Toward a neuroscience of consciousness using advanced meditation.

Advanced meditation, cultivated through long-term expertise, provides a unique experimental window into the core mechanisms of consciousness. Two classes of meditative phenomena are highlighted: advanced concentrative absorption (related to jhāna), where highly abstract awareness persists while typical features of consciousness fade, and meditative endpoints (related to nirodha), involving a temporary suspension of consciousness. These states serve as precise, replicable anchors for a minimal model framework that aims to identify the simplest possible form of conscious experience. Integrating advanced meditation into neuroscience offers a promising path toward isolating the neural mechanisms supporting consciousness in its most reduced and fundamental forms.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Despite decades of progress in the neuroscience of consciousness, prevailing empirical paradigms remain largely anchored in the study of typical, content-rich states that are characterized by layered perceptual, cognitive, affective, and self-referential processes. Such complexity may obscure the neural mechanisms that give rise to conscious experience. Here, we propose that advanced meditation-referring to states and stages of practice that unfold progressively with increasing expertise-offers a powerful yet unexplored opportunity to isolate the core features of consciousness through a theory-driven neuroscience approach. We focus on two classes of meditative phenomena: advanced concentrative absorption (related to what have been called jhāna), which involves the preservation of highly abstract forms of awareness alongside the attenuation of typical features of consciousness; and meditative endpoints-namely, cessation events (related to what have been called nirodha)-which involve the temporary suspension of consciousness altogether. These phenomena serve as precise, replicable, and experimentally tractable phenomenological anchors for a minimal model framework, a novel approach aimed at identifying and characterizing the simplest possible form of conscious experience as a principled starting point for a systematic science of consciousness. Within this framework, the integration of advanced meditation into experimental paradigms offers a promising path toward identifying the neural mechanisms that support consciousness in its most reduced and fundamental forms.