EPFL x All Here
Science Paper published in NeuroImage.
We are pleased to share a significant scientific publication on meditation within the Mixed Reality Meditation Platform, titled:
“Meditation in the Third-Person Perspective Modulates Minimal Self and Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials.”
How Neuroscience and Technology Are Shaping the Future of Inner Experience
In recent years, meditation has moved from the margins of spiritual practice into the center of scientific inquiry. What was once primarily explored through introspection and tradition is now being studied using the most advanced tools of neuroscience, brain imaging, and immersive technology. A recent scientific publication marks an important milestone in this evolution, demonstrating how mixed reality can be used not only to guide meditation but also to rigorously investigate its effects on the brain and the sense of self.
This publication represents the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between academic neuroscience and a technology-driven meditation platform, offering new insight into how meditation alters self-consciousness and bodily awareness. More broadly, it reflects a growing movement to bridge ancient contemplative traditions with modern scientific and technological innovation.
The Origins of a Shared Vision
The story begins in 2021, when Professor Olaf Blanke from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL and エルキン・ベック, founder and president of All Here, came together to explore a shared question: what is the nature of the self, and how can it be studied, trained, and transformed?
From a scientific perspective, Professor Blanke’s laboratory has long been recognized as a leader in the study of self-consciousness. His research has examined how the brain constructs the sense of self, body ownership, and spatial perspective—often through experimental manipulations such as out-of-body experiences and bodily illusions.
From the contemplative side, Erkin Bek comes from a deep meditation background rooted in classical yoga theory & practice, particularly the Raja Yoga tradition informed by the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. In this framework, the “self” is not a by-product of perception but the central object of inquiry. Meditation, in this view, is a systematic exploration of self-awareness, identity, and consciousness itself.
Although these perspectives emerged from very different traditions, they converged around a common intention: to turn attention inward toward a Self inquiry rather than pursuing outward attention and expressionism, and to understand how Self-experience arises, shifts, and while bodily boundaries dissolve.
Designing a New Kind of Meditation Platform
Early discussions quickly moved beyond theory. Both collaborators recognized that immersive technologies—particularly virtual and mixed reality—could offer an unprecedented way to explore self-experience.
Unlike traditional screen-based interfaces, virtual reality can directly manipulate perspective, embodiment, and spatial presence. This opens the door to meditation experiences that are not merely guided by imagination, but actively shaped through perceptual and bodily cues.
Out of this realization emerged a bold ambition: to design a technology-powered meditation platform capable of generating novel meditative states, and to study those states using rigorous neuroscientific methods.
To support this ambition, All Here and EPFL formalized a three-year collaborative research agreement. The program officially launched in 2022, marking the beginning of an intensive interdisciplinary effort spanning neuroscience, extended reality, biomedical engineering, and contemplative practice.
Building the Research Team
A dedicated research team was assembled to carry out the project under the direct supervision of Professor Blanke and his deputy, Bruno Herbelin, in close partnership with Erkin Bek.
Three postdoctoral researchers formed the core of the effort:
This interdisciplinary composition proved essential. The project required not only technical excellence but also sensitivity to the phenomenology of meditation—how practitioners actually experience shifts in awareness, identity, and embodiment.
Studying Meditation from a New Perspective
At the heart of the research was a deceptively simple question: does meditating from a different perceptual perspective change the way we experience ourselves?
Using virtual reality, participants were guided to meditate in two distinct conditions:
These perspectives were not merely visual tricks. They fundamentally altered how participants related to their bodies, their thoughts, and their sense of identity.
The results were striking. Meditation conducted from the third-person perspective was associated with stronger feelings of detachment from the body, softer and less defined body boundaries, and a reduced sense of identification with bodily form. Neurophysiological measures further revealed changes in heartbeat-evoked potentials, suggesting altered processing of bodily signals in brain regions associated with self-referential processing.
Together, these findings provide empirical support for something meditators have described for centuries: that shifts in perspective can profoundly reshape the experience of self.
Scientific Significance and Publication
The study was published in NeuroImage, one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals in brain imaging and neuroscience. This represents a significant achievement—not only scientifically, but culturally.
It is among the first peer-reviewed publications to systematically examine meditation experiences delivered through immersive technology, and to link those experiences to measurable neural correlates of self-consciousness.
For the field of meditation research, it demonstrates that technology can be more than a delivery mechanism—it can be an experimental instrument for probing consciousness itself.
For All Here, it establishes a strong foundation of scientific credibility, signaling a long-term commitment to evidence-based development rather than speculative claims.
Why it matters
What makes this work especially meaningful is its timing. In a world where attention is increasingly fragmented and technology often pulls awareness outward, meditation offers a disciplined way of turning inward to explore the nature of self and experience.
This research shows that technology and contemplation do not have to be in opposition. When designed with scientific rigor and care, mixed reality can become a bridge—making deep meditative states more accessible while allowing them to be studied objectively.” where should I put it, where does it makes more sense ?
From Research Platform to Real-World Application
Following the study, All Here continued to develop the platform beyond the laboratory setting. The technology evolved into an industrialized meditation system, including the creation of a meditation capsule Zenbu Koko designed to deliver advanced mixed-reality meditation training.
Importantly, scientific research did not end with industrialisation. Instead, it became an integral part of ongoing development. Insights from neuroscience directly informed experience design, while user experience continued to generate new research questions.
The publication serves as both validation and catalyst—showing that technology-mediated meditation can be impactful, measurable, and worthy of serious scientific attention.
Expanding a Global Research Network
Building on this momentum, All Here has expanded its scientific collaborations internationally. New partnerships now extend beyond EPFL to include institutions such as the ジュネーブ大学, Fondation Campus Biotech Geneva, CSEM, research groups in Japan including the Laboratory of Collective Intelligence at the The University of Tokyo, and academic partners in India.
This growing international network reflects a shared recognition that meditation, consciousness, and self-experience are global topics that benefit from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the same time, All Here has developed its own internal science team, ensuring continuity between academic research and applied innovation. This hybrid model—combining external collaboration with internal expertise—positions the platform to remain scientifically grounded while moving rapidly toward real-world impact.
Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science
At its core, this work represents a bridge between two worlds.
On one side lies the ancient contemplative traditions that have explored the self for thousands of years through disciplined inner practice. On the other side stand modern neuroscience and immersive technology, capable of mapping brain dynamics and reshaping perception with unprecedented precision.
Rather than replacing one with the other, this collaboration demonstrates how they can inform and enrich each other. Technology becomes a means of helping to induce states that were reminiscent of real meditation experience, while science provides language and measurement for experiences long considered ineffable.
Looking Ahead
The publication in NeuroImage is not an endpoint, but a beginning. Ongoing research will continue to explore attention regulation, mind-wandering, self-awareness, and the neural dynamics underlying meditative states. New meditation experiences and training programs are developed, tested, refined, and studied.
As mixed reality technologies mature and neuroscience tools grow more precise, the opportunity to understand consciousness from the inside out has never been greater.
All Here is delighted to share this work with the broader community, and to contribute to a future in which meditation, science, and technology evolve together—offering deeper insight into what it means to be aware, embodied, and human.
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“ Inspire To Meditate, with Science & Technology “
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