PLoS Biology
May 4, 2007
Heleen A. Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Lawrence L. Greischar et al.
762 citations
Intensive meditation training reduces the attentional blink—a phenomenon where a second target in a rapid stream is often missed when it appears shortly after a first target. Three months of daily mental practice led to a smaller attentional blink and decreased brain-resource allocation to the first target, measured by a smaller P3b brain potential. Individuals with the largest reduction in resource allocation to the first target showed the greatest improvement in detecting the second target. These findings indicate that mental training enhances control over limited attentional resources and supports lifelong brain plasticity.
Journal of Neuroscience
October 21, 2009
Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagter, Nancy B. Rawlings et al.
499 citations
Three months of intensive meditation training improved the ability to sustain attention, as measured by dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography. Training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, shown by enhanced theta-band phase consistency of neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Individuals with the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behavioral response variability. Reduced variability in neural processing also occurred for unattended deviant tones, suggesting meditation affects both distracter and target processing, possibly by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2011
Heleen A. Slagter, Richard J. Davidson, Antoine Lutz
295 citations
The adult brain remains changeable through experience, but learning typically improves performance only on the trained task, not on similar new ones. This perspective argues that systematic mental training, such as meditation, can produce learning that is not specific to a particular stimulus or task but instead enhances core cognitive processes. Meditation practices are designed to improve defined mental functions, and several features of meditation regimens—including variable stimulus input, metacognitive focus, task difficulty, arousal regulation, and training duration—may foster this process-specific learning. The authors discuss key neuroimaging findings and methodological challenges in studying meditation training effects.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
September 1, 2021
Ruben Laukkonen, Heleen A. Slagter
183 citations
Deconstructive meditation can profoundly change the mind by reducing the brain's tendency to generate predictions based on past experience. The predictive processing framework suggests that meditation disengages anticipatory processes, gradually decreasing counterfactual and temporally deep cognition until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Three main meditation styles—focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual—lie on a single continuum, each relinquishing increasingly ingrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction permits insights by making these processes available to introspection. The framework is consistent with empirical and neurophenomenological evidence and highlights the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
September 29, 2008
Heleen A. Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Lawrence L. Greischar et al.
135 citations
The human mind has limited information processing capacity, as shown by the attentional blink—a failure to identify the second of two targets presented close together. This deficit is thought to arise from overinvesting limited resources in processing the first target. Previous research found that intensive meditation training aimed at reducing elaborate object processing decreased brain resource allocation to the first target and improved identification of the second.
International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHP
January 1, 2023
Fabio Giommi, Prisca R. Bauer, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana et al.
70 citations
Rigidity, or inflexibility, is a core feature of transdiagnostic processes underlying many mental health disorders. The pattern theory of self (PTS) defines the self as a dynamic, nonlinear pattern of multiple interacting processes. Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) can reduce rigid, habitual self-patterns, thereby improving mental health. MBIs alter psychological and behavioral aspects of the self-pattern and can shift the entire self-pattern as a gestalt. Neuroscientific evidence shows that the phenomenology of the self is reflected in cortical networks, and meditation alters these networks. Combining PTS and neuroscientific findings may deepen understanding of psychopathology and improve diagnosis and treatment.
Progress in Brain Research
January 1, 2023
Ruben Laukkonen, Matthew D. Sacchet, Henk Barendregt et al.
56 citations
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.
Neuropsychologia
September 28, 2023
Avijit Chowdhury, Remko Van Lutterveld, Ruben Laukkonen et al.
54 citations
In a single intensively sampled case, EEG spectral analysis was used to investigate advanced mindfulness meditation "cessation" experiences, revealing distinct neural signatures associated with these profound meditative states.
Mindfulness
April 11, 2023
Shaun Gallagher, Antonino Raffone, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana et al.
49 citations
Buddhist psychology's insights into mind-body phenomena and non-self align with the pattern theory of self, which describes the self as a dynamic, temporal, and enactive pattern of processes. Although Buddhist concepts do not map directly onto the self-pattern, both frameworks share similarities in explaining experiences of self and non-self through pragmatic, relational processes. This mutual perspective offers implications for well-being and flexibility that reduce anxiety, attachment, craving, and suffering.
Psychophysiology
February 12, 2016
Ayla Kruis, Heleen A. Slagter, David R. W. Bachhuber et al.
29 citations
Long-term meditators blink less frequently and show a different eyeblink pattern than meditation-naive participants, with high consistency over three time points. This pattern may reflect differences in striatal dopamine activity, as spontaneous eyeblink rate is a peripheral correlate of such activity. An 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course did not alter eyeblink rates compared to active or waitlist controls, and a full day of two different meditation types also had no effect. These results suggest either that individual differences in dopaminergic neurotransmission predispose people to meditation, or that long-term, but not short-term, practice induces stable changes in baseline striatal dopaminergic functioning.
Mindfulness
August 1, 2024
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Kirk Warren Brown, Shaun Gallagher et al.
