What are the jhanas?
“The jhanas may be the single most important thing on the planet right now. You may think it’s superintelligence or longevity. That’s nothing without wellbeing.”
What are they?
The jhanas are a set of extraordinarily pleasurable and non-addictive altered states you can learn to enter on command with meditation practice. They’re sometimes described as the opposite of an anxiety loop.
Anxiety can capture attention, which can lead to more anxiety, which can capture more attention, and so on, leading to a physiological response (e.g. heart rate changes, sweating, in the extreme case a panic attack). Jhana meditators create a similar positive feedback loop between attention and pleasure.
Why are people excited about them?
The jhanas are extraordinarily pleasurable. People who can enter these states use terms like “life-changing” and “MDMA without the drug.”
“When you’ve spent hours in a jhāna, you can call yourself a mystic....It is unforgettable. It overturns one’s conception of happiness. Even falling in love is not as enjoyable as this. It is unavoidable that one will inquire what is this bliss and where did it come from.”
Brain images corroborate these remarkable first-person accounts, and studies suggest jhana meditators are activating pleasure centers in their brain at-will and without external stimuli. (Hagerty et al. 2013, DeLosAngeles 2016, Dennison 2019)
An fMRI scan of an experienced jhana practitioner’s brain color coded by activity in jhana compared to baseline. Blue indicates deactivation and red indicates activation. Most of the brain shows deactivation, which might correspond with a "quiet," absorbed mind. Some of the activated regions are known to play key roles in pleasure and reward circuitry (e.g. the nucleus accumbens). (Hagerty et al. 2013)
The benefits of jhanas extend well beyond bliss. Traditionally, meditators don’t practice jhana as an end if itself, but for the personality-changes they bring with time. Much like how it’s easier to be prosocial or delay gratification when you have shelter, food, and water, access to the jhana-pleasure makes it easier to act as the person you aspire to be.
We hope to publish a more speculative piece soon linking jhanas to benefits discussed in other research, such as the “mentality of abundance vs. scarcity” from behavioral economics, the enhancement of game-theoretic cooperation by empathogens like MDMA, memory reconsolidation and its role in resolving trauma, and increased neuroplasticity in simultaneously relaxed and focused states.
Despite both first-person accounts and objective measurements of jhana pleasure, thousands of meditators have practiced the jhanas for thousands of years without fear of addiction. Jhana pleasure appears more similar to socializing with loved ones, exercise, entheogens, religious experiences, or laughing uncontrollably, than to drugs of abuse.
On the contrary, many report using jhanas to positively change their relationships to other cravings and desires. One rehab center in Thailand even uses the jhanas to free clients from addiction.
If they’re so great, why aren’t they more popular? We’ve written separately on why few people have heard of them so far.
Why might we take jhanas to scale now?
Today, awareness and practice isn’t just on the rise among advanced meditators. The jhanas have captured the attention of rationalist and techie pockets of Twitter and the blogosphere (e.g. LessWrong, Scott Alexander).
With thousands of existing jhana meditators practicing in the West, we have new ability to seek positive deviance. Identifying those with outsized results, learning from and cataloging their unique habits, and using biomarkers as guidance may eliminate the guesswork required to learn these states, making them accessible orders of magnitude faster.
Neuroscience is also better positioned than ever to understand these states. The rise of mainstream meditation and the explosion of contemplative neuroscience papers in the last decade means advanced meditation is a hot topic, and the psychedelic renaissance has ushered in new interest in altered states. Harvard and McGill have EEG and fMRI studies of the jhanas underway, and the EPRC’s released pre-study descriptions on its Jhana and Attention and Adept Practitioner studies.
Recent breakthroughs in neurofeedback mean we’re newly positioned to measure and teach these states. Several scholars have successfully used neurofeedback to accelerate novices’ abilities to imitate advanced meditators in record speed (Garrison et al. 2013 and Brandmeyer and Delorme 2020).
Finally, consumer-grade hardware has gotten dramatically better. Research-grade EEGs cost tens of thousands of dollars, but consumer-grade systems costing less than $1K are increasingly being used for EEG research and basic BCI applications (e.g. Emotiv, Neurosity, NeuroSky, NexStem.ai, Muse). Several of these companies aspire to be the first wearable neurotech platform to go mainstream; what’s needed now is their "killer app.”
The unprecedented opportunity: neurofeedback for the jhanas
At Jhourney, we think this is an unprecedented opportunity: non-addictive pleasure on-demand with widely reported mental health effects; newly tractable after a rise in awareness, practice, and measurement; and new technology to take it to scale.
Modern biosensors offer a way to eliminate the guesswork of learning how to meditate into jhanas. Close-loop systems like that in the video above, delivered via consumer-grade headset and mobile application, could take jhanas in-home anywhere.
And open-loop systems in which meditation instructors receive feedback about the progress of their students could revolutionize teacher-student relationships. As one meditation teacher told us “teaching meditation would finally be like teaching yoga; I’ll be able to individualize instruction in real-time.”
We’re collecting data from advanced meditators to identify the physiological correlates of these states, and build the tools to take them to scale. If you’d like to follow along, sign up for our newsletter.
