When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum (opens in new tab)

A recurring question on this blog is how much of what we take to be fixed about experience—time, space, agency, the bounded self—is actually a construction the brain assembles from past experience and could, in principle, take apart. Laukkonen and Slagter’s 2021 paper “From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind” gave that question its most ambitious recent framing. Their proposal is elegant in its simplicity: the three meditation styles most studied in contempla...