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Advanced meditation includes meditative endpoints that are outcomes of meditation practice and occur with time and mastery of meditation. The “cessation” event (related to nirodha in Theravada Buddhism) is a meditative endpoint characterized by a loss of consciousness followed by a sense of mental reset and deep clarity. In general, organization of brain activity exists along a “criticality” spectrum: order and disorder occupy the extremes, and the critical point, which is thought to represent optimal information processing, is in between. We assessed brain criticality in the 39.9 s pre-cessation to 39.9 s post-cessation window by applying detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to electroencephalography (EEG) in relation to 37 cessations in a single advanced meditator. Changepoint analysis of whole-brain DFA revealed a spike in the whole-brain DFA exponent starting at 11.3 s pre-cessation, suggesting a strengthening of long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) and movement towards the critical point. The whole-brain DFA exponent remained elevated until 23.6 s post-cessation. These effects were most pronounced in posterior EEG channels. The results, which are consistent with reported phenomenology of cessations, contribute to a deeper understanding of and ultimately promise to inform the sharing of advanced meditation.
Lutterveld et al. (Wed,) studied this question.