The science behind the world’s most miraculous nap, or, Nirodha Samāpatti

an exotic variety of nonexistence

This essay co-authored by Kathryn Devaney.

For thousands of years, mystics have been rumored to perform magical deeds, such as levitation, clairvoyance, and the ability to appear in multiple places at once. Unfortunately, there is scant documentation of these miraculous feats. Maybe they do not happen. But there is one hard-to-believe meditative superpower that has now actually been documented by scientific research. 

It is called “the cessation of thought and feeling,” or, in Pali, the language of ancient Buddhist scripture, “Nirodha Samāpatti.” It is, in short, the most miraculous nap in the world. And, recently, a team of researchers led by Ruben Laukonnen, including one of us (Kathryn, specifically), published a paper on it in Progress in Brain Research. This is the first full-on encounter between Nirodha Samāpatti and science, and the rest of this post is a loose summarization of some of the paper’s contents.

To give you the full explanation of what Nirodha Samāpatti (hereafter “NS”) is, it’s probably best to tell you how it’s done.

It is an elaborate procedure. It begins with a long preparation stage, a sort of wind-up, during which the meditator proceeds through a series of alternately lovely and disorienting states, called “jhānas”, accessible by experienced meditators. There are eight. The first is an intense buzz, created by pointedly focusing on a pleasant sensation until the mind magnifies it into an electric spotlight of bliss. The second is similar, but a bit less intense and buzzy, and it’s reached by relaxing the single-pointedness of the meditator’s attention. From there, the subsequent six are accessed by a series of delicate attentional maneuvers. They are sometimes characterized as progressively “less fabricated” states, which is to say, states that are closer and closer to the bare bones of consciousness.

By the eighth, which is called, vexingly, “neither perception nor non-perception,” there is little recognizable mental activity left, just mind itself (sort of). If you’ve never experienced deep meditative states, recall how you might have felt on the verge of sleep once, floating in a funny, barely-perceptible ambiguity of time and space. It’s like that but with full wakefulness and also different.

Navigating through these states requires a very refined level of concentration. Thus, by the time the meditator gets to the eighth, necessarily, they are highly concentrated. Then the weird part happens. 

Before starting the jhāna meditation, the experienced meditator sets an intention. They say to their mind, “hey, I would like to enter Nirodha Samāpatti for ninety minutes, please.” And, after they exit the eighth jhāna, if they are successful, the mind responds by completely turning off. They go completely unconscious and wake up ninety minutes later¹. 

Okay, so, superficially, maybe not so impressive. Sounds like these people go into a trance and take a nap, after setting an intention to take a nap in advance. But this is no ordinary nap, for a few reasons. 

First of all, meditators doing NS are fully conscious until the very moment their consciousness shuts off, and they become conscious at the very moment it reboots. That enables the meditator to have a peculiar experience: a front-row seat as consciousness restarts, a chance to watch normal mental processes form themselves.

Secondly, NS is deeper than sleep. Meditators in NS cannot be woken in normal ways. You can shake them, you can slap them—they won’t snap out of it. And, unlike normal sleep, NS is totally dreamless. It is just: lights out. Nothing. 

Third, according to subjective reports, NS is psychologically refreshing in a way that normal sleep isn’t. Meditators emerging from NS describe a loosening of habitual thought patterns, especially neurotic thought patterns that lead to mental suffering. As well, they tend to describe an increased vividness of sensate reality: everything is bright and strange, as if the novelty of childhood has been temporarily restored. 

Interestingly, NS is not the only kind of meditative “cessation.” During long sits, especially on retreat, it’s not uncommon for meditators to experience their consciousness transiently “blinking out” as if a few frames of experience went missing. But NS is unique in that it can last for hours—or, if you believe certain accounts, even days.

Is this for real?

Some skepticism here is reasonable. These meditators say that cessations are different from a normal nap. But how do we know? 

In the paper, the researchers collected EEG data from a meditator experienced in performing cessations, and they found that something odd happened with their alpha brainwaves, consistently, over 37 different instances of cessation². 

If you’re not familiar with alpha waves, they are a primary brainwave pattern, and they’re associated with relaxed, open, collected mental states. Right before the cessation, the meditator’s brain displayed a sudden decrease in alpha wave activity. Then, during the cessation itself, there was even less alpha wave activity than you’d find during a normal nap: it looked more like the middle of a deep, prolonged sleep.

