Can Deep Meditation Unlock Hidden Powers of the Human Brain?

Deep meditation could enable extrasensory powers, scientist claims.

A Harvard scientist says deep meditation could quiet the brain enough to pick up signals beyond the five senses.

A team including Oxford neuroscientist Ruben Laukkonen recorded brain activity in 29 experienced Vipassana meditators while tones played in the background, and the meditators reported how deep their meditation felt from moment to moment.

The deeper they went, the more consistent their brains' responses to each tone became, and the easier it was for a computer to pick those responses out from the brain's background chatter. In other words, deep meditation seemed to raise the brain's signal-to-noise ratio.

Timothy Lomas, a psychology research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, takes the idea much further in a separate paper. He proposes that by lowering the brain's internal "noise floor," meditation might let faint signals reach awareness, including the kind of extrasensory experiences that meditation traditions have described for centuries.

The idea is controversial, and it touches one of the oldest claims in contemplative traditions: that advanced meditators gain unusual powers of perception. Laukkonen himself says he keeps "an open mind," noting that there are many reports of such experiences, while stressing that his own data show something more ordinary, which is that meditation sharpens normal sensory processing.

That said, both papers are preprints that haven't been peer-reviewed yet, and the Oxford-led study only measured how the brain responded to ordinary sounds, so there is still no solid evidence that the brain can tap into an outside source of information.

As neuroscientist David Vago put it, "A few striking successes would not be enough." Still, being able to measure how meditation clears up the brain's signals gives scientists a concrete way to test bold ideas like this one instead of just arguing about them.

source:

Nath, M., Reggente (2026). Meditation depth enhances the functional signal-to-noise ratio of the brain. bioRxiv (preprint). Lomas, T. (n.d.). From siddhis to psionics: The psi-meditation connection (preprint).