Neural Correlates of Transmitted Light Experience during Meditation: A Pilot Hyperscanning Study

Abstract

Certain individuals during deep meditative state can give out an aura or 'light, which is perceived by others through some unknown connections, visual, telepathic or other. Despite various anecdotal, historical accounts of such induced light experience (ILE), its underlying neural mechanisms are not known. In this pilot study, we investigated the neural correlates of ILE by simultaneously recording the EEGs of an expert meditation Teacher, who is claimed to elicit ILE, and his Pupil (N=2) during joint meditation sessions under various instructions, given separately to the Teacher (transmit/do not transmit) and to the Pupil (receive/do not receive) and also during transmit/receive instruction but both wearing goggles, limiting the visual input. We observed a robust increase in the high frequency beta (12-30 Hz) and gamma oscillations (30-70 Hz) in the Teacher's brain whenever he was instructed to transmit. Electric field tomography analysis localized these effects over a multitude of brain regions including the fusiform gyrus, angular gyrus and the cerebellum. Finally, we found that the Teacher's and Pupil's brain responses were synchronized especially in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) during transmit/receive condition, and the information flow was directional, i.e. from the Teacher to the Pupil; interestingly, this enhanced interbrain synchrony disappeared with goggles. These results were interpreted in terms of heightened internally selective attention as manifested by high frequency betagamma oscillations and of joint attention as manifested by interbrain alpha synchrony. Altogether, our results provide first neuroscientific evidence underlying the phenomenological experience of induced light.

Brain-to-Brain Neural Synchrony During Social Interactions: A Systematic Review on Hyperscanning Studies

“…Setting. A majority of studies (25/28, 89%) were conducted in the lab while 11% (3/28) of the studies were done in a natural setting [23,87,90]. For example, Babiloni et al [87] demonstrated that the EEG methodology is suitable for high-quality EEG data in subjects playing in an ensemble outside of a lab.…”

“…For example, Babiloni et al [87] demonstrated that the EEG methodology is suitable for high-quality EEG data in subjects playing in an ensemble outside of a lab. Recently, Fenwick et al [90] was the first study to investigate neural synchrony during meditation.…”

Recent Trends in Non-invasive Neural Recording Based Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Analysis on Multidisciplinary Human Interactions for Understanding Brain Dynamics: A Systematic Review

“…The following studies explore machine mediated neural and behavioral synchronization in real and virtual environments (Hachmeister et al, 2014 ; Gumilar et al, 2021 ). Similarly, the effect of cooperation on neural synchrony (Abe et al, 2019 ), meditation and monastic debates (Fenwick et al, 2019 ; van Vugt et al, 2020 ), emotional association in groups (Nummenmaa et al, 2014 ; Goldstein et al, 2018 ; Santamaria et al, 2019 ) are included in this paradigm. These studies do not have a single set of specified roles for the participants similar to the previous paradigm apart from the participants all being part of social groups.…”

“…Studies that put no restrictions on the participants regarding movement and used wireless or comparatively lighter data acquisition device was considered naturalistic and comprised 59.3% or 38/64 of the papers (Reiterer et al, 2011 ; Ding et al, 2018 ; Greco et al, 2018 ). Some studies restricted the movement of the participants (Dikker et al, 2017 ; Bevilacqua et al, 2019 ) through instructions, monitored ambient lighting (Fenwick et al, 2019 ), used noise-canceling earphones (Balconi, 2016 ) to limit perceived noise. These were considered semi-naturalistic as they do not replicate real-life social interactions on a full scale.…”