Non-duality in brain and experience of advanced meditators – Key role for Intrinsic Neural Timescales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Distinguishing between self (internal) and environment (external) is fundamental to human experience, with ordinary waking consciousness structured around this duality. However, contemplative traditions describe non-dual states where this distinction dissolves. Despite its significance, the neural basis of non-duality remains underexplored. Using psychological questionnaires for non-duality experience and EEG-based intrinsic neural timescales as measured by the autocorrelation window (ACW), we studied non-duality in advanced meditators, novice meditators, and controls. All subjects underwent breath-watching meditation (internal attention) and a visual oddball cognitive task (external attention); this allowed us to conceptualize non-duality as a lack of distinction between internal and external attention. Our key findings include: (a) advanced meditators report greater experience of non-duality during breath-watching (psychological scales), (b) EEG-based ACW is longer during internal attention (breath watch) than external attention (oddball task) in all subjects taken together, (c) advanced meditators show no such distinction with equal duration of their ACW during both internal and external attention (we replicated this finding in another dataset of expert meditators); (d) the advanced meditators’ internal-external ACW difference correlated with their experience of the degree of non-duality (psychological scales) during internal attention. Together, these findings suggest that the brain’s intrinsic neural timescales during internal and external attention play a key role in mediating the experience of non-duality in advanced meditators.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".