During Zen meditation in a monastic setting, experienced Vietnamese monks showed significantly higher alpha and theta brainwave power than non-meditating controls, with no change in beta power. This pattern differs from mindfulness practices, where beta power often decreases. Among monks, brain activity did not differ between meditation and mind-wandering states, nor between brief 4-minute and extended 1.5-hour sessions, indicating a continuity of meditative and non-meditative states in advanced practitioners. The findings suggest Zen meditation fosters a distinct state combining relaxation and sustained alertness, and demonstrate the feasibility of mobile EEG technology for in-situ research.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness arises from a system's ability to integrate information. Applying IIT to a simulated network of integrate-and-fire (IAF) neurons shows that such a network can have a non-zero Φ value—a measure of integrated information—under specific conditions. The complexity of the network's dynamics does not necessarily correlate with its Φ value. However, the amount of integrated information increases with the neurons' time constant, reflecting their integrative capacity. The integrated information measure defined in IIT 3.0 is not resilient to noise when the network includes internal random fluctuations.