Neuroscience's Third Wave Explores Advanced Meditation, Enduring Transformations, and the Brain

A review article published in Neuron, Cell Press's flagship neuroscience journal, frames what researchers are calling the "third wave" of meditation science: a rigorous, phenomenology-driven push into the states, stages, and endpoints that emerge only with deep, long-term practice. This isn't incremental progress on stress reduction. It's a fundamental reorientation of what the field is even asking.

Three Waves, and Why the Third Changes Everything

To understand the stakes, the history matters. Writing in Scientific American, Matthew Sacchet, PhD, Director of the Meditation Research Program at Mass General and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, argues that meditation can be so much more than stress relief: a gateway to experiences facilitating deep psychological transformation. The research tradition that produced him has moved through three distinct phases. The first wave, focused largely on clinical applications, began in earnest in the 1980s, and eventually delivered strong evidence that mindfulness was clinically meaningful for depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and a list of conditions that's continuing to grow. During the 2000s and 2010s, while clinical research expanded, a second wave of investigations focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying meditation and the related clinical effects. The second wave asked *how* mindfulness works; its findings showed benefits for mental health at times comparable to those achieved with pharmaceuticals. The cultural impact has been real: it is clear that meditation is helpful for many, and Sacchet's team has begun to use cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to study the neural activity of practitioners in deep meditative states.

Now, the third wave asks a different question entirely. Sacchet describes being on "the cusp of a third wave or a third major epoch of meditation research, which is really the next frontier for this entire field." Though informed by earlier epochs, it goes beyond both: it asks what these practices may be capable of, their limits and endpoints, and is informed by what they historically and traditionally were developed for.

What "Advanced Meditation" Actually Means

The term needs precision. Meditation itself, formally defined by Sparby and Sacchet, is "the deliberate engagement in one or more of a set of mental activities such as attention, observation, and imagination, the cultivation of which is performed not only for its intrinsic value but also to realize different secular and non-secular aims internally related to the practice itself." Advanced meditation takes this further: advanced meditation consists of states and stages of practice that unfold with mastery and time.

The Neuron review and the MGH/Harvard research program identify four categories of advanced meditative phenomena that third-wave science is working to map:

• Distinct states: Advanced concentrative absorption meditation, or ACAM, exemplified by the jhāna sequence. Jhāna meditation (ACAM-J) consists of eight progressive states of altered consciousness, classified into form and formless jhānas. Traditional accounts describe them as a series starting with ACAM-J1 and ending with ACAM-J8, often characterized by five factors: directed attention, sustained attention, emotional joy, mental ease, and single pointedness.

• Stages: Advanced investigative insight meditation (AIIM), which maps the sequential unfolding of insight across practice.

• Endpoint events: Momentary and extended cessations. Cessation events may be spontaneously experienced during deep meditation as a culmination of the stages of insight or advanced absorption meditation. Crucially, while these attainments involve quite literally the cessation of experience, meditators have subsequent awareness of this "gap" and often experience profound clarity, openness, and insight into the emptiness of phenomena.

• Persistent endpoints: Enduring psychological transformations that outlast any single sitting, reshaping the practitioner's baseline relationship to self, emotion, and experience.

Beyond mindfulness, advanced meditation is rooted in the activity of becoming aware of one's own awareness and is characterized by experiences of intense bliss, insight into the nature of self and reality, as well as altruistic and compassionate behavior.

The Methodological Break from Earlier Research

Here's where the third wave makes its sharpest methodological argument. Earlier research, even studies involving so-called long-term or expert practitioners, relied on duration-based participant groupings. How many years someone had practiced stood in as a proxy for depth of practice, and the studies "seldom assessed meditation-related phenomenology," limiting efforts to link reported experience to neural dynamics. The result: studies that told us something about meditators as a demographic, but comparatively little about what was actually happening in a given meditative state.

Within computational phenomenology, contemplative practices emerge as a compelling domain of study, offering a path toward the investigation of profound psychological and emotional development into identifiable skills, states, stages, and meditative endpoints. Given their heightened sensitivity to internal states, trained meditators provide rich, structured, and fine-grained accounts of these experiences, making them an ideal population within this field of study.

The third wave insists on integrating those accounts. A defining feature of the emerging work is its emphasis on phenomenology, wherein practitioners' first-person reports are systematically integrated with strong theoretical frameworks grounded in modern mind and brain science, contemplative traditions, and neuroimaging/electrophysiology. "A neuroscientific framework grounded in the neuroimaging and electrophysiology of diverse advanced meditative phenomena is rapidly gaining traction," the Neuron review states.

