Jake Eaton: I’m speaking to you for the Weird Issue, and I thought a good place to start was with the Berkeley Alembic, which you, a neuroscientist and meditation practitioner, co-founded. 

The Alembic hosts events on “meditation, embodiment, scientific inquiry, psychedelic exploration, and visionary culture.” In the past few months, that’s included sessions on, for example, botanical medicine for psychedelic integration, an immersive VR experience focused on death, and a divination class — in addition to regular programming on meditation, psychedelics, and the like. 

One way I think of the Alembic is as a place that filters for the 0.001% of the population in terms of openness to experience. This made me wonder: is “weird” even a meaningful concept to you anymore? 

Kati Devaney: I use the term “weird” as a compliment. One of my co-founders at Alembic is Erik Davis, who wrote High Weirdness. 

I do a lot of the programming for the Alembic, and one of the ways I select is based on that feeling of “I know it when I see it.” Whether it’s weird is one of my metrics. Is it unusual? Another is whether the teacher or facilitator is speaking from a deep place of knowing. 

Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I can pick up when people are parroting something versus when they’re teaching something they’ve integrated into that unquantifiable bit of their soul. We select for people creating something that’s coming from them. 

One of the events you didn’t mention was with Daniel Chamberlin, who does death-focused yin yoga to metal music. There is only one of those guys, you know? He’s done all the yin training, but then he’s mixing it in with his experience of hardcore and metal shows and his own deep, compassionate nature. So there’s a sense of “This is really unusual and really deep. We like it. Come hang out with us.” 

J: I’m sorry I missed that. I was recently talking about how the moves you make in jhana meditation are similar to those you make in yin yoga when you release bodily tension. 

K: Except you make it in your mind. Totally. The Alembic is trying to create opportunities for cross training just like that. Our main classes, the backbone of regular meditation and yoga, are less weird. They’re appropriate for people who have played around with an app and are now looking for a place to go meditate with people. 

But our special events run the gamut from lineaged rinpoches ¹ to something strange and cool and out there that only seven people will show up for — but even so, we want to program it for those seven people. 

J: When you consider the many different modalities that have come through the Alembic at this point, has anything broken through to you in a way that surprised you? Are you still surprised? 

K: It happens, probably, not once a month anymore, but pretty frequently. I continue to be delighted by the monthly psychedelic salon that we host, The Chalice. There’s so much psychedelic stuff out there now and so many people who are — no offense to people in their 20s — basically 22-year-old psychedelic guides who have done ketamine a few times and now think “I’ll help.” The people who come into The Chalice are all, for the most part, in their 60s and 70s or older. They were around for the first wave of psychedelics — the Leary, Alpert, Kesey wave. They learned some stuff during that time and have interesting things to share. I think their attitudes are an embodied way of learning from them. 

For example, Maria Mangini was the youngest resident of Millbrook, ² and she organizes The Chalice. Someone recently mentioned the “psychedelic renaissance,” and Maria said something very wise about the hype cycles — that there’s going to be a backlash, that we’ve seen this before. But she was so relaxed while she was saying it. She had this attitude of “Yeah, there are stakes, but we’ll see.” We have a lot to learn from that generation, especially around mistakes we cannot make again. 

We also had a Shakta Tantra woman come in and teach us how to wrap mantras around the body. That practice blew my world open. It became my main practice for the next six weeks. The fact that she could go that deep during a six hour day-long on a Saturday was amazing.

J: It's a mantra practice mixed with a body scan?

K: Yeah, exactly, and a visualization.

J: Okay, so weird stuff aside, let’s talk about normal neuroscience, such as observing the cessation of consciousness in an fMRI machine. 

K: Just the regular stuff. Sure.

J: Before we get to cessation, though, can you briefly orient our readers to the neuroscientific study of meditation? How big is the field, how long has it existed, and what are its core methods?

K: Between the 70s and 90s, there was a small group of people looking at how meditation changed behavior. There were a few studies which used EEG to measure brain waves, but most of the research was on attention. Dan Brown did a lot of early research on this theme. There’s also a well-known paper by Valentine and Sweet, which looked at sustained attention. ³

And then, in the late 90s, Sarah Lazar at Harvard and Richie Davidson in Wisconsin were some of the first people to put meditators — often monks — into brain scanners. Most of that work was cross-sectional. 

