Meditation practitioners report being able to induce a total absence of consciousness lasting up to seven days, known as cessation or nirodha samāpatti. Unlike sleep, individuals in this state cannot be woken by external stimulation, experience no sense of time or tiredness, and have a stiff rather than relaxed body. Emerging from cessation is said to produce profound effects such as sudden clarity, openness, and insights. This paper outlines the historical context, presents preliminary data from two labs, sets a research agenda, and provides an initial framework for understanding these experiences. It integrates classical Buddhist concepts of nirodha and nirodha samāpatti into current cognitive-neurocomputational and active inference frameworks of meditation.
Jhana meditation produces states of self-reinforcing bliss that may be useful in clinical and scientific settings, but research has been limited by scarce data and few expert practitioners. To address this, the authors release the largest open-access dataset of electroencephalographic and physiological recordings from expert Jhana meditators, comprising over 100 hours of data from 26 subjects across three retreats. The dataset includes example analysis code. This resource aims to enable broader collaboration and advance understanding of internally generated altered states of consciousness.
Experienced Vipassana meditators show stronger anticorrelation between the dorsal attention network and the default mode network during both sustained attention tasks and at rest, compared to matched controls and a larger reference dataset. This pattern, previously linked to better brain health, indicates more stable sustained attention without increased distractibility. No differences were observed between meditators and controls in an attentional reorienting task. The findings, based on functional MRI, suggest that long-term meditation practice may enhance the brain's ability to maintain focused attention by strengthening the separation between attention and default mode networks.