Embodied mind between education and cognitive sciences: bodily consciousness and meditation training

The new approach in which both pedagogy and cognitive neuroscience converge is rapidly growing in these years and shows us how it is possible to conduct applied research on many topics: language, emotion, consciousness, action, learning, identity, intersubjectivity, and rehabilitation. In particular, I want to explore how this new approach could operate on a specific theme, that is body consciousness and meditation practice. The main purpose is to analyze the effects of meditation practice on the bodily consciousness (first-person perspective, proprioception, emotions recognition) and on the bodily self. The core questions are: What are the effects of meditation on students and in particular on the constitution of the bodily consciousness and bodily identity? What is the development of first-person perspective in the recognition of mental and physical states? What effects are there on the differentiation between body image, body schema, proprioception, interoception, and esteroception? This is a presentation of a theoretical position and of some recent and current researches which use mixed methods (qualitative and experimental) to study new paths for the old body/mind problem from an educational point of view.