Given what alpha brainwaves are associated with, their diminution could correspond to the “uncoupling” of the processes that make up the delicate theatrical production of consciousness. Like, if you imagine consciousness as a switchboard connecting different departments, with “shape” and “color” plugged into “spatial locations,” and so on, and alpha waves are created when everything is wired up, a lack of alpha waves could be imagined as everything coming unplugged³.

Interestingly, this same drop-off in alpha wave activity is also seen in the brains of people sedated with ketamine. And ketamine is a drug that often produces a state of consciousness in which the normal wiring-up of experience is significantly disrupted. 

Okay, this is interesting. But here’s a question. Why does this happen?

The thing that comes next is, nothing

To answer the question of why Nirodha Samāpatti works, we need to spend a little time with another question. Why does meditation work? It is somewhat odd that profound psychological changes can be created by just sitting and breathing, or repeating a mantra.

There’s no definitive answer yet. But one promising possibility comes to us via a fascinating theory of mind—the predictive processing model of consciousness.

In its fine details, the predictive processing model is quite complicated. But the general picture isn’t that hard to understand. 

Essentially, our lives are structured on subconscious predictions about what’s going to happen. We build up these predictions over a lifetime of experience and proceed to wander around glossing reality to fit the prediction, or, if reality refuses to bend, we update the prediction. For example—you may have the expectation that a grocery store contains apples and coffee but does not contain an LP of Alice Coltrane's 1971 meteoric sensation Universal Consciousness. If you happened upon that LP in a grocery store, your brain would—without any conscious effort required on your part— dutifully update your model of “grocery store” to include “Alice Coltrane LPs.” 

This faculty is part of what makes people miraculously intelligent. It’s how we can, say, be reasonably confident that our small-talk skills will work on someone we’ve never met before. However, it can also be a bummer. Have you ever been stuck in a routine so thoroughly that it felt like your life was melting away, like you weren’t even really noticing anything? That can be a product of structuring your life—or having it structured for you—in such a way that everything can be predicted. 

Also, this explains why surprising experiences are so rich—why, when walking through a city you’ve never been to, the architecture and smells might seem especially memorable, even though they’re not actually that dissimilar from your previous environment. Your brain, upon having its expectations violated, is looking for as much data as possible such that its map of reality can be updated.

Interestingly, one of the primary outputs of meditation practice is this very kind of sensory richness. Seasoned meditators experience a reality filled with novelty and detail. Everything becomes interesting again—the sweep of a city skyline, the unexpectedly sweaty undertones of jasmine’s sweetness. It’s as if meditators are regarding the texture of reality as surprising, somehow, as being outside of the scope of their predictions.

So, maybe, meditation is a way of training yourself to hijack predictive processing. (For much more on this, see Ruben Laukonnen & Heleen Slagter’s 2021 paper.) You set down the constant web of intrusive thoughts about how the future might be and choose to simply breathe instead. And, instead of settling for a prediction of how breathing will feel, you slow down, and say, okay, moment-to-moment, what is it actually like to breathe? Instead of paying attention only to what violates your predictions—a stressful Slack ping, or whatever—you allow everything to be seen as relevant data. At deep levels of meditation, you can even discard the prediction that reality is divided into self and other, or the prediction that time is linear—and thus, you get that classical “everything is united in the eternal now” type feeling.

But what’s the final prediction, the one that sits under everything else? Perhaps it’s something like “I will continue to remain conscious.” That is maybe the big meta-prediction, the one that sets the stage for everything else. If you could suspend that prediction, or update it to “I’m going to black out for approximately 90 minutes,” you might enter into something like Nirodha Samāpatti.

Or maybe we’re just bears

But, from another perspective, this doesn’t make any sense. Just because we function on predictions, it doesn’t mean we should be able to alter them at this fundamental level. Why on earth would evolution allow us the ability to shut ourselves off, which seems counter-productive from a survival standpoint?

An archeologist, Igor Djakovic, has advanced an intriguing hypothesis in response, which is cited in the paper. Perhaps NS is a reactivation of a latent hibernation/torpor system in the brain. Many animals go into a state of suspended animation that looks more like NS than normal human sleep, and the brain contains many remnants of our earlier evolutionary history. Maybe this is one of those remnants.

An existence proof of weirdness

Perhaps you are now thinking, “so what.” NS is a cool trick. But why is it interesting? And should you learn how to do it?

