Meditation and the Sense of Self: What Brain Scans Show

Of the three characteristics, non-self (anattā) is probably the one that causes the most confusion. Impermanence we can observe quite directly… But non-self? What happens to our sense of self when we look closely, and who is it then that is sitting here. Dissatisfaction we know all too well. But non-self? Who is it then that is sitting here, meditating, reading this article?

In the last fifteen years or so, neuroscientists have started to take this question seriously. Not by trying to prove whether the Self exists or not, but by looking at what happens in the brain when meditators experience their sense of self in different ways. Scanning meditators is not new, but what I find interesting in the studies below is that they combine brain data with what the meditators themselves report about their experience. The researchers call this neurophenomenology.

I picked three studies that, put together, follow a path that will feel familiar to many practitioners, and which maps surprisingly well onto the Layers of Insight: from the busy, thinking self, through the more subtle layers of self, into the dissolving of the boundary between inside and outside.

The Default Mode Network: The Brain's Self-Network

There is a network in the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN). It becomes active when we are not focused on any particular task, when we daydream, plan, worry, replay conversations or think about ourselves and our lives. One of its central hubs is a region called the Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC), sitting deep in the middle of the brain towards the back.

Earlier research from Judson Brewer's lab at Yale had already shown that experienced meditators have less activity in this network while meditating. But that only tells us something happens, not what it feels like from the inside. The first study tried to connect the two.

Study 1: Watching the Posterior Cingulate Cortex in Real Time (Garrison et al., 2013)

In this study experienced meditators lay in an fMRI scanner and meditated in short runs, while they could see a graph of the activity of their own PCC - without knowing what it was. When the graph turned red, it secretly showed PCC activation, and when the graph turned blue, it secretly showed PCC deactivation.

After each run they described what they had experienced, and the researchers carefully analysed these reports and compared them to the brain activity.

When the PCC activity went down (blue), meditators described what the researchers grouped as "undistracted awareness", concentrating and simply observing sensory experience, and "effortless doing", not efforting, contentment.

When the PCC activity went up (red), they described "distracted awareness", mind-wandering and interpreting, but also something the researchers called "controlling": efforting and trying, along with discontentment.

This last part is the one that caught my attention. The Self-network didn't only become active when meditators got lost in thought. It also became active when they were trying too hard to meditate. The researchers themselves point to the difference between meditation and "trying to meditate".

Experientially this makes a lot of sense. The one who is pushing, controlling, trying to get somewhere or trying to get rid of thoughts is itself a very active form of Self. Anyone who has sat a retreat probably knows this moment when we realise that the striving for a better state is exactly what is in the way. For me, this happens almost daily, when I feel my meditation is going a certain way, whether distracted, bored or dull and I want it to be different than it is.

So the PCC seems to be tracking something like how much "me" is present in experience, including the subtle "me" that is trying to meditate well.

Study 2: Narrative Self, Minimal Self and Selflessness (Dor-Ziderman et al., 2013)

But which Self are we talking about? When we look closely in practice, the Self doesn't seem to be one thing.

Philosophers and neuroscientists often distinguish between two layers. The narrative self is the story of me: my past, my plans, my identity, how others see me, the self that lives in time. The minimal self is much more immediate: the sense of being here, in this body, the one who is experiencing and doing right now. In other words, this Self seems to have layers to it.

Norman Farb and colleagues had already shown in 2007 that these two modes use different brain networks and that mindfulness training helps people shift from the narrative to the more experiential mode. But Buddhist practice points to a third possibility beyond both of them, where experience continues but without a sense of someone owning it or doing it.

In this study, twelve long-term mindfulness meditators were asked to move between these three modes inside an MEG scanner, which measures the brain's magnetic activity at a very high time resolution:

1. Narrative self - thinking about themselves and their life.

2. Minimal self - resting in the present-moment sense of being a body and an agent.

3. Selflessness - letting go of the sense of ownership and agency, so that experience simply happens without anyone having it.
   

The meditators also described their experience afterwards, so again first-person reports and brain data could be put next to each other.

