Meditative absorption shifts brain dynamics toward criticality
arXiv (Cornell University) November 26, 2025 Jonas Mago, Josh Brahinsky, Mark Miller et al.
During a 10-day retreat, ten experienced meditation practitioners showed that neural dynamics can be volitionally shifted toward a critical regime—a state between order and chaos that supports flexible yet stable information processing. Compared to regular mindfulness of breathing, a refined state of meditative absorption called jhana produced pronounced sensory fading, slower respiration, higher neural signal diversity, reduced chaoticity, and enhanced mismatch negativity amplitude over frontocentral sites. Spectral analyses revealed a flatter aperiodic component and reorganization of long-range temporal correlations. These findings suggest that criticality is a candidate neurophysiological marker of absorptive, minimal-content experiences.