[Cause Exploration Prizes] Jhana meditation

A version of this essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy’s Cause Exploration Prizes contest.

tl;dr

Jhana are meditation states reported to be extremely blissful as well as conducive to lasting, substantial increases in wellbeing.

There is preliminary neuroimaging evidence that subjective reports of jhana correlate with changes in brain activity.

We present five researchers pursuing shovel-ready projects about jhana with room for more funding. These projects would substantially contribute to our understanding of jhanic states and the role they might play in transforming our conception of human flourishing.

Definitions

By “meditative approaches”, we’re referring to a variety of contemplative practices that wisdom traditions claim to be supportive of human wellbeing and flourishing, usually by inducing states of increased concentration, inner stillness, sensory clarity, insight, and/or joy.

“Jhana meditation” is a particular meditative approach that involves developing one’s ability to concentrate on a single object. It is reported to induce profoundly altered states, as described in this post by Scott Alexander:^[1]

The Buddha discussed states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:
“Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion (Samyutta Nikaya)”
…

The meditator cuts themselves from all sensory stimuli, eg by meditating really hard on a single object like the breath and ignoring everything else, and as a result gets “rapture and happiness born of seclusion”.
The serious meditators I know say this is real, meaningful, and you can experience it after a few months of careful practice.

Jhanic states are described more formally in Hagerty et al. 2013:

Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports: (1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highly focused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels.

Investigating jhana meditation is important, tractable, and neglected

There is a long tradition of encouraging meditation and contemplative practice as a road to increased wellbeing. This perspective arises across cultures and religions, and until recently has received little empirical investigation.

We’re now in a particularly high-leverage time to investigate meditative practices. As described by Dr. Matthew Sacchet, Director of the Meditation Research Program at Mass General and Harvard Medical School:

Throughout history, many contemplative, philosophical, religious and spiritual traditions have included meditative approaches to lessen psychological suffering toward “awakening”, “enlightenment”, “salvation”, or other endpoints.

Meditation is now more medically and scientifically mainstream than ever before. Recent advances in scientific methods including in brain mapping and computation, coupled with internet technologies that have enabled unprecedented communication and networking among meditators, have set the stage for new possibilities for meditation research.

Given the potential for meditation to improve mental health and general wellbeing, now is the time to advance the study of meditation through deeper scientific investigation of meditative practices.

Meditation research is important

In a 2019 estimate by Founders Pledge, mental health disorders accounted for 10.5% of the global disease burden (Halstead 2019). A 2012 analysis estimated the annual economic cost of mental disorders to be $2.5 trillion (Halstead 2019). These figures likely underestimate the present burden of mental disorders, as the analyses were carried out prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. They also do not account for the burden of several other factors, including self-harm and suicide, which have been estimated to increase the DALY count of mental disorders by 30% (Vigo et al. 2016). Chronic pain, for example, is believed to be psychosomatic in origin and has an estimated prevalence of 27.5% across data from 52 countries (Zimmer et al. 2021).^[2]

The Happier Lives Institute estimates that current firstline psychotherapies (e.g. cognitive-behavioral therapy) are approximately nine times as cost-effective as direct cash transfers (McGuire and Plant 2021). Unfortunately, the costs of these modalities scale linearly – each marginal dose of treatment requires an additional hour of therapist time to administer.

Meditative approaches stand out as especially scalable and transportable methods of addressing mental disorders – they require minimal external infrastructure and capital investment to deploy (i.e. they scale with low marginal cost), and intervene on factors common to all people (i.e. neural circuitry).

Systematic reviews of the academic literature on meditation find moderate effects on reducing depression, reducing anxiety, and improving one’s ability to live with chronic pain (see Bohlmeijer et al. 2010, Goyal et al. 2014, Goldberg et al. 2018, and Ball et al. 2017).

However, the current meditation literature suffers from methodological issues such as researcher bias, roll-up of outcomes from different meditative approaches into single summary statistics, and lack of reliable metrics of meditator expertise. Further high-quality research is required to improve our understanding of the effect sizes of meditative approaches on mental health.

More ambitiously, contemplative traditions have frequently held up meditation as a path to wellbeing improvements far above what a typical person considers to be baseline. This claim challenges our culture’s current paradigm of mental wellness. However, if true, meditation could yield enormous benefits from a utilitarian perspective, especially if the valence of subjective experience follows a logarithmic function (see Gómez Emilsson 2019). Furthermore, wellbeing improvements above baseline could lead to a multitude of beneficial flowthrough effects via e.g. better decision-making and improved prosocial coordination across institutions and individuals.

