How meditation deconstructs your mind

We’re laying out the latest science of what meditation does to your mind. The better we understand the common mechanisms across how different meditation practices affect the mind, the more meditation science can contribute to broader understandings of human psychology.

More relevant for us non-scientists, we’ll get better at developing and fine-tuning styles of practice that can help us get the most out of whatever we’re looking for in taking up meditation. (It’s possible, after all, that there are improvements to be made on the instructions we received a few thousand years ago.) 

There’s a lot to get into here, but if you walk away from this with anything, it should be that in the past few years, a breakthrough has begun sweeping across meditation research, delivering science’s first “general theory of meditation.” That means very exciting days — and more to the point, scientifically refined meditation frameworks and practices — are not too far ahead. 

Don’t we already know what meditation is?

Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.

Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.

One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.

But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.

Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there. 

Which might leave you wondering why it’s mindful relaxation that gets all the attention. For one thing, there’s how much time we imagine deeper meditation practices will take — we’ll get into that later in this course. Another obstacle blocking advanced meditation’s path into the mainstream is that a critical mass of Americans aren’t exactly itching to become full-on Buddhists. But if you turned to science instead of religion for guidance on these meditation practices in the past few decades, you’d mostly find a bunch of scattered neuroscience jargon that doesn’t all hang together.

Buddhism can paint a really elaborate picture of what’s going on with meditation, with ancient models of meditative development still being used today, like the four-path model. Science has struggled to do the same. We know some interesting but scattered things: Meditation makes parts of your brain grow thicker. It changes patterns of electrical activity in key brain networks. It raises the baseline of gamma wave activity. It shrinks your amygdala. 

The problem, as Shamil Chandaria, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, put it to me, is weaving it all together into a story that shows us the big picture. “In terms of all these neuroscience results,” Chandaria said, “there’s this problem of what does it all mean?”

In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.

A general theory of meditation

Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.

Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm. 

“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.

Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)

And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.

You can think of this progression as four rungs on a ladder that lead from the surface of the mind all the way down to the bottom. Or, from the beginner stages of meditation, all the way through to the very advanced. You can place a huge variety of meditative practices — though not all — somewhere along this spectrum.

And just about everything that’s grown popular under the label of mindfulness is in that first group of focused-attention practices. The idea that meditation can make you “10 percent happier” is talking about these introductory practices that settle the mind.

But the idea that meditation can make you 10 times happier, like meditation teacher Shinzen Young claims, references the next stages: practices that open up once the mind begins to settle.

Once more, with science

Now, bear with me. We’re going to retell that story, but using Laukkonen and Slagter’s innovation — the general theory of meditation. The key to this framework is a theory that’s risen to dominate cognitive science in the past decade or so: predictive processing. 

Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals. These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls. 

The building blocks for these conjured models of the world we experience — the predictive mind — are called “priors,” those beliefs or expectations based on the past. Priors run a spectrum from deep and ancestral to superficial and personal.

For example, say you ventured an opinion in front of your third grade class and everyone laughed. You might have formed a prior that assumes sharing your thoughts leads to ridicule. If that experience was particularly meaningful to you, it could embed deep in your predictive mind, shaping your behavior, and even perception of the world, for the rest of your life.

Similarly, our bodies know how to do some of their most basic functions — like maintaining body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — because we’ve inherited priors from our evolutionary history that holding our body in that range will keep us alive. According to predictive processing, consciousness is constructed via this hierarchy of priors like a house of cards.

With all that in place, science’s new meditation story can be put nice and short: Meditation deconstructs the predictive mind.

But hold on. It took billions of years for evolution to slowly, patiently build us these predictive minds. They’re one of the great marvels of biology. Why would we want to deconstruct them? 

Well, evolution doesn’t care whether survival feels good. Conscious experience — as we know it — might be a really useful trick for adapting to our environments and achieving the goals that further life’s crusade against entropy and death. But natural selection cares about ensuring our bodies survive, not that we achieve happiness and well-being. 

