A new study from India has looked at whether the depth of meditation can be tracked in the brain. The researchers focused on something called frontal alpha asymmetry, or FAA for short. This is a difference in brain activity between the left and right sides of the frontal lobe, measured in the alpha rhythm range. Alpha rhythms are slow brain waves, and when one side of the brain shows more or less of them compared to the other, it can hint at emotional balance or how engaged the brain is.
The work, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, compared people who had practiced Heartfulness meditation for many years with people who had never meditated before.
The study involved 59 adults between the ages of 30 and 45. Out of these, 26 were long-term Heartfulness meditators with more than five years of daily practice, usually about an hour each day. The remaining 33 were non-meditators with no formal training. All of them went through a 30-minute Heartfulness session while their brain activity was recorded using EEG, a method that tracks electrical signals from the scalp.
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The meditation session had four stages. It began with relaxation, moved into meditation, continued with a phase called transmission where a trained guide was present, and ended with a short post-meditation rest. During each stage, the researchers measured FAA. At the end, participants also filled out questionnaires about how deep their meditation felt. Two tools were used: the Meditation Depth Questionnaire and a simple rating scale where participants marked how absorbed they felt.
So what did they find? First, the long-term meditators reported greater depth than the non-meditators. That result is not surprising, but the interesting part was the brain data. FAA values shifted across the stages of meditation in ways that separated meditators from non-meditators. More importantly, the FAA values were linked with how deep participants said their meditation felt. In other words, when people reported going deeper, their brain signals showed a corresponding pattern.
This matters because meditation depth is usually only measured through self-reports, which are subjective and can vary from person to person. By finding a measurable brain marker that moves in step with people’s own reports, the study suggests a possible objective handle on meditation states. The authors also connect FAA with existing research in psychology, where the same marker has been tied to approach versus withdrawal emotions. That link could help explain why meditation practices are often said to influence emotional well-being.
The study does have limits. It compared groups at a single point in time, so it cannot prove that meditation practice directly caused the brain differences. It also focused on a single meditation style and a narrow age group, so results may not apply everywhere. Still, the findings add weight to the idea that long-term practice leaves traces in both experience and brain function.
For researchers, this work highlights a practical way of tying meditation states to measurable signals. For practitioners, it shows that the years of sitting in daily practice may shape the brain in ways science can now begin to capture. The next challenge will be to follow new practitioners over time to see if these brain patterns appear as they progress, and to check if other meditation traditions show the same link between depth and brain activity.
Story Source: Krishna, Singh & Manjunath (2025), published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Read the original study here.