Meditation Could Tune Into Signals from a Mysterious Source—And Enable Extrasensory Powers, Scientist Claims

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• New research suggests deeper meditation can improve the brain’s signal-to-noise ratio. This makes it easier to detect neural activity associated with a particular stimulus.
• Some scientists are exploring the controversial idea that meditation could make people receptive to unusual forms of information that could fall under the umbrella of “extrasensory perception.”
• Though experts point out that there’s no solid evidence for extrasensory perception, they say experiments could provide further data that could inform new studies.

Gazing at a rose is a beautiful experience. That is, until your brain finds a way to pit all that appreciation against a slew of other thoughts clamoring for your attention: Did you reply to that email? What will you have for lunch? What did that jerk mean when they said that? And 34 or so intrusions later, there goes your focus on nature’s artistry.

But what if meditation could finally allow you to become absorbed in the flower without all that mental chaff? Directing your attention toward the present experience—say, the shape of the petals or the subtleties of its scent—might keep those intrusive thoughts at bay.

More intriguingly, what if the bloom came into sharper focus not just for you, but for a scientist examining your brain activity?

“If I gave you a rose and asked you to look at the rose, I can ‘decode’ or ‘mind-read’ that you’re looking at a rose from your brain with a certain accuracy,” says Ruben Laukkonen, PhD, a neuroscientist and senior researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. “The idea is that if you’re meditating, the rose in your brain becomes clearer, so I can more easily ‘see’ the rose from your brain.”

Laukkonen is describing a principle known as the brain’s functional signal-to-noise ratio: how clearly neural activity represents relevant information against competing activity. Scientists can examine recordings of brain activity and use computational analysis to distinguish patterns associated with a particular stimulus from unrelated activity.

“The activity is more stable and less buried beneath unrelated stuff,” Laukkonen explains. “This clarity of neural signals, we believe, maps onto the clarity of the mind and subjective experience.”

In a study posted to bioRxiv in June 2026, Laukkonen and four colleagues put that idea to the test. They recorded the brain activity of 29 experienced Vipassana meditators using electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that records the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp, while playing auditory tones and asking participants to periodically rate the depth of their meditation. Vipassana, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist-derived practice that emphasizes observing sensations, thoughts, and other experiences as they arise, without getting caught up in them. The researchers found that the deeper the participants reported going into meditation, the more consistent their brains’ responses to the tones became, and the easier it was to separate sound-related activity from background neural activity.

The findings, which have not yet undergone peer review, suggest that deeper meditation may improve the brain's functional signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, the brain seems to register the sounds more clearly instead of letting them get buried under all the neural chatter—think of your own mind’s ceaseless buzz that has you wondering where you need to be tomorrow at 5 p.m. or what somebody said to you three years ago.

But some researchers take this signal-to-noise idea somewhere much stranger. What if the information emerging from the background were not simply a faint sound, sensation, or thought already available to the ordinary senses? What if, beneath all that neural racket, something has been trying to get through?

Researchers gathered recently to discuss a related idea. Neural Transduction Theory (NTT) is the controversial idea that the brain may receive consciousness from an unknown source (dubbed the Other Side) rather than generate it. Among them was Timothy Lomas, PhD, a psychology research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lomas has proposed that meditation might lower the brain’s internal “noise floor,” quieting the mind’s incessant hum and allowing otherwise imperceptible signals to enter awareness. These signals might explain reported extrasensory abilities that have no clear explanation, such as remote viewing, the controversial practice of attempting to describe a distant place or object without ever seeing it, he says.

In a preprint currently under review, Lomas, whose research focuses on cross-cultural perspectives on well-being, draws on neuroscience to try to explain the more uncanny outcomes of meditation. For example, there are Ganzfeld experiments, in which researchers test whether volunteers whose ordinary sensory input is reduced—sometimes with half-ping-pong balls covering their eyes and static playing through headphones—can correctly identify hidden images. And then there are the strange experiences reported by some seasoned meditators: remote viewing, visions, sensations of leaving their bodies, feelings of merging with the universe, or the unsettling conviction that meditators have somehow gained access to knowledge they could not ordinarily possess.

To explain the mechanism for how information might conceivably reach the mind through unknown channels, Lomas considers possibilities ranging from quantum nonlocality, which describes the strange connections observed between quantum systems, to panpsychism, the philosophical view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality. He also proposes a possibility that Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was right about: the collective unconscious, a proposed reservoir of shared psychological patterns.

Fascinating as all this sounds, no scientist has established that the brain can receive information from some mysterious source beyond the known senses. Lomas’s central question is whether meditation might make us more receptive to information that is otherwise invisible to our minds.

David Vago, PhD, a neuroscientist and research associate at Brigham and Women's Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, sees a rather large problem with this interpretation. Deep meditation, he explains, can produce what William James, often called the father of American psychology, described as a noetic quality: an overwhelming sense that something is profoundly real or significant. Psychedelics, seizures, and sensory deprivation can also produce similar experiences, he continues.

“The brain can create a sense of significance on its own,” Vago says. “Therefore, a strong sense of receiving something extraordinary is not evidence of an outside source.”

You may feel as though you've just received a message from somewhere beyond the known universe, but that feeling, however powerful, doesn't establish that anybody—or anything—sent it. Even the words “noise” and “signal,” Vago argues, become slippery very quickly. “The idea is plausible if we are precise about what noise means and what kind of signal we are talking about,” he says. In ordinary perception, reducing internal interference may make a faint sound or dim light easier to detect. But making better use of information already reaching the brain is a very different proposition from receiving information through an unidentified channel.

Laukkonen, for his part, isn't quite ready to close the door on the stranger possibilities, pointing to evidence that the brains of long-term meditators process information more efficiently and that these meditators can react faster to stimuli. None of that demonstrates extrasensory perception, but it does support the more modest premise that less competition in a brain already overwhelmed by stimuli or mental events might bring previously overlooked information into focus. Yet, the source of such perception is a wholly different beast. “I think, as a scientist, you always have to maintain an open mind, and certainly there are many reports of such [extrasensory] experiences,” he says. “But we also need to treat the scientific method with a certain patience,” he adds.

How could researchers even determine whether anything extraordinary was actually happening? And how could the scientific method, built around observation, measurement, and reproducible evidence, investigate something supposedly operating beyond our senses?

“A few striking successes would not be enough,” Vago says. “Scientists would need to rule out each ordinary explanation.”

That means deciding in advance what would count as a success, conducting enough trials to rule out coincidence, and making sure neither the participants nor the researchers can unwittingly give away the answers. Any extraordinary result would also need to survive repeated testing, including by independent researchers.

“Even a result that passed all of them would first count as an unexplained effect needing further study, not proof of a new [mysterious] source of information,” Vago says. Past claims involving remote viewing and precognition, which is the supposed ability to know about events before they happen, have failed these tests, Vago notes.

Laukkonen, too, cautions against jumping to conclusions, but he's convinced science still has a great deal to discover about consciousness. “What I can say for sure is that we do not have the full story, and many apparent anomalies will be found in years to come, as they always have been,” he says.

For now, meditation stays in its lane, at least when scientists are watching; it offers them a way to investigate how the brain processes sensory information, regulates attention, and constructs conscious experience. For everyone else out there in the world, it remains a great method to take in the sensory wonder of a rose without the usual mental cacophony crashing the party.

Whether anything beyond the thorny beauty itself might spring from that silence—something the eyes cannot see, the ears cannot hear, and science has yet to explain—is a much stranger proposition. The rose, at least, has nothing to prove.