Which is why you often hear meditation teachers talking about “reprogramming” the mind. We don’t want to just leave the predictive mind in pieces. Again, it’s one of the most useful adaptations life on Earth has ever mustered. But in some departments, we might want to kindly thank evolution, while taking the reins and revising a bit of its work to make this whole business of living feel better.

“Precision weighting” is the volume knob on the predictive mind

Each step, from focused attention through to cessation, is a deeper deconstruction of the predictive mind. But “deconstructing” doesn’t mean, like, breaking it.

Instead, the key idea is “precision weighting,” which you can think of as the volume knob on each of the priors that make up your predictive mind. The higher the precision — or volume — assigned to something, the more focus your mind pays to it. The more your experience warps around it.

Deconstructing the mind is to progressively turn down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness. By definition, then, the deeper meditation goes, the stranger (as in, further from ordinary) the resulting experience will be.

How meditation deconstructs the predictive mind

So let’s go back to our four-step model of meditative depth. We said the first step, focused attention practices, “settle the mind.” 

Now, we can say that with a bit more detail. By focusing on one particular thing, like the breath, you’re cranking up the precision weighting assigned to it. You’re holding up the volume knob so that your experience settles around it.

By doing so, you also turn down the volume on everything else. You can see this happen in real time pretty easily — just try picking out one specific thing in your current experience. Like your left earlobe — how does it feel right now?

Really, take five seconds and tune into it.

Looking back, you might notice that the more you tuned into that earlobe, the more everything else began to fade into the background. That helps explain why focused attention practices like basic mindfulness can be so relaxing. You’re turning down the volume on everything that’s stressing you out.

Next, in open-monitoring practices, you drop that object of attention and release the volume knob. But it doesn’t twist back to its normal resting position. Since your focusing practice turned down the volume on everything else, the default setting across your mind at large is now lower. 

Focused attention settles your mind onto one object of attention. In open-monitoring, you drop into a more settled mind across the board.

It’s not that you no longer have thoughts springing up. But as those thoughts do, your mind reacts less to them. They’re muted, less sticky, so attention clings to them less. They just come and go more easily. 

That’s why during the open-monitoring stage, you begin to see the entire snow globe that mental activity is happening inside of. The idea of a “field” of awareness is no longer a metaphor; you can see it directly.

“Advanced practitioners are said to be able to effortlessly observe experience as a whole,” write Laukkonen and Slagter, without being ‘caught’ by thoughts, emotions, or anything else that arises in one’s sensorium.”

Focused attention practices are an important step in meditation — it helps to calm your mind before trying to see through it. But on their own, they don’t usually lead to big revelations about how your mind works. Open monitoring is where this “seeing through” process really kicks in.

“There is a space of awareness that’s different from the contents of awareness,” said Chandaria, who’s been meditating for about 37 years. “And that’s something that most people aren’t even aware of. The first time we see that, it’s like, oh, I never knew that there was actually an ocean on which these waves were arising. I never knew the ocean.”

And then there’s non-dual experience

As you sink into open-monitoring practice, the predictive mind has loosened its grip on experience. But there are still deep priors at play.

For example, in open-monitoring practice, it probably still feels like there’s a “you” doing the meditating. And that “you” is experiencing “your” awareness. There’s a subject — you — aware of an object, the field of experience. 

But according to heaps of meditators and mystics through the millennia, this, too, can be deconstructed.  

Non-dual meditation aims at turning down even those deep priors that construct distinctions between subject and object altogether. As well as basically every other possible distinction. During non-dual experiences, there’s no self/other, good/bad, here/there, now/later. All these dualities that underlie ordinary cognition basically melt into a big soup of the Now.

This is the thing — the big soupy Now — that you’ll quickly hear a ton of platitudes about in meditation circles. The illusion of separation, the truth of universal oneness.

That’s because there’s just no great way to describe it — it’s either incredibly weird, or incredibly trite. But if you’re after more descriptions anyway, philosopher and meditator Thomas Metzinger recently published a book containing over 500 different accounts of non-duality, or “minimal phenomenal experience” as he calls it, from advanced meditators across 57 countries. Metzinger is usually at least a decade ahead of the field, so it’s worth a read.

