Toward an interdisciplinary mind science of advanced meditation

Abstract

Meditation research is increasingly moving beyond mindfulness and other early-stage practices toward advanced meditation, encompassing states, stages, and endpoints that progressively unfold with increasing expertise through meditative development. This emerging subfield consists of interdisciplinary research that brings advanced meditation within reach of systematic scientific investigation. Here we articulate this research subfield, including its constitutive conceptual and methodological components and interrelated translational domains: philosophical and theoretical foundations, computational phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, epidemiology and public health, clinical and well-being outcomes, and relations with psychedelic experiences. This subfield represents an important development for meditation research and the mind sciences more broadly, with implications for health and well-being and for empirical understanding of the human mind.