Around the 2010s, people started doing more active fMRI research on meditators. A lot of this was enabled by the Mind & Life Institute, which provided funding and drew public awareness to be able to do research. Some well known researchers during this time, in addition to Sara Lazar, include Judson Brewer, Cathy Kerr, and Dave Vago. In 2016, for instance, Fadel Zaidan published a paper on meditation-based pain relief in the Journal of Neuroscience. When I wrote my own grant in 2011, I used the word “meditation” just once. Otherwise, I emphasized “attention training.” That was what you had to do back then in order to get funding.

But then, recently, there’s been a fork in the road. One way to get funding — the easier way — is doing mindfulness-based stress reduction research. MBSR is an amenable technique for researchers because it’s a concrete, 8-week intervention. You take your measurement, run the program, and take your measurement again. And you can apply that to whatever your area of interest is — say PTSD. 

But there’s a smaller, weirder fork looking at the deep end of meditation practice. That research is trying to get at what meditation is changing in the brain or the mind. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take the weird fork. 

But there’s still this giant, unexplored middle. For example, when someone starts meditating, what changes happen in the first six weeks? Six months? Two years? Are these trajectories standard and predictable? How many are there?

So we have this MBSR line and this weird deep line, but everything else is still up for grabs.      

J: Let’s talk about the weird deep line. In the past couple of years there have been two papers on cessation of consciousness, which is a rarely attained state among advanced meditators in which all conscious activity ceases.There’s also emerging research on an advanced practice called fire kasina, which, in one pilot study, was practiced for up to 14 hours a day. 

There’s a growing interest on what happens to advanced practitioners. Why are these practices breaking through now — and only now? I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, more esoteric practices are harder for a general public to understand and might invite skepticism. But I could also imagine that advanced practice — and the much more interesting states you find at that end — would have been of interest to earlier researchers. 

K: There's one very practical reason — and then I have more speculative reasons. 

The practical reason is that’s just how science funding works. The majority of funding for scientific research comes from the NIH and its associated organizations. Over time, those organizations have become more conservative about what they will fund. You have to be pretty sure your project is going to work before you even propose it. But as meditation has become more and more accessible and generated more mainstream interest, there’s been an increase in philanthropic funding. 

But another reason is that the Overton window on research has slowly and surely been moving. I’m grateful to Sara Lazar for really starting this: she was a geneticist, she hurt her back, got prescribed yoga, and thought, “What is this bullshit?” Then she did the yoga and realized: this is amazing. Then she started studying meditators. Back when I wrote my grant, I could cite her stuff. You have this incremental progress ratchet in science. The people who came before us in the 90s and early 2000s really opened doors for the next generation.

J: Let’s talk about some of the advanced states. What is cessation? And how did we start studying it in the scanner? 

K: Sure. There are two different types, and this is important. 

There’s one type, which lasts longer. It’s nicknamed the ninth jhana. That’s nirodha samapatti. 

The other type – still cessation — is much shorter. The analogy I’ve heard is “missing frames in a movie.” You blink out for a second and then you’re right back. 

I’ve experienced a lot of the blippy ones, but never nirodha samapatti, so I can’t speak to whatever the paradoxical first person experience of that would be. 

So: the blippy ones. There is a sense in which your equanimity is really high. It’s almost like an attractor state in consciousness where if you don’t do anything, you can get pulled in that direction and notice yourself going in. But there are different entry points, and I’ve experienced a few. There’s one where the world just, like, gets ripped away from you to the side. That was the first I ever experienced — like the feeling of going up over a roller coaster. There was nothing about it. I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t scared. It was just a thing happening. And then I was out. And then I remember the feeling of coming back. 

That’s the pattern. There’s a ramp up, then you’re gone. And then you experience the coming back. And that part feels really good. 

So this is a weird thing that the brain does. We do not understand — at all — how it is working. I’m excited to say that, with Jhourney, we now have EEG data on an experienced nirodha meditator who was able to go up through the jhanas into nirodha and stay there for a while. 

And in the paper we recently published, we report EEG data which looks somewhat similar to ketamine EEG data. It looks like it might be an anesthetic-like experience or a vestigial sort of hibernation. 

But the truth is: we need a lot more data to understand, spatially, what’s going on in the brain, both in the ramp up to cessation and in the ramp down. 

J: Specifically, the paper reports there’s “a linear decrease in large-scale functional neural interactions in the alpha band.” Like I’m 12, what does that mean?

K: This data is going to tell you a lot about what's going on in time but nothing about what's going on in space. We don't know where in the brain this is happening, necessarily. We do know, however, that the role of the alpha band — brain waves in the 8-13 Hz range — is attention filtering. Differences or changes in alpha activity help build the salience map of the world. We can see, for instance, that alpha suppression is different in the motor cortex in mediators who are doing a body scan. 