If open-monitoring practice is where meditation’s hefty insights begin kicking into gear, non-duality is where they ramp up. It’s often described as “coming home.” One meditator from Metzinger’s research described it as: “the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”

According to Laukkonen and Slagter’s framework, non-duality is the baseline of all experience. It’s always beneath our ordinary experiences — awareness in its least constructed form. Non-dual meditation practice is about “creating the conditions that reduce ordinary cognition that normally ‘hides’ non-dual awareness.”

But even non-duality isn’t the end of the road. It’s still a mode of consciousness. And according to predictive processing, wherever there’s conscious experience, there’s an underlying prior, or expectation, that’s holding it up. This, too, can be deconstructed.

When the mind has no priors left: Cessation

In the past year, meditation researchers have begun to corroborate long-standing claims from Buddhist scripture that if your meditation goes deep enough, the whole show of consciousness can be extinguished — temporarily, that is — altogether.

Nirodha-samāpatti, or “cessation of thought and feeling,” is a summit of meditative attainment in Theravada Buddhism, the oldest surviving form of Buddhism most commonly practiced in Southeast Asia. Cessation is like going under general anesthesia, but without any drugs. Consciousness can be switched off from the inside, for — according to the scriptures — up to seven days at a time (though the first lab data on cessation looked at a more modest 90-minute stretch).

Cessation is a bonafide advanced meditation thing — I’ll make zero effort to convince you it’s accessible to us non-monastic folks. But according to neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet, who leads the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, the early data collected from studying cessations with neuroscience gizmos supports the idea that meditation deconstructs the predictive mind. 

“Cessation could thus reflect a final release of the expectation to be aware or alert,” Luakkonen and Slagter write. It’s like a bottoming-out of the predictive mind.

Coming out of cessation, meditators can observe the reconstruction of the predictive mind, prior by prior. “That puts us in a special state,” Chandaria said. “You can call it reprogramming mode. And in reprogramming mode, we can start to reprogram ourselves in ways that could be more conducive to human flourishing.”

Why does this matter?

For those of us who aren’t neuroscientists, or don’t care about “predictive processing,” what good does this model of meditation do?

It’s not the objective truth about what meditation actually does. It’s just a story. It’s not comprehensive — there are styles of meditation that wouldn’t fit neatly onto this framework. And meditation doesn’t always follow this trajectory — you can go straight into non-dual practices, or try out open-monitoring before focused attention.

On a personal note, I find this framework really helpful. Immediately after reading Laukkonen and Slagter’s paper, it gave me a way to see my own practice that clicked with my experience better than other stories — which stem from other cultures — about what meditation does.

Now, I usually spend the beginning of my meditation sessions doing focused attention practice to settle the mind. And when I notice my concentration is stable enough, I release the focus and drop into open-monitoring practices. And when my mind falls into an especially weird place that words don’t really capture, I figure, maybe that’s leaning into this non-dual stuff? Just having the labels helped kindle my interest in playing around with things.

And as a scientific framework, this model is generating all sorts of new hypotheses to test. More broadly, it also gives us a way to think through how it’s possible that so many people are trying meditation, but so few are having the big transformative experiences that more advanced practitioners talk about.

Even if some 60 million Americans tried meditation in 2022, if most of them only do some sort of focused attention practice, they’re never trying anything beyond the first step. That’s like concluding that running probably won’t make you significantly healthier because you laced up your sneakers and nothing transformative happened.

When I asked Chandaria how this new scientific model compares to religious models that have been around for ages, like Theravada Buddhism’s four-path model, he said that “Ultimately…all these stories are pointing to the moon. But [contemplative traditions] were pointing with their fingers. Now, we have laser pointers.” And as science progresses, “we’ll be able to work with what we’re finding out about the brain,” he added. “It’s actually about making progress, and by progress, I mean more useful stories.”