Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
September 1, 2021
Ruben E Laukkonen, Heleen A Slagter
183 citations
Deconstructive meditation can profoundly change the mind by reducing the brain's tendency to generate predictions based on past experience. The predictive processing framework suggests that meditation disengages anticipatory processes, gradually decreasing counterfactual and temporally deep cognition until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Three main meditation styles—focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual—lie on a single continuum, each relinquishing increasingly ingrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction permits insights by making these processes available to introspection. The framework is consistent with empirical and neurophenomenological evidence and highlights the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind.
Progress in brain research
January 1, 2023
Ruben E Laukkonen, Matthew D Sacchet, Henk Barendregt et al.
56 citations
Meditation practitioners report being able to induce a total absence of consciousness lasting up to seven days, known as cessation or nirodha samāpatti. Unlike sleep, individuals in this state cannot be woken by external stimulation, experience no sense of time or tiredness, and have a stiff rather than relaxed body. Emerging from cessation is said to produce profound effects such as sudden clarity, openness, and insights. This paper outlines the historical context, presents preliminary data from two labs, sets a research agenda, and provides an initial framework for understanding these experiences. It integrates classical Buddhist concepts of nirodha and nirodha samāpatti into current cognitive-neurocomputational and active inference frameworks of meditation.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
June 1, 2025
Joshua Kugel, Ruben E Laukkonen, David B Yaden et al.
15 citations
A sudden shift in understanding or perspective that feels true—called insight—is common during psychedelic experiences and is often considered central to their therapeutic value. A systematic review of 98 studies (40 survey, 58 interventional) found that insight was positively correlated with psychedelic dose and was significantly higher after psychedelics in 93% of studies comparing to placebo. Crucially, 86% of studies found that insight was associated with therapeutic improvement, and this relationship was often stronger than that of mystical-type experience. The findings suggest insight's importance for clinical practice and understanding mechanisms of psychedelic therapy, though heterogeneous study designs and possible publication bias limit meta-analytic conclusions.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2022
Hilary J Grimmer, Ruben E Laukkonen, Anna Freydenzon et al.
6 citations
False insights—moments of sudden, incorrect understanding—can be triggered in anyone under the right conditions, not just people prone to psychosis or delusional thinking. In an experiment with 200 participants who completed an adapted version of the FIAT paradigm, which elicits false 'Aha' moments for unsolvable anagrams, no association was found between these experimentally induced false insights and measures of schizotypy, need for cognition, jumping to conclusions, aberrant salience, faith in intuition, or cognitive reflection. The findings suggest that experiencing false insights may be a general human phenomenon rather than a marker of particular thinking styles or psychosis proneness.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2024
Ruben E Laukkonen, Evan Lewis-Healey, Luca Ghigliotti et al.
A novel multivariate spatial filter called Rhythmic Entrainment Source Separation can extract steady-state visual evoked potentials from EEG data to quantify perceptual switch rates during binocular rivalry without requiring self-reports. This method may be valuable for studying consciousness in contexts where self-reports are problematic or impossible. The analyses also indicate that no-report conditions may affect attention deployment and thereby neural correlates, an important consideration for consciousness research.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
October 1, 2023
Ruben E Laukkonen, Margaret Webb, Carola Salvi et al.
Feelings of insight help people select ideas from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and generating intuitive confidence, enabling fast action under uncertainty. This 'Eureka heuristic' is explained through active inference: implicit restructuring via Bayesian reduction produces a higher-order prediction error (the content of insight), while dopaminergic precision-weighting of that error accounts for the confidence, pleasure, and attentional capture (the feeling of insight). The account aligns with the phenomenology, accuracy, and neural unfolding of insight, as well as its effects on belief and decision-making. Dangers include the formation and entrenchment of false beliefs and vulnerability of insights under psychoactive substances and misinformation.