What the Brain Data Is Already Showing

The empirical work is young but specific. Dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) analysis of fMRI can identify brain states underlying advanced meditation. One intensive case study followed a meditator who completed 27 runs of jhāna advanced absorptive concentration meditation, concurrently with 7-T fMRI and phenomenological reporting, identifying three brain states that marked differences between ACAM-J and nonmeditative control conditions, characterized as a DMN-anticorrelated brain state, a hyperconnected brain state, and a sparsely connected brain state. Analyses indicate higher prevalence of the DMN-anticorrelated brain state during ACAM-J than control states, and the prevalence increased significantly with deeper ACAM-J states.

During advanced concentrative absorption meditation, Sacchet's team has observed "a shift of activity from the anterior to posterior part of the brain, that is, from front to back." As Sacchet puts it: "This mirrors a shift from a mind engaged with conceptual thought to one that is increasingly present."

The initial success of pioneering neuroscience studies on never-before rigorously studied advanced meditation include advanced concentrative absorption meditation (jhāna) and the meditative endpoint known as cessations (nirodha), with much more to be discovered. Supporting neuroscience also draws on prior work by Fell et al. (2010), Gervais et al. (2023), Orme-Johnson (2000), Singleton et al. (2021), and Travis (2014), researchers whose findings provide a growing foundation for the neuroimaging and electrophysiology work now underway.

Rethinking "Negative Effects" as Part of the Path

One of the third wave's most consequential arguments isn't about peak states at all. It's about how science interprets difficulty. A Springer-published commentary by Sparby and Sacchet argues that "in the third wave of meditation research focused on advanced meditation, there is an ongoing shift toward nuance and complexity in the interpretation of 'negative effects.'"

The earlier, simpler view held that adverse effects should be avoided wherever possible, and tolerated only when the benefits outweigh the risks. The third-wave argument expands that framing significantly: "pains, unpleasant sensations, and other aversive experiences may be unavoidable or even essential for meditative development." Sparby and Sacchet's 2025 paper published in Mindfulness addresses the implications of challenging experiences for negative effects, transformative psychological growth, and forms of happiness.

This reframing has direct clinical relevance. Sacchet's lab published a study investigating advanced mindfulness meditation "cessation" experiences using EEG spectral analysis in an intensively sampled case study, published in Neuropsychologia. Complementing this is Lindahl et al.'s 2020 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, "Progress or Pathology? Differential diagnosis and intervention criteria for meditation-related challenges: Perspectives from Buddhist meditation teachers and practitioners," which laid out criteria for distinguishing genuine meditative development from experiences that warrant clinical concern. The question isn't whether difficult experiences arise in deep practice; they do. The question is what they mean and what interventions, if any, are appropriate.

The Clinical and Societal Stakes

The promise isn't purely theoretical. "Advanced meditation holds remarkable promise for supporting well-being in both clinical and nonmedical settings," according to the Scientific American framing of this research. The potential reach is specific: the capacity to massively reduce or otherwise alter narrative and self-referential thinking, improve attention, and foster feelings of self-generated joy and contentment "far beyond what is currently understood in the domain of 'mindfulness' research and practice—qualities that are often difficult for people with mental health conditions to attain."

The broader context: mindfulness has already cleared real cultural and institutional barriers. The U.K.'s National Health Service has endorsed mindfulness-based therapy for depression, and mobile apps have brought meditative techniques to smartphones, expanding access to a global audience. Sacchet's team has begun to use cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to study the neural activity of practitioners in deep meditative states, and by learning how meditation affects the structure and function of the brain, researchers can develop new models of mental health that incorporate concepts from advanced meditation, including self-transcendence and human flourishing.

Sacchet has said it is "very possible that we might see the jhānas fitting into hospitals, clinics, and perhaps the public in general." That's not a casual projection from someone outside the clinical world; it comes from a researcher embedded in the largest hospital-based research program affiliated with Harvard Medical School, using fMRI and EEG systems that are, in his words, "neuroimaging systems here that haven't been used yet to study meditation — ever."

Where the Research Goes Next

The field is moving beyond framing mindfulness and meditation research in the context of stress reduction and asking: what are the limits and endpoints of these practices? It brings a scientific lens to questions of what these phenomena might be, how to study and understand them, and ultimately, how to use that insight to develop better ways to facilitate more people experiencing them.

The mission of the Meditation Research Program at Mass General and Harvard is to establish a scientific understanding of, and to share, advanced meditation; the program's research spans and integrates diverse fields across clinical science and medicine, computer and computational science, engineering, epidemiology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.

The Neuron review identifies future research directions that include longitudinal studies tracking practitioners across stages of mastery (not just comparing meditators to non-meditators by years of practice), phenomenologically validated instruments for classifying states like ACAM and AIIM, and rigorous diagnostic frameworks for evaluating meditation-related challenges. The union of advanced meditation and neuroscience, as the review's authors put it, "offers radical potential for understanding the foundations of happiness and the nature of the human experience." That's a large claim. The research to back it up is just getting started — and what's already been measured inside a 7-Tesla fMRI machine suggests the claim is not unreasonable.