Distinct contemplative traditions share a common EEG complexity signature

Meditation is linked to a large, uniform drop in EEG complexity that reliably separates meditation from task states across four contemplative traditions, in 226 participants.

• Why it matters: It is unclear which brain-activity features are shared across contemplative practices, which reflect long-term training, and which remain specific to a tradition.
• What they did: Using neurodynamic profiling with 21 EEG features across oscillatory, aperiodic, complexity, and timescale families, machine learning compared advanced meditators from four traditions with non-meditating controls.
• The result: Complexity features generalized across traditions: a classifier trained on three traditions still detected meditation in the fourth, while timescale dynamics and other feature families showed tradition-specific signatures.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.