I am incredibly grateful to @rubenlaukkonen.bsky.social and @hohwy.bsky.social (@monash-m3cs.bsky.social) for their continuous supervision throughout this project.

Also grateful to Stephen Procter (midlmeditation.com) for constructive discussions and guidance on Buddhist meditative practices.

Finally, we outlined four stages through which meditation may systematically reduce suffering within action-perception cycles.

We translated traditionally introspective meditative concepts—such as grasping, ignorance, insight, and suffering—into a computational framework, enabling them to be objectively examined and measured.

We suggest that meditation reduces suffering reliably. That is, not by altering specific states of suffering, but by dismantling the underlying mechanisms through which any suffering arises in the first place.

In this work, we argue that while different ways of reducing suffering can result in states that appear phenomenologically similar, their underlying dynamics differ fundamentally.

See the figure below to get an intuition!

I also presented a poster on it at
@theassc.bsky.social
earlier this month! So grateful for the opportunity.

Here's the link to the poster:
bit.ly/Poster-Agraw...

Does meditation just happen to address multiple types of suffering, or does its broad effectiveness hint at something deeper about the mechanisms of suffering or well-being itself?

We address this in our new preprint!
@rubenlaukkonen.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...