Meditation is popularly imagined as switching the mind off. Brain recordings suggest the opposite. In a study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, a team including Karim Jerbi, professor of psychology at Université de Montréal, with first author Annalisa Pascarella of Italy's National Research Council and colleagues at Gabriele d'Annunzio University and Sapienza University of Rome, used magnetoencephalography to capture what expert meditation actually does to brain dynamics.
The participants were 12 monks of the Thai Forest Tradition from the Santacittarama monastery near Rome, each with an average of more than 15,000 hours of practice. The team compared two canonical techniques, samatha, a focused attention on a single object such as the breath, and vipassana, an open monitoring of the present moment, against rest, using machine learning to distinguish the three conditions. Both forms of meditation significantly altered neural oscillations and increased brain complexity, but in distinct ways.
Most intriguingly, vipassana moved the brain closer to criticality, the balance point between order and chaos that physicists and neuroscientists regard as the brain's optimal operating regime, while samatha produced a more stable, focused state. A brain near criticality may switch tasks more easily and store information more effectively, which could help explain why meditation-based interventions ease anxiety, stress and rumination. The sample was small and highly specialised, the authors caution, but the message stands: the meditating brain is not resting, it is reorganising.