Debunking the Common Meditation Myth: New Study Finds It’s Actually Heightened Brain Activity, Not Rest
If you’ve ever considered trying meditation, you’ve likely absorbed the common idea that the practice requires you to relax, steady your breathing, and clear your mind completely of distracting wandering thoughts. Most new practitioners assume meditation puts the brain into a passive resting state—but a new international study upends that widespread assumption, concluding this ancient practice is actually the exact opposite: meditation is a state of elevated cerebral activity that fundamentally reshapes how the brain functions.
Researchers from the University of Montreal and Italy’s National Research Council recruited 12 monks of the Thai Forest Tradition based at Santacittārāma, a Buddhist monastery located outside of Rome. At a laboratory in Chieti-Pescara, the scientific team analyzed the meditation practitioners’ brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technology that records the brain’s electrical signals with extremely high precision.
The study centered on two classic, widely practiced forms of meditation:
Samatha: A technique built around sustaining focused attention on a single anchor, most often steady breathing, with the goal of stabilizing the mind and reaching a deep state of calm and concentration.
Vipassana: A practice rooted in non-reactive observation of sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise, to build mental clarity and a deeper understanding of lived experience.
“With Samatha, you narrow your field of attention, somewhat like tightening the beam of a flashlight; with Vipassana, on the contrary, you widen that beam,” explains Karim Jerbi, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and one of the study’s coauthors. “Both practices actively engage the brain’s attentional mechanisms. While Vipassana is more challenging for beginners to master, most modern mindfulness programs alternate between the two techniques.”
The research team tracked multiple indicators of brain dynamics, including neural oscillations, measurements of signal complexity, and parameters tied to the concept of “criticality.” A framework borrowed from statistical physics, criticality has been applied to neuroscience research for 20 years. It describes systems that operate most efficiently on the border between order and chaos, and in neuroscience, this critical state is considered the optimal condition for information processing in a healthy brain.
“A brain that lacks flexibility adapts poorly to new circumstances, while too much chaos can lead to malfunction, as seen in epilepsy,” Jerbi explained in a press release. “At the critical point, neural networks are stable enough to transmit information reliably, yet flexible enough to adapt quickly to new situations. This balance optimizes the brain’s processing, learning, and response capacity.”
During the experiment, the monks’ brain activity was recorded by a high-resolution MEG system as they switched between the two meditation styles, with short periods of rest between each session. Researchers processed the raw data using advanced signal analysis and machine learning tools to extract different indicators of neural complexity and dynamic brain activity.
Striking a Balance
Results published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness show both forms of meditation increase the complexity of brain signals compared to a brain at rest. This finding confirms that a meditating brain does not simply calm down—it instead enters a dynamic state rich with information processing.
At the same time, researchers observed widespread reductions in certain parameters linked to the global organization of neural activity. One of the study’s most striking findings came from analysis of the criticality deviation coefficient, which revealed a clear functional difference between Samatha and Vipassana. This indicates that although both practices boost brain complexity, they do so through distinct dynamic configurations, which align with their differing subjective experiences.
In other words: Vipassana brings the practitioner closer to the ideal balance of stability and flexibility, while Samatha produces a somewhat more stable and narrow-focused state. According to the research team, the closer the brain gets to this critical state of balance, the more responsively and efficiently it functions. This advantage shows up in measurable ways, for example in a greater capacity to switch between tasks or store new information.
Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that meditation practice modulates neural oscillations, increases the complexity of brain activity, and alters the brain’s criticality balance. “Since meditation is an active state that engages attentional processes, it affects several aspects of brain function, leading to improved well-being and a reduction in stress and symptoms of anxiety and depression,” Jerbi said.
By analyzing the ancient practice of meditation with cutting-edge technology, the study sheds new light on the thousand-year-old tradition. “This unique combination,” Jerbi noted, “allowed us to document with unprecedented precision what happens in the meditating brain.”
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been adapted from the original Spanish translation.
