Then I decided to simply meditate constantly. I've gone to 4 Vipassana retreats in my life and have been on the practice on and off since 10 years (mostly off). In my opinion, Vipassana is more or less the same as a normal body scan, except for the fact that a normal body scan is more loose about how long you stay in a certain area of your body (with Vipassana you immediately move on once you've felt a sensation). Just to give you an idea of what it is that I'm doing.
There are a few things that I'm noticing:
1. My sensitivity towards sensations in my body seems to be growing a lot faster. It's hard to emphasize how much it has grown just for doing this a few days.
2. The more I think, the more my meditation is interrupted, which is okay. It's just something I notice.
3. When I get into situations where thinking isn't required, then it starts to look a lot like formal meditation.
4. To my surprise, it's relatively easy to be in a light to medium information dense conversation and still meditate with ease. It only becomes difficult when I'm listening to concepts I can't immediately grok and this almost never happens in normal day to day conversation. My suspicion is that this is mostly because mindfulness meditation is associated with the insula. The insula is not a part of the default mode network (normally), so not too many signals are disturbing each other.
Anyway, does anyone knows some science on this?
However, I want to stress that Mindfulness, in the general sense, covers all the (sensing) continuum physical/emotional/lower-mental/higher-mental, while body-scanning seems to concentrate on the first level.
It is also not a static experience. (Real) Mindfulness is supposed to be a slowly transformative process, so I'm sure the observations you cited here will mutate (in subtle ways) as you continue the practice, and you grow as a person.
> does anyone knows some science on this?
“scientific” etymologically means “producing knowledge”.
I consider (older) techniques like Vipassana as a form of (inwardly) empirical investigations that are capable of producing reliable (Self) Knowledge because they are (ideally) based on observation without judgment. I think it better to perfect that inner “observation without judgment” than accept some (outwardly) science (at this early 21st century stage anyway).
This is to my surprise also. As one who has recently taken up this technique of constantly meditating - it all goes out the window immediately in any human interaction. Maybe this is social anxiety, but I'd appreciate any tips that allow you to do this.