Patanjali and neuroscientific research on meditation
Frontiers in Psychology July 3, 2015 K. Bærentsen
The authors propose that Patanjali's definition of meditation as the 'restriction (or stilling) of the fluctuations of the mind' can serve as a starting point for fMRI research. They argue that an operational definition of the neural substrate of meditation adequate to this definition can be developed from a non-reductionistic understanding of the mind's neural underpinnings in terms of dynamical functional brain systems.