RESEARCH WATCH · 11 OCTOBER 2026 · 2 MIN READ
Shared patterns.
Uneven evidence.
What can a comparison of meditation, hypnosis and psychedelics actually establish?
The finding and its boundary
Ayla V. Gay, Cherine Fahim and Chantal Martin-Soelch, University of Fribourg, synthesised 41 neuroimaging studies involving 961 healthy adults: meditation 9 studies/185 participants; hypnosis 7/168; psychedelics 25/608. One trance study with 8 participants remained outside quantitative pooling.
Only meditation survived multiple-comparison correction
Hypnosis, psychedelic maps and cross-state overlap remain exploratory. This neither establishes a common mechanism nor proves that other states have no neural effects.
Mixed imaging methods, baselines and substances constrain comparison. Small study counts weaken publication-bias tests. The search ended in February 2025.
EDITORIAL ASSESSMENT · PROVISIONAL
Keep the questions testable
Relevance 4/5: directly useful for comparing altered-state methods. Evidence quality 2/5: major inferential limitations warrant an audit. Confidence in this provisional assessment: moderate.
Our review priorities are to check statistical thresholds and overlap construction, establish whether source studies share participants, and test the proposed common patterns in independent data. Baseline tasks, distinct drug effects and analysis choices are competing explanations to investigate.
Meditation, hypnosis, psychedelic measurement and trance testimony remain separate lanes. Imaging cannot stand in for the cultural meaning of living traditions. Suggested destination: AWAKEN; contextual relevance to BQ002. This is not a test of consciousness beyond the individual. All Big Questions remain unresolved.
- Audit the original inputs and corrected outputs.
- Verify registration timing, deviations and repository versions.
- Preregister independent, correction-controlled comparisons before claiming a shared mechanism.