Given the enormous benefits claimed by proponents of meditation and the current state of the literature (promising early results alongside methodological concerns), we propose that meditation research be prioritized as per a hits-based approach to philanthropy.

Investigating jhana meditation stands out as an especially important research focus, as in addition to their beneficial acute qualities, access to jhanic states is traditionally considered to be prerequisite to the insights that lead to lasting improvements far above baseline.^[3] Jhana meditation is anecdotally reported to be very pleasant in the moment, as well as more generally supportive of flourishing and adult development.

Researching jhana meditation is tractable

Unlike some other meditative approaches (e.g. mindfulness meditation), jhanic states are reported to be discrete, profound, and holistically beneficial, with similar subjective experiences reported across many practitioners. There exist manualized procedures for the practices that lead to eight distinct jhanic states (Catherine 2008, Brasington 2015). These qualities imply that jhanic states are helpful, straightforward to recognize, and replicable across subjects.

Preliminary neuroimaging studies have found evidence of discrete neural correlates to the subjective experience of each jhanic state in experienced practitioners (Hagerty et al. 2013, Dennison 2019) and these preliminary results have been independently replicated in a different subject pool (Devaney et al., in prep).

For example, early fMRI data has shown changes in brain activity each time a meditator reported moving from one jhanic state to another, as well as stable, discrete, distinct patterns of activity when the meditator reported resting in each jhanic state (Hagerty et al. 2013).

The practices that lead to jhanic states are ripe for optimization. There is currently huge variance in the time it takes for a practitioner to achieve a jhanic state, and the causality of this process is poorly understood.

Some practitioners achieve jhanic states with a few hours of practice, or by accident. This suggests that it’s possible to learn jhana meditation quickly and with minimal cost, but we currently lack the understanding to replicate this rapidity across practitioners. Further research into the causal mechanisms underlying jhana could generate insights that allow rapid scaling of these states and their beneficial effects, e.g. via improved pedagogical methods and/or neurotech-enabled practices.

As discussed below, several high-quality academic groups are pursuing research agendas relevant to improving our understanding of jhana meditation. These groups have room for more funding.

Researching jhana meditation is neglected

According to a 2021 estimate, mental health receives less than 1% of global philanthropic funding, disproportionately less than the magnitude of its burden (Müller 2021).

Despite the growing popularity of meditative approaches, meditation research receives less funding than research into other novel mental health treatments, such as invasive and non-invasive neurostimulation and psychedelic-assisted therapy (both of which require more regulatory overhead and sophisticated external infrastructure to be scaled).

Jhana meditation has received much less attention than other meditative approaches, such as mindfulness meditation and insight meditation, despite making bolder claims about its power and utility. Few prior studies have investigated EEG correlates of these states (Dennison 2019), and to date there has been only one publication of fMRI data acquired during jhana meditation (Hagerty et al. 2013).

Jhana meditation’s affiliation with religious traditions may generate stigma, as well as contribute to a large inferential distance between the median jhana practitioner and the median academic researcher.

Further, the large variance in time and effort currently required to achieve jhanic states may discourage investigators who have difficulty verifying the existence of these states for themselves.

Finally, academic study of jhana suffers from a “threshold problem” – there are few academic papers to cite in order to build a case for the importance of jhana, and thus it’s difficult to get funding through conventional channels, which is the mechanism that would produce more papers to cite! A well-targeted influx of funding from outside the academy could bridge this gap, helping to bring a new field of research into existence.

Shovel-ready grant opportunities for investigating jhana meditation

Strong academic groups are currently investigating relevant topics including:

whether altered meditative states exist, and whether they can be objectively measured.
whether meditation interventions affect key neural circuits, such as memory and attentional circuits.
the causal relationship between meditative approaches and outcomes including fear extinction, stress reduction, enhanced cognition, moral reasoning, empathy, self-efficacy, and subjective experiences of wellbeing.
factors relevant to scalability, e.g. how to motivate people to sustain a meditation practice, how to best match a person and their context with the right style and dose of meditation, and how to minimize the risk of adverse effects.

Concretely, the following researchers are pursuing research agendas relevant to understanding jhana meditation and have room for more funding: