Neuroimage
June 1, 2024
Pradeep Kumar, Rajanikant Panda, Kanishka Sharma et al.
20 citations
High-order interactions between brain regions, measured as synergistic and redundant information, change differently across three non-ordinary states of consciousness. During Rajyoga meditation, synergy increased across the whole brain in delta and theta brainwave bands, while redundancy decreased in frontal, central, and posterior electrodes in delta and beta bands. During hypnosis, synergy decreased in mid-frontal, temporal, and mid-centro-parietal electrodes in the delta band, and in left frontal and right parietal electrodes in the beta2 band. During auto-induced cognitive trance, synergy decreased in delta and theta bands in left-frontal, right-frontocentral, and posterior electrodes, and at the whole brain level in the alpha band. Redundancy changes during hypnosis and auto-induced cognitive trance were not significant. Subjective reports of absorption, dissociation, and mystical experience did not correlate with the high-order measures.
Mindfulness
July 1, 2023
Kanishka Sharma, Peter Achermann, Bhawna Panwar et al.
12 citations
During Brahma Kumaris Rajyoga meditation—a practice done with open eyes—long-term meditators show reduced delta and increased low alpha brain activity compared to resting. Source localization of EEG from 52 experienced meditators reveals that the meditation alters activation in the central executive, mirroring, task-positive, and task-negative networks. These changes correspond to attention modulation, self-related processing, visual imagery, and an extra-corporeal sense of being a soul in communion with a Supreme Soul. The findings suggest that seed-stage meditation involves distinct cognitive and affective processes, and future work should differentiate its stages.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
February 6, 2023
G Pradeep Kumar, Kanishka Sharma, A Adarsh et al.
preprint
Long-term Brahmakumaris Rajyoga meditators practicing with open eyes show distinct changes in brain functional connectivity compared to controls listening to music. Using two measures—magnitude squared coherence (MSC) and imaginary part of coherency (ICoh)—the study finds that meditators have higher baseline MSC in frontocentral and centroparietal regions and higher |ICoh| globally in higher beta and gamma bands. During meditation, MSC increases in higher theta and alpha bands in frontal and parietal regions, while |ICoh| decreases across most regions and bands except alpha. Controls show no such changes during music. Increased frontal MSC and decreased |ICoh| suggest enhanced self-awareness; lower occipital MSC in meditators at baseline implies altered visual processing from long-term open-eye practice.
Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)
January 1, 2026
Ankan Biswas, Srishty Aggarwal, Kanishka Sharma et al.
Long-term meditators show stronger stimulus-induced gamma oscillations and steeper power spectral density slopes compared to matched controls, suggesting enhanced inhibitory function. Both stimulus-induced and stimulus-free gamma coexist during meditation but arise from different brain regions—occipital and fronto-temporal respectively—indicating distinct mechanisms. Meditation-induced broadband gamma localizes to fronto-temporo-parietal regions, with stronger effects in parietal areas of meditators, while stimulus-induced gamma is stronger in occipital areas. Meditators also report higher mindfulness, lower stress, and more mystical experiences, though these traits do not correlate with gamma power. These findings suggest meditation may boost inhibitory mechanisms and mitigate age-related neural decline.
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 25, 2025
Jerrin Thomas Panachakel, G. Pradeep Kumar, Suryaa Seran et al.
Three machine-learning architectures distinguished Rajyoga meditation from resting brain states using EEG data, with the goal of subject-independent classification. The CSP-LDA-LSTM architecture achieved 98.2% accuracy for intra-subject classification, while the SVD-NN architecture reached 96.4% accuracy for inter-subject classification, comparable to the best reported intra-subject results. Both architectures captured subject-invariant EEG features, indicating robustness and ability to generalize across different subjects.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 28, 2023
G Pradeep Kumar, Kanishka Sharma, A Adarsh et al.
Long-term Brahmakumaris Rajyoga meditators practicing eyes-open meditation show increased functional connectivity in higher theta and alpha brainwave bands both within and across hemispheres, measured by pairwise phase consistency. Controls listening to music show no change in theta band. During baseline, meditators exhibit greater interhemispheric anterior-to-posterior integration in higher beta and slow gamma bands than controls. Increased integration between frontal electrodes in meditators suggests heightened self-awareness, while reduced occipital pairwise phase consistency relative to controls indicates modified visual processing from long-term eyes-open practice. These connectivity changes support the communication-through-coherence hypothesis and cortical integration theory during meditation-induced non-ordinary states.
IEEE Region 10 Conference
December 7, 2021
J. T. Panachakel, G. P. Kumar, A. G. Ramakrishnan et al.
A deep neural network using long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture can classify EEG recordings into meditation and non-meditation segments. The approach was tested on data from fourteen long-term Rajayoga meditators. Using common spatial pattern for feature extraction and linear discriminant analysis for dimensionality reduction, the network achieved inter-subject classification accuracies of 79.1% with the alpha band, 86.5% with beta, 91.0% with lower-gamma, and 94.1% with higher-gamma bands. This is the first work to apply deep learning to distinguish brain electrical activity during meditation from resting activity.
IEEE India Conference
December 10, 2020
R. Ganesan, Kanishka Sharma
During meditation, brain activity patterns become more uniform across regions, as shown by EEG recordings from fifteen practitioners of Rajayoga meditation. The covariance matrices of neural activity between successive time windows become more similar, particularly in the frontal region, indicating reduced variability in brain connectivity during the meditative state compared to non-meditative states.
May 8, 2020
Kanishka Sharma, P. Achermann, Bhawna Panwar et al.
During open-eyed 'seed stage meditation' practiced by Brahma Kumaris Rajayoga meditators, brain activity shifts: delta frequencies decrease and low alpha frequencies increase. These changes involve the central executive, mirroring, task-positive, and task-negative networks, reflecting attention modulation, self-related processing, and the experience of the soul as a point of light endowed with peacefulness. The study used frequency domain brain electric source localization on EEG recordings from 52 meditators, comparing meditation to open-eyed, task-free resting. Exploratory analyses examined effects of time from rest through meditation to final rest. Future research should differentiate between the meditation's stages.