The human default consciousness and its disruption: insights from an EEG study of Buddhist jhāna meditation

Abstract

The “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) is a familiar topic in neuroscience, overlapping with research on the brain’s “default mode network”. Task-based studies of NCC by their nature recruit one part of the cortical network to study another, and are therefore both limited and compromised in what they can reveal about consciousness itself. The form of consciousness explored in such research, we term the human default consciousness (DCs), our everyday waking consciousness. In contrast, studies of anaesthesia, coma, deep sleep, or some extreme pathological states such as epilepsy, reveal very different cortical activity; all of which states are essentially involuntary, and generally regarded as “unconscious”. An exception to involuntary disruption of consciousness is Buddhist jhāna meditation, whose implicit aim is to intentionally withdraw from the default consciousness, to an inward-directed state of stillness referred to as jhāna consciousness, as a basis to develop insight. The default consciousness is sensorily-based, where information about, and our experience of, the outer world is evaluated against personal and organic needs and forms the basis of our ongoing self-experience. This view conforms both to Buddhist models, and to the emerging work on active inference and minimisation of free energy in determining the network balance of the human default consciousness.This paper is a preliminary report on the first detailed EEG study of jhāna meditation, with findings radically different to studies of more familiar, less focused forms of meditation. While remaining highly alert and “present” in their subjective experience, a high proportion of subjects display “spindle” activity in their EEG, superficially similar to sleep spindles of stage 2 nREM sleep, while more-experienced subjects display high voltage slow-waves reminiscent, but significantly different, to the slow waves of deeper stage 4 nREM sleep, or even high-voltage delta coma. Some others show brief posterior spike-wave bursts, again similar, but with significant differences, to absence epilepsy. Some subjects also develop the ability to consciously evoke clonic seizure-like activity at will, under full control. We suggest that the remarkable nature of these observations reflects a profound disruption of the human DCs when the personal element is progressively withdrawn.