Cambridge, UK — 25 August 2026— What happens in the brain when thoughts, perceptions and other everyday mental activity become very quiet, while we remain awake and aware?
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have taken a significant step towards answering that question by studying people practising Transcendental Meditation (TM).
Using high-density EEG, researchers studied 33 experienced TM practitioners and 33 age- and sex-matched non-meditating controls.TM practitioners reported significantly greater experiences of what researchers call "pure awareness" — a wakeful state in which thoughts, perceptions and other usual contents of experience become greatly reduced — while EEG analysis identified distinctive patterns of brain activity during TM.
The findings suggest that a state with very little thought or other mental content is not neurally simple. Instead, it is associated with a distinctive combination of diverse and coordinated brain dynamics.
A distinctive state of awareness
Participants first rested with their eyes closed for 10 minutes, practised TM for 30 minutes and then completed a second 10-minute period of eyes-closed rest. Controls followed the same procedure but performed a mental counting task instead of TM.
When TM was compared with the control task, some of the strongest distinguishing features involved temporal entropy and aperiodic brain dynamics — measures that capture the diversity and temporal organisation of neural activity.
Compared with the practitioners' own eyes-closed resting state, low-frequency functional connectivity — coordinated activity between different brain regions — was the strongest distinguishing feature.
The researchers therefore found that pure awareness could not be characterised by one simple change in brain activity. Instead, it appeared more diverse and variable than ordinary cognition, while also more stabilised and coherent than the practitioners' resting state.
More than simply sitting quietly
Because the TM practitioners' brain activity was recorded both during meditation and during eyes-closed rest, researchers could test whether the meditation state was neurally distinguishable from ordinary quiet rest.
Machine-learning analysis showed that the meditation periods could be reliably distinguished from the practitioners' resting periods. There was little evidence that the distinctive neural patterns associated with TM persisted into the subsequent resting period.
By contrast, the mental counting task produced detectable changes in the control group that continued into subsequent rest. The researchers say this supports the interpretation that the neural patterns observed during TM reflected a specific and transient state rather than simply a general difference between experienced meditators and non-meditators.
Measuring "pure awareness"
Brain recordings were combined with participants' reports of their subjective experience. Using Temporal Experience Tracing, participants reconstructed how their experience changed throughout the 30-minute meditation or counting period.
Pure awareness was defined as an experience increasingly free from the usual contents of waking consciousness, including internal thoughts and perceptions of the external world, together with reduced awareness of time, space and bodily sensations.
TM practitioners reported significantly greater maximum levels of pure awareness than controls, as well as greater variation in the experience over the 30-minute period.
Neither the maximum intensity nor variability of pure awareness was significantly related to years of TM practice. The researchers say this is consistent with the concept of "automatic self-transcendence" associated with TM — the proposal that mental activity settles through an effortless process rather than sustained concentration or progressively greater expertise.
New insights into how the brain communicates
The study also challenges the idea that increased alpha-wave coherence is the most informative neural feature of TM.
Traditional linear phase coherence was among the less informative measures for distinguishing TM from the control condition. Measures of more complex, nonlinear information sharing between brain regions provided greater discriminative power.
The researchers suggest that these findings may offer a deeper picture of the neural activity associated with pure awareness, extending beyond traditional measures of brain-wave synchronisation.
A new window on consciousness
Understanding consciousness requires scientists to bridge objective measurements of brain activity with subjective conscious experience. By combining detailed reports of participants' experiences with high-density EEG and advanced computational analysis, the Cambridge researchers investigated both together — an approach known as neurophenomenology.
The authors describe the study as the most comprehensive neurophenomenological characterisation to date of pure awareness, which they consider an example of a "minimal phenomenal experience".
Says Dr Andres Canales-Johnson:"One of the fundamental questions in consciousness research is what happens in the brain when awareness remains but thoughts and other usual contents of experience become greatly reduced. Our findings suggest that pure awareness during Transcendental Meditation has a distinctive neural signature, involving both diverse and co-ordinated patterns of brain activity."
The findings provide new ways to investigate how the brain supports being awake and aware when thoughts, perceptions and other usual contents of consciousness are greatly reduced. They also provide a foundation for further research into the distinctive state of consciousness experienced during TM.
About the study
The research involved 33 experienced TM practitioners and 33 non-meditating controls, individually matched for sex and age. Participants were aged 18–50. TM practitioners had at least four years of regular practice and averaged 12.9 years of experience.
Researchers used high-density EEG and analysed neural measures including temporal entropy, complexity, aperiodic activity, and linear and nonlinear functional connectivity.
The study was led by researchers at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, with collaborators from the University of Amsterdam, McGill University, University of Granada, University of Helsinki, Universidad de la República in Uruguay and Universidad Católica del Maule in Chile.
TM practitioners were recruited by the David Lynch Foundation UK in collaboration with Maharishi Foundation, which teaches Transcendental Meditation, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Controls were recruited through the University of Cambridge.
The study was funded by the David Lynch Foundation UK through private donors. All participants provided informed consent, and the experimental protocol was approved by the Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee.
Publication
Study: Distilling the Neurophenomenological Signatures of Pure Awareness during Transcendental Meditation
Authors: Alejandro Chandia-Jorquera, Sean D. van Mil, Mar Estarellas, Marina Dauphin, Claudia Pascovich and Andrés Canales-Johnson
Journal: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Publication date: 18 August 2026
DOI: 10.1162/jocn.a.2626