22 citations
A selfless state of consciousness, reported for centuries in wisdom traditions, involves both temporary and lasting conditions. In psychology, the healthy self is typically emphasized, and the idea of selfless modes is sometimes dismissed, hindering empirical progress. This paper offers an interdisciplinary conceptual discussion grounded in the pattern theory of self (PTS), which views the self as a complex pattern of dynamically related processes. It proposes that meditative practices induce a reorganization of the self-pattern, enabling temporary or persistent selfless experience. The authors present a heuristic model, the pattern theory of selflessness (PTSL), with six nonlinear transformations: consolidating and integrating the self-pattern; cultivating concentration and present-moment awareness; cultivating mindful awareness; self-deconstruction states; self-flexibility; and self-liberation as a trait. This integrative view advances understanding of non-self experience and guides empirical research.
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
January 1, 2019
Evert A. Boonstra, Heleen A. Slagter
19 citations
The article argues that Karl Friston's free energy minimization framework, which claims to unify brain theory and apply to all living systems, aligns with Georg Hegel's dialectics. Drawing on Catherine Malabou's work, the authors demonstrate that Friston's approach reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from a neuroscience perspective, requiring a reading through Hegel's speculative philosophy. This reading moves beyond the cognitivism-enactivism debate about whether organisms are secluded from or open to their surroundings. Instead, the tension between these positions is itself operative at the organismic level as a contradiction the organism sustains throughout life: secluded existence depends on perpetual relation with surroundings, and the condition for that relation is a secluded entity. This internalized contradiction grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization.
PsyArXiv
November 17, 2020
Ruben Eero Laukkonen, Heleen A. Slagter
17 citations
preprint
A unifying account of deconstructive meditation under the predictive processing view is offered. The brain makes predictions based on past experience, and deconstructive meditation disengages anticipatory processes, gradually reducing counterfactual temporally deep cognition until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual) are placed on a single continuum, where each technique relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction can permit certain insights by making these processes available to introspection. The framework is consistent with empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence and illuminates the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind.
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.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2024
Ruben Laukkonen, Evan Lewis-Healey, Luca Ghigliotti et al.
A novel multivariate spatial filter called Rhythmic Entrainment Source Separation can extract steady-state visual evoked potentials from EEG data to quantify perceptual switch rates during binocular rivalry without requiring self-reports. This method may be valuable for studying consciousness in contexts where self-reports are problematic or impossible. The analyses also indicate that no-report conditions may affect attention deployment and thereby neural correlates, an important consideration for consciousness research.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
October 1, 2023
Ruben Laukkonen, Margaret Webb, Carola Salvi et al.
Feelings of insight help people select ideas from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and generating intuitive confidence, enabling fast action under uncertainty. This 'Eureka heuristic' is explained through active inference: implicit restructuring via Bayesian reduction produces a higher-order prediction error (the content of insight), while dopaminergic precision-weighting of that error accounts for the confidence, pleasure, and attentional capture (the feeling of insight). The account aligns with the phenomenology, accuracy, and neural unfolding of insight, as well as its effects on belief and decision-making. Dangers include the formation and entrenchment of false beliefs and vulnerability of insights under psychoactive substances and misinformation.
Scientific Reports
September 13, 2019
Catherine I. Andreu, Ismael Palacios, Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz et al.
Long-term Vipassana meditators made significantly fewer errors than athletes on an emotional Go/Nogo task measuring response inhibition, while being equally fast. This behavioral improvement was accompanied by reduced midfrontal theta activity in Nogo versus Go trials, but no changes in the N2 and P3 brainwave components. Meditators also rated emotional pictures lower in valence and arousal. The results suggest that meditation may enhance response inhibition and emotional control.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2019
Erik L Meijs, Pim Mostert, Heleen A. Slagter et al.
Expectations about an upcoming stimulus increase the likelihood of conscious report, but this enhancement does not occur by sharpening sensory neural representations. Using magnetoencephalography and an attentional blink paradigm, researchers decoded letter identity from neural activity. Early sensory representations were similar whether letters were reported or missed, and also when letter identity was task-irrelevant. Later sustained neural representations were uniquely present when letters were consciously reported, indicating a decision-dependent signal. Global pre-stimulus neural activity biased decisions toward 'seen' responses. No evidence supported the sharpening of sensory representations by top-down expectations.
Mindfulness
December 1, 2017
Catherine I. Andreu, Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz, Vladimir Lopez et al.
Regular long-term meditation practice is associated with enhanced performance monitoring, the ability to detect and correct errors. Meditators made significantly fewer errors than non-meditator athletes on a challenging attention task. EEG recordings showed larger amplitudes in two brain potentials related to performance monitoring—the error-related negativity and correct-related negativity—in meditators compared to controls. These results suggest that meditation may improve cognitive control, specifically performance monitoring, which is often impaired in psychiatric disorders such as ADHD and substance use disorder.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2008
Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagter, John D. Dunne et al.
Meditation encompasses a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Two commonly studied styles are focused attention meditation, which involves voluntarily focusing attention on a chosen object, and open monitoring meditation, which involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.