That is the argument behind a new 2025 review by Jonathan Lieberman and Matthew Sacchet, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews DOI. Their idea is both elegant and a little audacious: advanced meditation may give neuroscience a cleaner way to study consciousness itself, not just the usual mental chaos swirling around it like a sports bar TV wall on playoff weekend.

The brain usually plays a very crowded sport

Most consciousness experiments look at ordinary waking life, sleep, anesthesia, or maybe psychedelics. Useful? Absolutely. Clean? Not even slightly.

Regular conscious experience is jam-packed. Perception. Inner monologue. Emotional weather. Self-storytelling. That one embarrassing thing from 2014 barging into the huddle uninvited. When scientists scan the brain in these states, they are often trying to isolate the basic machinery of consciousness while the whole offense, defense, marching band, and hot dog cannon are still on the field.

Lieberman and Sacchet suggest a different strategy: study highly trained meditators who can enter unusual states where many common features of experience fade away. Fewer mental players on the field means a better shot at spotting the core playbook.

Advanced meditation as the brain’s minimalist offense

The paper focuses on two big meditation phenomena.

First: advanced concentrative absorption, related to what Buddhist traditions often call jhāna. In these states, attention becomes extremely stable and experience can become radically simplified. Sensory clutter quiets down. Self-referential chatter eases off. Awareness may remain, but in a stripped-down, abstract form.

Second: meditative endpoints, especially cessation events, related to nirodha. These are reported as temporary suspensions of consciousness altogether. Which, from a neuroscience perspective, is about as subtle as a coach saying, “What if we studied football by removing the football?”

And that is exactly why the idea is interesting.

The authors propose a minimal model framework - basically a scientific attempt to identify the simplest possible conscious state, then work upward from there. Instead of asking, “What brain activity accompanies normal, overloaded human experience?” they ask, “What is the least you need for consciousness to still be there?”

That is a much sharper question.

Why meditation might help where other methods get weird

Other altered-state tools exist, of course. Sleep research is huge. Anesthesia tells us what happens when consciousness drops offline. Psychedelics scramble the usual network dynamics in ways that reveal a lot about perception and selfhood. But advanced meditation has a unique selling point: trained practitioners may be able to enter specific states deliberately, repeatedly, and with detailed introspective reports.

That matters. Reproducibility is the holy grail and also the thing scientists mutter about into their coffee.

If a highly experienced meditator can reliably shift into a deeply reduced conscious state during an experiment, researchers get something precious - a repeatable phenomenological target. It is less like waiting for a lightning strike and more like having an elite quarterback call the same audible on command.

Recent work backs up the idea that meditation can systematically alter attention, self-processing, and large-scale brain networks, though the most extreme states remain under-studied (Brandmeyer and Delorme, 2021; Sacchet et al., 2024 PMCID: PMC11043080). Reviews on consciousness science also keep circling the same problem: our usual paradigms are noisy, theoretically loaded, and often bad at separating consciousness from all the stuff that travels with it (Seth and Bayne, 2022; Mashour et al., 2020).

The hard part: monks are not lab mice, and consciousness is rude

Before we declare meditation the new MVP of consciousness science, there are some obvious challenges.

For one, these advanced states are rare. You cannot just recruit twenty undergrads, hand them an app, and ask for nirodha by Thursday. The relevant practitioners often have years - sometimes decades - of training.

For another, first-person reports are essential here, but they are also tricky. If someone says consciousness disappeared for a bit, what exactly does that mean? How do you line that up with EEG, fMRI, breathing changes, and behavior? Consciousness research already has enough philosophical food fights to stock a tailgate for years.

There is also the classic neuroscience problem: a brain scan can show correlation, but it does not come with a tiny referee explaining causation.

Still, this paper puts a finger on a real weakness in the field. If we only study consciousness in its loudest, busiest forms, we may miss its basic structure entirely.

Why this could matter outside meditation halls

If this program works, it could sharpen how we think about coma, anesthesia, disorders of consciousness, and even psychedelic states. It might help researchers distinguish the neural signatures of raw awareness from the signatures of memory, sensory detail, emotion, and the ever-chatty sense of self.

That is not just philosophically spicy. It could shape clinical tools for detecting whether consciousness is present in patients who cannot communicate normally. It could also force big theories of consciousness - global workspace, integrated information, predictive processing, the whole starting lineup - to make riskier, cleaner predictions.

And honestly, the whole thing has a delightful plot twist. A field obsessed with high-tech scanners and computational models may need help from people who got very, very good at sitting still.

References

Lieberman JM, Sacchet MD. Toward a neuroscience of consciousness using advanced meditation. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2025; DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106520

Brandmeyer T, Delorme A. Reduced mind wandering in meditation and its neural correlates: A review. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.07.018

Sacchet MD, et al. Advanced meditation research and the neuroscience of altered states. Neuron. 2024; PMCID: PMC11043080

Seth AK, Bayne T. Theories of consciousness. Lancet. 2022; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01900-0

Mashour GA, Roelfsema P, Changeux JP, Dehaene S. Conscious processing and the global neuronal workspace hypothesis. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41583-020-00403-6

Disclaimer: The image accompanying this article is for illustrative purposes only and does not depict actual experimental results, data, or biological mechanisms.