To the latter question, NS is difficult. It’s a skill that takes even the most gifted meditators years of work to develop. However, smaller meditative cessations are not uncommon—many people experience them at some point in a deep meditation practice, especially on retreat. In fact, both of us have experienced brief meditative cessations, although neither of us has experienced NS. Both of us have found the cessation experiences deeply refreshing, and intrinsically fascinating.

So, if you see it as an interesting goal to try for, go for it. In our experience, cessations arise when there is a particular mode of awareness that is both very relaxed and very concentrated, so training up gentle concentration and equanimity won’t steer you wrong. We recommend Just Note Gone as a technique that, if taken far enough, seems to be good at cessation induction. Then, if you like cessations enough to strive for NS, have fun. We recommend Michael Taft’s “How to Jhāna” as a way to start climbing the jhāna ladder and Rob Burbea’s jhāna recordings to develop expertise.

However, if you don’t particularly want to chase cessations, but feel a sense of obligation to do so—well, we’d recommend that you cessate that feeling of obligation. It’s true that some meditative traditions claim that they’re a necessary part of meditative development: that, at a certain point along the road to enlightenment, you’ve got to reboot your machine. The argument is that cessations give you a highly detailed first-person understanding of how experience is constructed, and thus, how the mind creates suffering. But this is highly controversial. Many mature meditative traditions never talk about cessations, regarding them as an unnecessary distraction—Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t care about cessations at all, for example, and their teachers seem pretty awakened, not like people who are missing some secret ingredient.

Now, as for the former question: so what? Sure, NS is, potentially, an interesting consequence of the predictive processing theory of mind. But it’s not proof of that theory, or, really, even necessary evidence. Understanding NS probably won’t help us cure cancer or anything.

We still think it’s pretty interesting, for a couple of reasons.

First, meditative cessations offer a unique avenue of mental exploration. Most of the time, weaving and unweaving the mind requires you to take drugs, and it’s not really practical to give someone ketamine, say, 30 times over the course of a weekend. Also, people on drugs tend to offer somewhat muddled experiential reporting. However, meditators capable of on-demand cessations can cross the threshold of existence again and again, providing verbal and neuroelectric reports of this exotic penumbra. Such reports could give us a greater understanding of the stagecraft of consciousness—how experience is assembled, where in the brain consciousness is rooted, etc.

Second, NS is proof that the mind can do things that are significantly stranger than what is commonly discussed in Psychology 101. Thirty years ago, when meditation was not accepted as a reasonable object of scientific study, it’s likely that NS would have been regarded as hogwash, a myth bandied about by naive, superstitious people in funny robes. This should be cause for humility about science’s current understanding of the mind. We’re not saying you should start believing in energy healing or clairvoyance. But it is worth asking, of the human skull: what other weirdness is in there?

1. In the Visuddhimagga, a manual on several types of absurdly hardcore meditation practice, also describes techniques with which you can provide exceptions to your set intention, EG, "I will remain in Nirodha for two days unless my teacher needs me in which case I will immediately exit."

2. In an initial 2011 study of advanced meditation practitioners carried out by David Vago and his team at Harvard Medical School, there was an initial report of cessation by 2 of the practitioners while meditating in an fMRI experiment. These practitioners were trained in the Unified Mindfulness systems, as described by meditation teacher Shinzen Young. Although these results were unpublished, the phenomenon was briefly described in a 2013 publication in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Through personal communications with David Vago, he described dramatic BOLD activity in the frontopolar cortex that correlated with the expertise of the practitioners who reported the cessation experience. Vago believes this region of the pre-frontal cortex is a prime substrate for higher-order conscious states given its role as the key circuit breaker for fronto-parietal and other resting state networks.

Burgess, P. W., Dumontheil, I., & Gilbert, S. J. (2007). The gateway hypothesis of rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10) function. Trends Cogn Sci, 11(7), 290-298. https://doi.org/S1364-6613(07)00128-3 [pii]
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Spreng, R. N., Sepulcre, J., Turner, G. R., Stevens, W. D., & Schacter, D. L. (2013). Intrinsic architecture underlying the relations among the default, dorsal attention, and frontoparietal control networks of the human brain. J Cogn Neurosci, 25(1), 74-86. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00281

3. Hans Berger, inventor of EEG, discovered Alpha rhythms in a search inspired by an incident of apparent psychic transmission. Shortly after he had a horseriding accident, he received a telegram from his sister, who wanted to know if he was okay, based on an intuition that he was in danger. Hans concluded that she must have experienced some kind of brain-to-brain electrical transmission, and set out to discover its mechanism.