Mindfulness
April 13, 2023
Julieta Galante, Andrea Grabovac, Malcolm Wright et al.
82 citations
About half of the millions of people who learn mindfulness meditation continue regular practice after initial instruction, but it is unclear whether benefits increase with ongoing practice or whether harm can occur. Evidence shows a wide range of experiences from positive to challenging and potentially harmful. Complex interactions and temporal sequences may explain these experiences and their links to health and well-being. Effects may vary systematically due to factors like initial dosage, accumulated practice, developing skill, and interactions with past experiences and environment. The authors call for interdisciplinary, ontologically agnostic research using longitudinal models and insights from contemplative traditions to develop safer, more effective applications.
Neuropsychologia
September 28, 2023
Avijit Chowdhury, Remko Van Lutterveld, Ruben E. Laukkonen et al.
54 citations
In a single intensively sampled case, EEG spectral analysis was used to investigate advanced mindfulness meditation "cessation" experiences, revealing distinct neural signatures associated with these profound meditative states.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 10, 2024
Olivier Sandilands, Daniel M. Ingram
6 citations
Meditation, psychedelics, and similar practices that alter conscious experience are increasingly used in clinical and non-clinical settings, yet the full range of associated phenomena remains poorly described and understood. There is an ethical mandate to research this domain more extensively, starting with comprehensive documentation. A review of 50 recent clinical or scientific publications, synthesizing reports from over 30,000 individual subjects, produced a large inventory of experiences, effects, after-effects, and impacts across a broad variety of psychoactive compounds, meditative practices, and other modalities. The authors critically discuss existing terminology and argue that specialized vocabularies are needed to ground this nascent research field, proposing the notion of 'emergence' and 'emergent phenomenology' as foundational concepts.
October 16, 2025
Sebastian Ehmann, Terje Sparby, Daniel M. Ingram et al.
2 citations
preprint
The analogy that meditation is like mental training is widely used but conceptually underdeveloped. This paper bridges that gap by introducing principles from exercise science—such as programming, periodization, and core training variables (volume, frequency, duration, density, intensity)—to contemplative training contexts. It proposes defining training intensity as the graded phenomenal presence of specific meditative qualities alongside minimization of counteractive qualities, referenced against a normative standard. Advanced meditation involves not just accumulating training volume but refining skills to access advanced states, stages, and endpoints. The authors argue that adopting a unified semantic framework and systematically assessing these variables would enable more precise, comparable, and cumulative analyses across studies.
Mindfulness
May 1, 2024
Malcolm J. Wright, Julieta Galante, J. S. Corneille et al.
About 45% of people from three international communities—UK online panelists, US-based MTurk workers, and readers of a rationalist blog—report having had at least one sudden unusual mental or somatic experience, not caused by drugs, that is often interpreted as spiritual or mystical. The most common experiences include derealization (17%), unitive experiences (15%), and ecstatic thrills (15%). Following such experiences, respondents reported a mix of positive and negative well-being outcomes; 13% reported moderate or greater suffering and 1.1% reported life-threatening suffering. Of those who suffered, 63% did not seek help. These emergent phenomena appear widespread and can lead to both benefits and harms that are not adequately addressed by clinical practice.