No abstract

The use of the term immersion to describe a multitude of varying experiences in the absence of a definitional consensus has obfuscated and diluted the term. The non-exhaustive literature review presented in this paper indicates that immersion is a psychological concept as opposed to being a property of the system or technology that facilitates an experience. An adaptable definition of immersion is synthesized based on the findings from the literature review: a state of deep mental involvement in which the individual may experience disassociation from the awareness of the physical world due to a shift in their attentional state. This definition is used to contrast and differentiate interchangeably used terms such as presence from immersion and outline the implications for conducting immersion research on audiovisual experiences. A new methodology for quantifying immersion is proposed and avenues for future work are briefly discussed.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we contrasted major and minor mode melodies controlled for liking to study the neural basis of musical mode perception. To examine the influence of the larger dissonance in minor melodies on neural activation differences, we further introduced a strongly dissonant stimulus, in the form of a chromatic scale. Minor mode melodies were evaluated as sadder than major melodies, and in comparison they caused increased activity in limbic structures, namely left parahippocampal gyrus, bilateral ventral anterior cingulate, and in left medial prefrontal cortex. Dissonance explained some, but not all, of the heightened activity in the limbic structures when listening to minor mode music.

Meditation is an ancient spiritual practice, which aims to still the fluctuations of the mind. We investigated meditation with fMRI in order to identify and characterise both the "neural switch" mechanism used in the voluntary shift from normal consciousness to meditation and the "threshold regulation mechanism" sustaining the meditative state. Thirty-one individuals with 1.5-25 years experience in meditation were scanned using a blocked on-off design with 45 s alternating epochs during the onset of respectively meditation and normal relaxation. Additionally, 21 subjects were scanned during 14.5 min of sustained meditation. The data were analysed with SPM and ICA. During the onset of meditation, activations were found bilaterally in the putamen and the supplementary motor cortex, while deactivations were found predominately in the right hemisphere, the precuneus, the posterior cingulum and the parieto-temporal area. During sustained meditation, SPM analysis revealed activation in the head of nucleus caudatus. Extensive deactivations were observed in white matter in the right hemisphere, i.e. mainly in the posterior occipito-parieto-temporal area and in the frontal lobes. ICA identified 38 components including known baseline-resting state components, one of which not only overlaps with the activated area revealed in the SPM analysis but extends further into frontal, temporal, parietal and limbic areas, and might presumably constitute a combination of frontoparietal and cinguloopercular task control systems. The identified component processes display varying degrees of correlation. We hypothesise that a proper characterisation of brain processes during meditation will require an operational definition of brain dynamics matching a stable state of mind.