So differences in alpha seem to be important not just for building the attentional map of the world, but potentially the world itself — perceptually building the world. And what we saw in the cessation data was that that map lost all contrast and went flat. 

We need a lot more data before we can begin to replicate that across people. But it's an interesting early indicator that the perceptual mechanism responsible for  both attending to and in some ways creating the model of the world goes offline temporarily.

J: I haven’t personally experienced cessation, but I have a meditation practice. I can understand intellectually, if not always emotionally, how breaking the chain of reactivity — noticing the gap between stimulus and response — leads to equanimity. And so it makes sense to me severing that chain entirely via cessation can lead to even deeper equanimity and clarity. But from a brain perspective, do we know what is actually happening to foster that feeling? 

K: This requires a little bit of background on how predictive processing and predictive modeling works. 

The short version is that we are biasing our attention according to our prior experience in order to keep ourselves safe and alive. I think — but have not yet found the mechanism — that there exists a checker constantly running in between the predictions we have and the environment we're experiencing. And I'm hypothesizing the existence of the checker because of the existence of the prediction error signal that we can document. That’s one of the oldest EEG signals. 

When your predictive mechanism doesn't match the environment, you get this error signal. And it's one of the strongest signals in the brain. And in order for that error signal to exist, something's got to be checking the prediction against reality. I think running that checker all the time is annoying. 

I think what we think of as higher and higher equanimity is actually just a decrease in the frequency of that checker. And in the same way, recognizing objects and biasing our attention to the world out there — differentiating between, for example, “that is a tree” and “there is a bird” — requires subtle mental tension. It makes perfect sense why we do that — so we don’t get eaten. But you can just relax that mechanism. Have you sat with your eyes open? 

J: Yeah.

K: You sit with your eyes open, and you can watch your mind relax. You can see the whole world. It doesn’t become confusing goop. It’s just “stuff out there,” and you don’t need to know what it is right now. You can feel that “thing” relax. 

I think there are these nested hierarchical feedback loops between top-down attentional systems, bottom-up perceptual systems, and where they're meeting. I think this is happening in the temporal parietal junction, where there's that checker running, trying to pattern-match them. And the mechanism by which late-stage meditation is working is by harmonizing the top-down predictive model with the bottom-up world data so that there’s less and less of a clash between them. It’s decreasing the refresh rate.

J: There was recently a study detailing the experiences of meditators who were doing intensive fire kasina practice. This is a technique where one gazes at a flame or candle, then maintains the afterimage with your eyes closed. Six practitioners at the retreat — so caveat, small sample — took the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. Five out of those six scored higher on the MEQ than the average participant in any psychedelic trial. 

We know that MEQ scores are one of the best predictors of transformative change in psilocybin therapy, for instance. But when this study did its follow-ups, it didn’t exactly seem as if the meditators had had their world rocked — maybe, the authors suggest, because they were already experienced meditators.

There’s at least preliminary evidence that high-dose psychedelic experiences and deep meditation practices are doing something similar in the brain from a predictive processing angle. Yet insights via meditation usually come gradually, and practice might possibly culminate in an experience like cessation. With psychedelics, the main event happens first — and all at once — and insights either come then and there or through integration after that. Can you tie those threads together for me?

K: You can think of meditation practice as a nested series of iterative loops. You do the practice, and the practice inherently meets you where you’re at. You’re in your window of tolerance the whole time. You can mess with that a little, but for the most part, if you're practicing in a way that's sane, you're going to stay in your window of tolerance. You're going to develop slowly and iteratively. That's not to say there aren't big moments of insight that feel like step functions. But it’s going to feel like you’ve been going in one direction for a while, and then bonk, new thing, keep going, bonk, new thing. 

Psychedelics, I think, are doing a larger loop. It's a bigger, more dramatic loop that's also more transient. So you get this temporary preview of where something can go later, but only once it has stabilized. As people discovered to their annoyance in the 60s and 70s — Ram Dass is a great example of this — you can't stay there. You never get to stay. You always have to come back. Which is why so many psychedelic people start meditating. 

If you look at the functional connectivity studies that have been done while people are on psychedelics in the magnet — God bless them — you see parts of the brain that aren’t supposed to talk to each other communicating. In particular, parts of the default mode network, which typically only talks to itself, starts connecting up with other attention networks. Those other networks are typically much more concerned with the world model, not the self model. A very simple explanation for the experience of “I became one with everything” is that your default mode network is linking up with your attention network. 

