab portion of the study, and assisting with (and becoming co-authors of) publications.
Publications and Current Research
“Definitions of Meditation Among Lay People: A Mixed Method Examination Considering the Roles of Meditation Experience, Religion, and Spirituality”
Adrian J. Bravo, Patton Burchett, Kevin Vose, Matthew Haug, Mark McLaughlin & Cheryl L. Dickter. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2025).
What people mean by “meditation” turns out to vary considerably. Analyzing participants’ own definitions, the study identified seven recurring ways of understanding meditation and found significant differences associated with prior meditation experience and religious and spiritual self-identification.
“Mapping a Culture of Mindfulness: Lay Conceptions of Mindfulness and Why They Matter”
Patton Burchett, Adrian J. Bravo, Mark McLaughlin, Kevin Vose, Matthew Haug & Cheryl L. Dickter. Mindfulness 17 (2026): 2423–2437.
Comparing experienced meditators with people who had no contemplative experience, this study found that understandings of mindfulness differ with experience and reflect distinctive cultural assumptions. The findings challenge the idea that contemporary American mindfulness is simply a culturally neutral or universal practice.
“Neural Activity during Meditation among Experienced Meditators: Associations with State and Trait Measures”
Cheryl L. Dickter, Adriana Lopez, Folly Folivi, Matthew Haug, Kevin Vose, Patton Burchett, Mark McLaughlin, and Adrian J. Bravo.
Forthcoming in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.
This study connects the subjective experience of meditation with its neural correlates. Experienced meditators practiced their customary forms of meditation while EEG recorded brain activity. Experiences of mental quieting and transcendence were associated with changes in gamma activity, while mindfulness and absorption traits were also associated with patterns of neural activity. The study additionally used an interdisciplinary measure developed by the research team to investigate dimensions of contemplative experience often overlooked by standard psychological measures.