Defensive Freezing and the Evolutionary Origins of Meditation in Humans.
David S Black, Phil Reed
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences March 1, 2026 DOI: 10.1111/nyas.70249 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Keywords | Animals Humans Biological evolution Culture Theory Stress response Origins Defensive freezing |
| Key points | Argues that meditation originates from the evolutionarily conserved defensive freezing response, whose components—immobility, heightened vigilance with narrowed attention, and bradycardia—were co-opted and selectively reinforced in early human social communities. Proposes that meditation is therefore a culturally refined expression of an ancestral survival strategy rather than a human psychological innovation, maintained through reinforcement, mimicry, and verbal instruction from the late Paleolithic (approximately 150,000–200,000 years before present) to the present. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT: The biological origins of meditation in humans remain underexplored, despite extensive scholarship on its cultural history and health effects. We present a theoretical account that traces the origins of meditation to the evolutionarily conserved repertoire of defensive freezing. We propose that this ancient survival response—characterized by motoric immobility, heightened vigilance with narrowed attentional focus, and bradycardia—provided a behavioral, neural, and physiological substrate upon which operant and social reinforcement could act. Over evolutionary time, these response components may have been co‐opted and selectively reinforced within early human social communities, giving rise to complex, structured behavioral repertoires resembling modern sitting and slow‐movement meditative practices embedded within various cultural systems of teaching. Rather than viewing meditation as a human psychological innovation, we suggest it represents a culturally refined expression of an ancestral survival strategy, maintained and elaborated through reinforcement, mimicry, and verbal instruction, spanning the late Paleolithic era (approximately 150,000−200,000 years before present) to the present day. This framework recasts meditation as an evolved modulation of a more basic stress‐ and threat‐related freezing response template, shaped and maintained through social reinforcement.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cites 12
- How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective Perspectives on Psychological Science October 14, 2011
- How Does Mindfulness Training Affect Health? A Mindfulness Stress Buffering Account Current Directions in Psychological Science December 1, 2014
- The structural–functional connectome and the default mode network of the human brain Neuroimage October 4, 2013
- The Mindful Brain: A Systematic Review of the Neural Correlates of Trait Mindfulness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience November 1, 2024
- Neural correlates of mindfulness meditation and hypnosis on magnetic resonance imaging: similarities and differences. A scoping review. Journal of neuroradiology = Journal de neuroradiologie March 1, 2024
and 7 more in the library