ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dynamic causal modeling of low-density resting-state EEG in long-term meditation practitioners.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Life in Suspension with Death: Biocultural Ontologies, Perceptual Cues, and Biomarkers for the Tibetan Tukdam Postmortem Meditative State.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Article
- Death and Happiness: Exploring the Temporalities of the Meditated Death and Everyday Life in Tibetan Buddhist Practice of Tukdam.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Review
- Tukdam, Different Ontological Bodies, and Making Tibetan Deaths Visible.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Article
- Training the embodied self in its impermanence: meditators evidence neurophysiological markers of death acceptance.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Toward a Unified Model of Advanced Meditation, Human Development, Meditation Maps, and Transtradition Metaphors: Facing Impermanence, Suffering, and Death.Mindfulness · 2025Article
- Report from a Tibetan Monastery: EEG neural correlates of concentrative and analytical meditation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Patients with Disorders of Consciousness: Are They Nonconscious, Unconscious, or Subconscious? Expanding the Discussion.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Defining Meditation: Foundations for an Activity-Based Phenomenological Classification System.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Non-invasive Electrophysiological Characterization of Distinctive Meditative States in a Yogi duringInternational journal of yogaArticle
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Authors and funding
25 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
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Abstract
Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain's activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline (HB) and postmortem (PM) subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity (MMN), and auditory brainstem response (ABR). In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the
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