Toby Woods

What if there were a drug that allowed us to study consciousness in its most basic form?

Christopher Timmermann describes the potential of 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic that strips away everything but awareness.

Read the full article here: bigthink.com/neuropsych/5...

Thank you to my excellent coauthors: @corcorana.bsky.social, Olivia Carter, Shian-Ling Keng, and Jennifer Windt.

We are making the protocol available open access so that the operationalized form of the practice can be subjected to scientific scrutiny, and so that the protocol can be used freely by other research teams.

Our findings validate our operationalization of the Stillness Meditation instructions. This protocol for the first time makes it possible to carry out tightly controlled studies investigating the emergence of pure consciousness from when a person first begins the practice.

In classical Focused Attention meditation, accessing pure consciousness can require intensive practice over long periods. Stillness Meditation is described as achieving the state with modest daily practice over a few days, weeks, or months.

Why would someone practise doing nothing? In Stillness Meditation it is because repeated practice is said to lead to mental stillness without thoughts and perceptions, also known as pure consciousness, and that is said to entail a profound reduction in anxiety.

We found little difference between Stillness Meditation and the two active controls (including Focused Attention meditation, which is said to be relaxing even for beginners). In each of the three conditions participants reported a very positive experience.

A previous study famously concluded that 15 mins doing nothing was aversive (people preferred electric shocks!). Using cardiac measures and detailed self-report items, we found, in contrast, that 15 mins skilful doing nothing is calming, pleasant and easy.

Findings for detailed skill assessment measures indicated Stillness Meditation participants got the basic skill in the 15 min session. Participants typically gave the maximum rating for clearness of instructions and reported being highly engaged.

Participants did a 15 min session of Stillness Meditation or one of two active controls (Focused Attention meditation and Audiobook). The Stillness Meditation and Focused Attention instructions were matched on structure, word count, voicing, and amount of silence.

In this study we took active steps to minimize theory contamination. We omitted information about the background, purposes, goal-states, and effects of the practice, we didn't use the word "meditation", and we only included participants who were meditation-naive.

A big, and usually unacknowledged, issue in meditation studies is "theory contamination". Words used by the meditation teacher or researcher (e.g. calm and stillness) can lead participants to report particular qualities even when those qualities were not part of their experience.

Our team has spent 9 years seeking to understand the Stillness Meditation technique and experience via detailed, systematic research. For this study, we developed a set of Stillness Meditation audio instructions based on our previous work.

There are very few studies on Do Nothing meditation. These practices are extremely subtle – said to involve a "method of no method", "nonmeditation", or an absence of technique. This makes it very difficult to operationalize them as instructions for participants.

We focused on a contemporary, secular Do Nothing practice called Stillness Meditation. This method treats doing nothing as a learnable skill that is developed through the practice. The skill entails abandoning all effort — relinquishing any form of trying.

This research is a collaboration between @monash-m3cs.bsky.social and @psychunimelb.bsky.social. Special thanks to M3CS and the Three Springs Foundation for my 2.5 year postdoc funding, which made the whole thing possible.

How does one do nothing skilfully? Can one get something of this skill in a single 15 min session? Is this first session aversive and difficult, as people commonly find doing nothing, or is it calming and easy? Our new preprint on Do Nothing meditation answers these questions! 🧵

osf.io/8fp6e

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