Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural complexity and extended cessations: A source-localized MEG-EEG analysis of the advanced meditative endpoint, nirodha samapatti

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Kenneth Shinozuka¹ (kennethshinozuka@gmail.com), Matthew Sacchet²; ¹University of Oxford, ²Harvard Medical School

We are entering a third wave of meditation research focused on advanced meditation, including states and stages of meditation practice that unfold with time and mastery. Nirodha samapatti (NS), sometimes called extended cessation in the scientific literature, is a meditative endpoint described in Theravada Buddhist meditation that corresponds to complete cessation of perception and feeling. In other words, meditators report periods of unconsciousness during NS. Here, we aimed to determine the neural correlates of NS, including their relation to biomarkers of unconsciousness. For example, EEG-based Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc) has been shown to consistently decrease during anesthesia and disorders of consciousness. Using the first-ever simultaneously-acquired EEG and MEG data from three NS meditators, we measured differences in whole-brain, source localized, normalized LZc between NS and two non-meditative, cognitively engaging control tasks. No significant differences in normalized LZc were identified between NS and the control tasks. These results suggest that NS is a unique brain state from other interventions and conditions that lead to unconsciousness.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Other