Last week introduced the topic of jhanas – altered states of consciousness that can be entered during Buddhist meditation.
The ever deepening nature of jhanas can be illustrated by the poetic description and random capitalisation on the Metanoia Press website. Here’s jhana 1:
Initial Withdrawal of Mind from outer sensory world to Within. Non-sensual pleasure and happiness. Discursive self-referential thought continues. Some background noise in mind continues.
Five jhanas on, things have taken quite the turn:
Here, the perceived space dissolves into a living fractal world full of unimaginable qualities, beings, environments, and jewels. The vast infinite consciousness serves as the surface for the Saguna (with-attributes) Brahman to bring forth its magnificent qualities. Multi-Dimensional Self-Mirroring Fractal Worlds and Beings recursively nested within each other come into direct experience and participation—a Living Web of Constellations. Each being uniquely experiences all the universes and cosmic manifestations of Saguna (With-Attributes) Brahman. The worlds are created and dissolved in mere moments through acts of mere attention and intention in Brahman’s Living Eternal Surface of Infinite Consciousness. Indra’s Web. Garden of Eden. Krishna’s Vishwarupa (Infinite Cosmic Form). A million divine forms, with an infinite variety of color and shape.
This week’s The Witness Space covers a 2013 paper in Neural Plasticity describing the first neural recording during jhanas, with American researchers examining – and rejecting – three ways the subject might have activated his reward system by external means.
“Taken together,” they write, “these results demonstrate an apparently novel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.”
It’s not hard to find scientific studies of meditation and physiological changes, but this study stands out for examining the ability to up-regulate positive emotions, rather than mitigating negative states such as depression or anxiety.
The dopamine system, the authors say, generates pleasure and governs positive reinforcement, with studies showing a cascade of brain neurons ending in the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) being activated. Further research has linked medial OFC activity with subjective reports of pleasure for smell, taste and music.
Indeed, the system has been activated for a wide range of stimuli, also including sex, humour and monetary gain – but no one had ever shown that the dopamine system could be activated without external causes.
Until now.
The researchers hooked up a 53-year-old male Buddhist practitioner with 17 years of training – about 6000 hours – believed to be the only person in the US with both the desire and experience to be studied.
As well as seeing what fMRI and EEG scans showed, they tested other ways they thought the feelings of bliss might be activated: subtle body movements which can induce altered states; or recalling a pleasant experience, which would generate bliss but not use the full dopamine system.
The meditator cycled from J1 to J8, signalling with a double finger tap when beginning the transition to the next stage and clicking with a mouse when he’d reached it. Each jhana state lasted about 120 seconds, with 30 seconds for each transition.
The paper’s first five hypotheses were built on five jhana characteristics that may have specific brain correlates (and can therefore be tested). Results from EEG follow each result, which is in italics.
H1: decreased activation compared to rest in visual and auditory processing areas
Characteristic: Internal verbalisations dwindle or vanish.
Visual – significant
Audio – supportive
H2: decreased activation in two areas associated with speech
Characteristic: Internal verbalisations fade or become “wispy”.
Strongly supported
H3: decreased activation in the orientation area
Characteristic: Altered sense of bodily boundaries or orientation.
Strongly supported
H4: increased activity in the area which regulates attention
Characteristic: Highly focused attention on the object of meditation.
More weakly confirmed
H5: increased activation in dopamine reward system
Characteristic: Joy increases to high levels and can be maintained.
Strongly confirmed
H6 (testing to see if the meditator is triggering bliss via movement): no increased activation in areas responsible for rhythmic movement
Hypothesis strongly rejected
With each hypothesis supported, the researchers analysed the data to see if different meditation states produced different brain activation patterns, with the below results. For some reason they only include data from the first five jhanas, with no explanation given for leaving out numbers from J6-8.
J2, J3 and J5 are all lower than rest, but J4 is higher. That could be explained by the meditator being distracted, but he said that wasn’t the case.
Also, 3 (b) shows that dopamine rewards peaked at J4, which by definition is supposed to be less joyful than J2 and J3, while the complete dopamine system only triggered for J2 (at least living up to its name of “joy and bliss”).
EEG results also variously supported the hypotheses, though with some non-significant readings against expectations.
The results weren’t entirely what the researchers expected. Orientation and visual activity didn’t decline after J3, contrary to the notion of each jhana going “deeper”. While J2 and J3 are supposed to be equally joyful, J2 was more so.
But tests to see if the meditator was producing these effects externally were more promising, though with a warning that other possibly pathways hadn’t been studied. Was the subject making subtle movements known to trigger bliss? No. Brain areas linked with somatosensory and motor coordination showed a significant fall in activity.
Was the subject recalling a memory of a happy time, and in doing so triggering the reward system? No. Activity in regions associated with vision and hearing declined significantly.
Researchers were also able to explain why subjective reports – the meditator spoke of J3 as being like post-coital bliss, for example – weren’t matched with the measured size of the reward signal, theorising that less was needed in a brain already quietened by meditation.
But does this raise the spectre of meditators spending their days blissed out in jhanas, like a tribe of wasted organic junkies? Jhana meditators report negative tolerance, as it becomes easier to enter them over time, and no withdrawal symptoms have been reported.
While there could be issues with motivating the survival instinct, the authors note “that the modern environment already allows unprecedented stimulation of the dopamine reward system with plentiful food and drugs of abuse”.
As for potential issues, time to bring out The Witness Space favourite for the first time in a few weeks!
Bonus clip
Next week: jhanas III