We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a role in the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports: (1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highly focused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditator show changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptly after jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activation of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject might stimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparently novel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject. 1. Introduction Ecstatic experiences have been reported in every major religion, and psychologists have long advocated research in these areas [1, 2]. Neuroscience can contribute to these issues by documenting the brain activity of expert meditators, some of whom have trained to enter these states with volitional control. The type of meditation studied here is a Buddhist concentration technique called jhana that induces an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) in the framework of Vaitl et al. [3] and whose short-term goal is joy or happiness. Because happiness is a fundamental goal of many people and is the object of the new discipline of positive psychology [4, 5], imaging the brain of an individual who claims to generate joy without any external rewards or cues could point the way toward improved training in joy and greater resilience in the face of external difficulties. Of particular interest is the neural mechanisms by which happiness is generated. Jhana meditations consist of a set of 8 sequential practices that were first codified by Buddhists over 2000 years ago [6]. All are reported to be ecstatic, in that they generate great joy while in an ASC that is dissociated from external cues or stimuli. The first three practices are, to our knowledge, the only meditations to specifically target short-term joy or happiness (see [7, 8] for other meditations that generate ASCs). Figure 1 shows a schematic of
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