Mindfulness meditation as cross-modal adaptation

                 Bedford (2012) proposed a novel psychological theory of how mindfulness meditation leads to healing based in the field of perception. According to the theory, mindful meditation along with guided imagery creates a conflict between a visual image and the immune system, the latter of which is argued to be a sensory modality. This cross-modal visual-immune system conflict now acts like any cross-modal conflict in perception: one of the modalities must change to realign the two modalities. When the immune system is the modality that changes, healing can occur. In this view, there is no “mind” over “matter”; what appears as the mind influencing the body is actually just low level interaction of multiple perceptual modalities/senses, which they evolved to do to maintain perceptual accuracy.