Source
Chandia-Jorquera, van Mil, Estarellas, Dauphin, Pascovich & Canales-Johnson (2026), LIT-1354, read in full in NOTE-1058 from the bioRxiv preprint, version 3 (2 April 2026): methods (pp. 2–6), results (pp. 6–10), discussion (pp. 11–14). The version of record in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience was not read.
What was actually shown
Reports. 33 TM practitioners with at least four years’ practice and 33 controls matched on sex and age traced, after a 30-minute session, how far they had experienced “pure awareness”, on a scale whose top was defined for them as “an experience free from content defining everyday working experiences” (p. 3). Practitioners’ peak traces were higher (0.697 against 0.523, d = 0.771) and their traces more variable (d = 1.32) (p. 6). The peak difference could have come out null: controls, too, rated their counting at about half the scale.
EEG. A random-forest classifier on 65,920 features per trial, tested on held-out subjects in 100 repetitions of nested cross-validation, separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, with permutation entropy and aperiodic activity most important (p. 8). Within practitioners it identified meditation epochs against rest with 88% sensitivity, with low-frequency phase-lag connectivity most important (p. 9). It could not separate practitioners’ rest before meditation from rest after it, which it could do for controls around counting (pp. 9–10).
The missing link. “we did not identify robust direct associations between the PA measures and the EEG features” (p. 14). The authors do not take this to mean there is none.
What this does not say
- It is not a neural signature of pure awareness. The EEG separates a meditation period from a counting period and from rest. Within that period, no EEG feature was shown to follow the reports. The authors’ “double dissociation” is a difference between two feature-importance rankings.
- It does not show experience without content. The reports are retrospective ratings on a scale defined for the participant by the experimenters. The authors concede possible demand effects for controls (p. 13). Practitioners were recruited through the TM organisation and know what the practice is said to produce. Woods, Windt & Carter (LIT-1351; THEORY-866) find that TM’s own teachers describe the state as keeping wakefulness, calm, bliss and knowing.
- It does not separate state from trait or task. The 65% contrast is meditators meditating against non-meditators counting.
- The null correlation with years of practice is not evidence of effortless access. It is the absence of an association in 33 people.
- The peak-report p-value is overstated. t = 3.10 is printed with p < 0.001; with about 64 degrees of freedom it gives p ≈ 0.003 (recomputed in NOTE-1058). The difference stands at p < 0.01.
Connections
No relation is declared. The record has no question about the neural correlates of minimal-content states, and the account neither supports nor tests the claims below.
- CLAIM-412. The exchange offered this study as experience with little interpretation. As read, it shows reports of little content and a distinct EEG organization, which bears on the claim’s caveat that interpretation is not rich conceptualization, and not on the claim.
- CLAIM-411. Every phenomenal fact here is a report, and the report was not tied to the neural data. That is the access problem the counter turns on.
- THEORY-866, filed from the sibling reading, is the textual evidence that the state TM aims at is not contentless.