Beyond “mindfulness” and toward a science of advanced meditation: Neurophenomenological investigations of absorption and cessation

COEX 

Meditation includes contemplative practices that are informed by ancient wisdom traditions. Mindfulness is the best-known meditation technique, and includes the development of present-focused awareness and non-judgment of experience. Interest in meditation is burgeoning, and it has been shown to be effective in improving mental and physical health in clinical and non-clinical contexts. Our Meditation Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School is leading investigations into advanced meditation, that is, states and stages of practice that unfold with expertise over time. We will present several of our recent findings including using human electrophysiology and MRI combined with a neurophenomenological approach to examine the neural signatures of advanced concentration and mindfulness meditation practices including jhana, or ‘absorption’, and nirodha, or ‘cessation’. Absorption is characterized by profound joy, clarity, and openness, whereas cessation is described as complete discontinuation in awareness similar to the loss of consciousness. We intensively sampled these states and events as experienced by a single advanced meditator (with over 23,000 h of meditation training). Our results include spectral and connectivity analyses of the EEG data, and whole-brain 7T fMRI regional homogeneity (assessing the cortex, subcortex, brainstem, and cerebellum). By relating jhana and cessation to objective and intrinsic measures of brain activity (including EEG and MRI metrics) that are related to consciousness and high-level psychological functioning, these results provide evidence for the ability of experienced meditators to voluntarily modulate their state of consciousness and lay the foundation for studying these unique states using a neuroscientific approach toward health-related applications in both clinical and non-clinical contexts.