What Are the Jhanas? The Neuroscience of Meditative Bliss

The early Buddhist texts describe it with a homely image. A skilled bath attendant kneads soap powder with water in a metal basin until every grain is saturated and no drop leaks out. In the same way, the meditator's body is pervaded, through and through, with rapture and joy born of seclusion. This is the first jhana, as described in the Samaññaphala Sutta (Digha Nikaya 2).

So what are the jhanas, and why are neuroscientists now scanning the brains of people who can enter them at will? The answer touches one of the most radical ideas in contemplative history: that the mind can generate profound pleasure from attention itself.

What are the jhanas?

In the Pali tradition, the jhanas are a series of meditative absorptions. The first four are usually described as follows:

1. First jhana: attention applied to and sustained on its object, with rapture (piti), happiness (sukha) and a unified mind.
2. Second jhana: effortful attention falls away; rapture and happiness remain, with inner confidence and stillness.
3. Third jhana: rapture fades into a quieter contentment, accompanied by mindfulness and equanimity.
4. Fourth jhana: pleasure and pain both drop away, leaving pure equanimity and clear awareness.

Four further "formless" states are said to follow, with names such as infinite space and infinite consciousness. The suttas also preserve a striking story. In the Mahasaccaka Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 36), the Buddha recalls entering the first jhana spontaneously as a child, sitting in the shade of a rose-apple tree, and later asking himself why he should be afraid of a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensual desire. I find that question quietly revolutionary.

Bliss in the scanner: what neuroscience is finding

In 2013, Michael Hagerty and colleagues published a case study in Neural Plasticity on one experienced practitioner of the Sri Lankan jhana tradition. Signal in the nucleus accumbens, a hub of the brain's dopamine and opioid reward system, rose during jhana compared with rest, with the strongest activation in the second jhana. Activity in visual, auditory and language regions decreased. The authors describe this as evidence of self-stimulating a reward system: intense pleasure produced by an internal practice, without any external reward.

More recently, Matthew Sacchet's team at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard has studied a single adept in remarkable depth. In a 7-tesla fMRI study published in Cerebral Cortex, Winson Yang and colleagues recorded 27 jhana sessions over five days from a meditator with more than 25 years of experience, and found distinct patterns across cortical, subcortical, brainstem and cerebellar regions that tracked qualities such as joy, ease and equanimity. In 2025, Avijit Chowdhury and colleagues reported in NeuroImage that, in a practitioner with over 23,000 hours of practice, jhana states were linked to higher global functional connectivity, lower modularity between brain networks, reduced oscillatory power and higher signal complexity on EEG. Changes correlated with reported bliss. The authors suggest the findings fit theories in which advanced meditation loosens the brain's usual hierarchy of processing.

All of this rests on case studies of single individuals, and the researchers themselves describe the work as exploratory. The jhanas are also attracting popular interest, with dedicated retreats appearing in recent years, so careful science matters more than ever. What we can say is that the experiences meditators describe have measurable and coherent neural signatures.

Pleasure as a teacher

For many people, pleasure is something to earn, buy or ration. The jhana teachings present it as a natural capacity of a concentrated, wholesome mind, and as a support for insight. The joy steadies attention, and steady attention sees clearly.

This resonates deeply with my own work on ecstatic states. In ecstatic hypnosis, as in jhana practice, pleasure becomes a doorway: a way to soften defences, deepen trust and discover how much of our wellbeing is generated from within. I present the jhanas as a tradition and a map of experience, and the neuroscience as a young, promising field still testing it.

A practice: resting in the pleasant

This exercise draws on methods taught by contemporary jhana teachers. Expect a gentle taste; full absorption usually takes sustained practice, often on retreat.

1. Sit comfortably for 20 to 30 minutes. Rest attention on the sensation of breath at the nostrils or upper lip.
2. When the mind wanders, return kindly. Let the breath become your whole world.
3. After some minutes, look for any pleasant sensation: warmth in the hands, softness in the face, a subtle glow in the chest.
4. Shift attention from the breath to that pleasantness. Let it be the new object.
5. Hold it lightly, the way you would cup a small bird. Allow it to spread on its own.
6. Before ending, rest for a minute in whatever quiet remains, then open your eyes slowly.

Over time, many practitioners find the pleasant feeling grows more reliable and more absorbing.

To explore ecstatic states in depth, join me at the Ecstatic Hypnosis Retreat in Portugal, 24 to 30 April 2027.

Related reading

• Is the Self an Illusion? Meditation, Neuroscience and the Buddha's Not-Self
• Breathwork, Music and the Ecstatic Brain: What Neuroscience Now Confirms
• Theories of Consciousness Put to the Test: Science, Humility and the Witness

Sources

• Hagerty, M. R., Isaacs, J., Brasington, L., Shupe, L., Fetz, E. E., & Cramer, S. C. (2013). Case study of ecstatic meditation: fMRI and EEG evidence of self-stimulating a reward system. Neural Plasticity, 2013, 653572. Full text
• Yang, W. F. Z., Chowdhury, A., Bianciardi, M., van Lutterveld, R., Sparby, T., & Sacchet, M. D. (2024). Intensive whole-brain 7T MRI case study of volitional control of brain activity in deep absorptive meditation states. Cerebral Cortex. Neuroscience News report
• Chowdhury, A., Bianciardi, M., Chapdelaine, E., Riaz, O. S., Timmermann, C., van Lutterveld, R., Sparby, T., & Sacchet, M. D. (2025). Multimodal neurophenomenology of advanced concentration absorption meditation: An intensively sampled case study of Jhana. NeuroImage, 305, 120973. DOAJ record
• Samaññaphala Sutta (Digha Nikaya 2) and Mahasaccaka Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 36), Pali Canon.