"Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream," The Beatles sang. Turns out, experienced meditators can do just that according to a new scientific study. Researchers used EEG to measure brain activity of experienced Tibetan Buddhist meditators and determined that they could "voluntarily induce unconscious states, known as cessations."
From Neuroscience News:
By correlating the meditator's first-person experience with neuroimaging data, researchers have gained insights into the profound modulation of consciousness achievable through advanced meditation practices[…]
In the event known as cessation (or nirodha, according to Tibetan Buddhist terminology), the meditators briefly lose consciousness, but upon re-awakening, they are said to experience significant changes in the way their mind works, including a sudden sense of profound mental and perceptual clarity.
Matthew Sacchet, together with researchers from Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States, realized that the idea that a meditator has the ability to "turn off" consciousness could have broad implications for our understanding of how cognition works…
Here's the scientific paper in the journal Neuropsychologia: "Investigation of advanced mindfulness meditation "cessation" experiences using EEG spectral analysis in an intensively sampled case study"
