NEWS

Geneva, Switzerland — Every 50–120 milliseconds, your brain shifts into a new state. This has been happening your entire life, and until recently, almost no one outside a neuroscience laboratory knew it. These shifts — which scientists call EEG microstates — are the building blocks of thought, perception, and conscious experience.

This month, a landmark review has brought that discovery into sharp focus, and reaffirms what we are building at All Here: tools that use meditation to cultivate the brain states associated with focus, self-awareness, and mental wellbeing.

…

About the Review

All Here Chief Neuroscientist Prof. Christoph Michel and Dr. Lucie Bréchet of the University of Geneva this month published a landmark review studying 40 years of EEG microstate research in the journal Trends in Neuroscience.

Their central finding: EEG microstates are sensitive markers of the brain’s state — measurably shifting in response to changes in cognition, consciousness, and mental health. Among the conditions shown to alter microstate dynamics, meditation stands out as a particularly well-documented example. This builds on earlier work by the same group, published in Brain Topography, which demonstrated significant changes in microstate dynamics during Ānāpānasati meditation practice.

…

Why This Matters

Think of microstates as the alphabet of the brain’s language. What matters is not just which states occur, but the order in which one transitions to the next — like syntax giving meaning to individual words.

Focused attention meditation shifts the brain’s activity in measurable ways: the brain states associated with cognitive control and self-awareness increase, while mind-wandering — the default mode of an unguided mind — decreases. Our own recently published study in Brain Topography found precisely this, capturing these shifts at millisecond resolution in experienced meditators.

These are not self-reported improvements. They are direct measurements of the brain’s electrical activity, captured by EEG devices and validated across decades of independent research.

The review also found that the brain states meditation strengthens are the same ones disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. And crucially, this disruption can be detected before a clinical diagnosis — making microstate monitoring one of the most promising early-detection signals in neuroscience today.

…

All Here and the Bigger Picture

If you have been following All Here’s journey, you know that everything we build rests on this kind of scientific foundation.

The authors of the review also identify a critical gap in the research: to make microstate research clinically useful, science needs a reference point — a map of what healthy brain activity actually looks like, gathered across thousands of people over time.

That dataset does not yet exist.

All Here is designed to build it.

Every meditation session captured through our wearable EEG devices can contribute to that baseline. Over time, the data could become a living reference map — helping researchers measure the real impact of meditation, detect early signs of disease, and bring interventions to the people who need them most.

This publication marks a milestone in All Here’s scientific credibility. But for those who have been with us from the beginning, it is also something more personal: confirmation that the work we are doing is bridging a gap in the science.

We are not just inspired by this research — we are part of where it goes next.

…

Read the full paper in Trends in Neuroscience: “EEG Microstates: From Methodological Foundation to Clinical Translation” — Michel & Bréchet, University of Geneva / All Here SA, June 2026.

Read the full announcement from the University of Geneva: “Le langage sur lequel le cerveau construit sa pensée” — Université de Genève, June 2026.