I studied 16 meditators in my thesis. This isn’t in the paper because I only saw it in five of them, but for those five, the nodes of their ventral attention network — that’s the part of the attentional system that does open monitoring — were connected up to the default mode network. 

I don’t think that just happened one day. I think probably what happened is that slowly, with every hour of practice, those areas are finding each other. Eventually, that shift becomes stable. 

J: Advanced meditators, especially those who do “non-dual” practice sometimes have a persistent shift in their experience where the sense of a separate self dissolves. Would those five people be evidence of people who have stabilized non-duality? 

K: Unfortunately, at the time, non-duality was too woo to think about. As a PhD student, I was doing Goenka meditation and studying Goenka meditators, and if you had asked me about non-duality I would have said there’s probably, like, seven old guys with white beards in caves on top of mountains who can access those states. I didn’t even ask! I just asked “how many lifetime hours of meditation do you have?” So I don’t know!

J: In some modern dharma circles, there’s an idea that all roads lead to Damascus. It’s hard to imagine there’s one right way to do meditation for everyone. What is the project by which we figure out whether there’s a specific set of practices that are faster for everyone? Can we align practice to someone’s personality? How do we go about that?

K: That's up for debate. Whether it's different routes up the same mountain, or whether there are different mountains altogether, we don't know. The way to do this is going to be to collect a lot of data. We need to get a lot of longitudinal data of people doing different practices and then build up that data set so that when a new practitioner enters, we can match them to people who've had success or failure at different types of practice. 

Anecdotally, I've been running meditation centers now for almost eight years, and the way that I match people to practices is I stand in the lobby and hang out with them. When they ask, “Where should I go?” I ask them a few questions, and I toss them into a class. I’m picking up on something. All meditation teachers are practice-matching all the time, using their intuition. The question is whether there’s something we can do to augment that intuition. 

In practice circles, everyone knows there are some people who are really movement people and others who just want to sit really still. But we don’t know if there’s one mechanism which would work for both of them — if it’s one elephant, so to speak, or a whole menagerie. 

It’s not just personality, either. There’s a humanistic aspect to it too. What are your values, what makes you tear up, where do you find beauty? What is changing in your brain and mind as you’re going along this path? 

J: Right. It’s easy to see the personality differences between your friends who are drawn to concentration practices and your friends who like open monitoring practices. 

K: Yeah! And they should probably all just switch. What you’re drawn to might be the exact opposite of what you should be doing because it’s reinforcing all the stuff you like and don’t like. But that’s a whole other conversation. 

J: So we’re now in a place where more advanced practices and/or states — fire kasina, jhana, cessation — are gaining scientific credence. A few years ago the question about jhanas was whether they were real.

What I don’t see discussed much, at least scientifically, is the idea of enlightenment. Do you see meditation neuroscience as being in the service of the goal of enlightenment? Or is it going to take longer still for that concept to be accepted? It seems like that’s still outside the Overton window. 

K: I think it is, but I think things are changing faster than anyone could have predicted. In 2009, I didn’t talk about having a meditation practice at all. Then two years later I was writing a meditation grant. Things can shift quickly. 

There's a lot of research now around well-being and flourishing. That is opening the door for talking about some of the permanent shifts in consciousness that lead to greater well-being. Call it enlightenment, call it awakening, call it what you want. There are certainly permanent shifts in your psychology that can happen from doing these practices, and they're starting to be documented.

J: One of my challenges when I first started in meditation — and in anything in the sphere of woo —  was to shut off my analytical side. If you’re an empirically oriented person, you need to let that go when you’re adopting a meditation practice. I’m curious how you bridge those worlds, both as a scientist and in your own practice. 

K: One part is that I got very strong evidence very early on that practice worked. I went on a ten-day Goenka retreat and had a terrible time. I was miserable — nothing happened. But when I left the retreat, my experience of being in the world was fundamentally changed for the better. 

The rule I have for both myself and my students is: You can analyze and systematize and map out and understand and diagram the practice as much as you want, anytime you want — except when you're on the cushion. When you're on the cushion, just do the practice. When you're on the cushion, you really don't want to be trying to understand it. You just want to do it.You can understand it later. That way you're not separating yourself from the experience you're having during your practice. 

Off the cushion, particularly for people who study meditation, it's extra important to be very rigorous. There’s that Richard Feynman quote: “The trick is to not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Imagine if there was, let’s say, a new science of Christian prayer, and all the scientists also just happened to also be doing Christian prayer. That wouldn't look good from the outside. 

You've got to defer to the data all the time. You document what you think is going to happen beforehand. You hold yourself to scientific standards. That's extra important when we're studying our own spiritual practice.