Each mode had its own signature. Letting go of the narrative self was linked to reduced high-frequency (gamma) activity in frontal and medial prefrontal regions, areas associated with our self-story. Letting go of the minimal self was linked to reduced beta activity in a network including medial prefrontal, medial posterior (close to our PCC again) and parietal regions. And the selfless state was specifically linked to reduced beta activity in the right inferior parietal lobule, an area involved in our sense of where "I" am located in space and where the body ends.

What I find beautiful about this is that it confirms something we notice in practice: the Self is layered. It's not simply on or off. Looking at it with the Layers of Insight, the narrative self lives mostly in the conceptual layer, the minimal self is closer to the layer of sensory events and flow, and selflessness starts to open towards the spacious layer, where observer and observed are no longer so separate.

A larger follow-up study from the same group of researchers in 2024 (Trautwein et al.), this time with 46 meditators, found reduced beta activity in the posterior medial cortex, right around the PCC. The effect was strongest in those meditators who described the most radical changes: losing the sense of being the one who acts and losing a single, fixed point of view. So we come back to the same area as in the first study, but from a much more subtle angle.

Study 3: Nondual Awareness - When Inside and Outside Stop Competing (Josipovic et al., 2012)

In Vipassana we mostly talk about seeing through the Self. In Nondual traditions like Dzogchen and Mahamudra, one emphasis is more on the collapse of the split between Self and World, Subject and Object. This third study looks at exactly that.

Our brain activity is broadly organised in two large systems. An extrinsic system that engages with the outside world - senses, tasks and actions. And an intrinsic system that deals with the inner world: thoughts, memories and self-related processing. This is largely the Default Mode Network again, with the PCC at its centre.

This also matches with the Satipatthana's description of meditating on the four foundations of mindfulness either internally or externally.

Normally these two systems compete. When one is active, the other quietens down, like a seesaw. They are anticorrelated, even when we are just lying still doing nothing. You could say the brain is wired for duality: either I'm paying attention to the world, or I'm paying attention to myself.

But what happens when we follow the third instruction of the Satipatthana - to meditate on the four foundations of mindfulness both internally and externally at the same time? Practicing the fourth foundation of mindfulness dhammas or experience, we meditate on our whole field of experience at once.

Zoran Josipovic, a neuroscientist and long-time practitioner himself, scanned Buddhist practitioners with 8 to 33 years of meditation experience while they practised two kinds of meditation: focused attention on one object, and nondual awareness, resting in an open background awareness that doesn't divide experience into subject and object.

During focused attention, the competition between the two systems actually became stronger than at rest. During nondual awareness it became much weaker. Inside and outside stopped fighting each other.

And the Self is right there in the middle of it. The intrinsic system is the self-related network. What changes in nondual awareness is not that the Self-network switches off, but that it is no longer set against the World. Josipovic describes nondual awareness as a background awareness that precedes concepts and intentions and can hold whatever arises without breaking experience up into the usual dualities, self and other, good and bad, us and them.

In later work he reported early findings suggesting that nondual awareness with very little content involves a network centred on the precuneus, which is right next to the PCC. So in a way we come full circle. The same region where the Self-story is being told may also be involved in the awareness that sees through the division between me and not-me.

What does this mean for our practice?

Putting the three studies together, we get something like a map of how the Self can be seen through:

The busy, striving self, which lights up when we wander and when we try too hard. The layered self, where narrative, minimal and selfless modes each have their own signature, and where meditators can learn to move between them. And the dissolving boundary, where the brain's inner and outer worlds stop competing.

I don't think any of this proves what the Buddha taught, and it doesn't need to. Brain activity goes together with these experiences, it doesn't explain them. The studies are also small, often a dozen to a few dozen very experienced meditators, and each uses slightly different ideas of what "self" is. But I find it quietly encouraging that the maps drawn from the inside over thousands of years, and the ones now drawn from the outside, seem to line up as well as they do.

And the most practical lesson might come from the very first study. The Self gets louder when we try to get rid of it. The PCC quiets down not through effort but through ease, through simply being aware of what is here, which is maybe what many of us have been told on retreat a hundred times without really believing it.

A little invitation for your practice:

Notice when the feeling of "I" is stronger or weaker when you're meditating. Notice the thoughts, feelings or sensations that are present when the "I" is stronger or weaker. When you allow yourself to "rest as experience", what happens to that feeling of I?