Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2022
Austin Clinton Cooper, Bianca Ventura, Georg Northoff
54 citations
Advanced meditators often report experiences of nondual awareness—a state without boundaries between self and environment. This review of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies across meditation types and experience levels finds that meditation reorganizes the brain's spatial topography. Key neural changes include decreased activity in the posterior default mode network (DMN), increased activity in the central executive network (CEN), reduced connectivity within the posterior DMN and between posterior and anterior DMN, increased connectivity within the anterior DMN and CEN, and significantly altered connectivity between DMN and CEN, likely nonlinear. These changes suggest a shift from mental-self-processing toward interoceptive and exteroceptive self-processing, enabling explicit nondual awareness. The authors propose a topographic reorganization model of meditation (TRoM) linking neural and experiential effects.
NeuroImage
August 15, 2024
Bianca Ventura, Yasir Çatal, Angelika Wolman et al.
22 citations
Meditation practices with a wider attentional focus, such as Shoonya meditation, are associated with longer intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) in the brain, measured as the autocorrelation window (ACW) of EEG signals, compared to practices with a narrower focus like Mantra or Vipassana meditation. The study compared three groups of highly proficient practitioners from different traditions and a meditation-naïve control group. The results indicate a correspondence between the width of attentional scope and the duration of neural temporal windows, suggesting that subjective attentional width relates to objective neural activity patterns.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
June 1, 2025
Georg Northoff, Bianca Ventura
21 citations
The brain-mind connection remains a central challenge because subjective experience is first-person while neural activity is observed from a third-person perspective. Neurophenomenology offers a systematic method to link these domains, but does not explain how they relate independently of methodology. Spatiotemporal Neuroscience proposes that neural activity and subjective experience share analogous spatiotemporal dynamics as a common feature. This paper shows how the two frameworks can be integrated on theoretical grounds, illustrated by examples of self, meditation, and depression. The integration provides complementary insights, deepens understanding of the brain-mind connection, and suggests new methodological approaches for empirical investigation.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 29, 2024
Saketh Malipeddi, Arun Sasidharan, Rahul Venugopal et al.
4 citations
preprint
Advanced meditators from the Isha Yoga tradition show shorter intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) during breath-watching, indicating deidentification with mental contents, and no significant differences in INTs between tasks, indicating non-dual awareness. Shorter INTs correlate with self-reported equanimity. The brain's intrinsic neural timescales may serve as a neural marker of equanimity.
Aust N Z J Psychiatry
September 28, 2023
Bianca Ventura
4 citations
This letter to the editor comments on a prior article about the need for phenomenology in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. It likely offers critique or additional perspective on the role of subjective experience in such treatments, but the abstract provides no specific findings, arguments, or data.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 26, 2025
Prakash Shrimali, Arun Sasidharan, Saketh Malipeddi et al.
1 citation
preprint
Meditation involves training attention inward, but the brain activity that distinguishes meditative from non-meditative states across different traditions is not well understood. Analyzing high-density EEG data from 170 participants—121 advanced meditators and 49 controls—across Vipassana, Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga, Heartfulness, and Isha Yoga traditions, researchers used random forest classifiers to distinguish meditative from non-meditative states with 91% accuracy. Nonlinear features contributed most, indicating a core neurodynamic profile. Classification was higher in advanced meditators (92%) than controls (85%), with different feature importance: nonlinear and aperiodic features dominated in meditators, while oscillatory and timescale features dominated in controls. Each tradition showed distinct neurodynamic profiles, suggesting multiple pathways lead to meditative states.
Communications Biology
June 12, 2026
Saketh Malipeddi, Arun Sasidharan, Bianca Ventura et al.
Advanced meditators from the Isha Yoga tradition report stronger non-dual experiences—where the boundary between self and environment dissolves—during breath-watching meditation compared to novices and meditation-naïve controls. Using EEG-based intrinsic neural timescales (INT), researchers found that across all participants, INTs are longer during internal attention (breath-watching) than during an external cognitive task. However, advanced meditators show similar INT durations between internal and external attention, and this reduced difference correlates with stronger reported non-dual experiences. The findings suggest that similar intrinsic neural timescale durations across internal and external attention may be a neural signature of non-duality.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Bianca Ventura, Andrea Buccellato, Saketh Malipeddi et al.
Vipassana and Shoonya meditation produce distinct alpha-band brain dynamics, with differences more apparent in temporal variability than in average activity. Vipassana, involving systematic body scanning, showed lower variability and more regular temporal patterns in both peak frequency and power of alpha oscillations. Shoonya, a non-directed attention practice, exhibited higher variability and irregularity in these measures. The findings suggest that dynamic features of brain activity, such as variability and temporal irregularity, may distinguish contemplative practices better than static averages, and could reflect a shared property of brain and experience.
Computers in biology and medicine
October 1, 2025
Andrea Buccellato, Di Zang, Yasir Çatal et al.
The brain's spontaneous activity has intrinsic durations—Intrinsic Neural Timescales (INTs)—that are hierarchically organized, with shorter durations in sensory regions and longer ones in association areas. This study shows that the topographic organization of INTs is not fixed but dynamically changes over time. Healthy individuals exhibit transitions between different INT states that are moderately predictable and show memory effects. In people with disorders of consciousness, these transitions become less predictable and show reduced memory effects, suggesting that the temporal richness of INT state transitions is important for maintaining normal consciousness.