Antecedents to Allied Health Professional (AHP) Workforce Planning and Management in Rural and Coastal Areas: A Scoping Review.

Advanced meditation encompasses an array of states, stages, and practices that are experienced through time and mastery of meditative techniques (; Winson Fu Zun ; ; W.F. ; ; ; ). Unsurprisingly, there is growing interest in the study of advanced meditation (, ) and development of the methods used to study it (, , ), with a new focus of research in contemplative science that has been termed the ‘third wave of meditation research’ (, , ). Advanced meditation includes the unfolding of stages of meditation and what we have called ‘meditative development’ (, , , , , ), that ultimately leads to meditative endpoints (, , ). Previous meditation research has provided various neuroscientific insights on topics, such as brain connectivity (, , , , ; W.F. ), mental and physical health (Winson F.Z. ; ; ; ; ; ), and the conscious human experience in general (, , ). Moreover, such research complements studies on other subjects, including emergent phenomena (, ), brain stimulation (), and psychedelics (, , ). These meditative states and endpoints can be described and classified using phenomenology (, , ). One particular meditative endpoint is a “cessation” event (c.f. evolving definitions of in Pali as conceived by various sects and across different eras within Theravada Buddhism). These events are characterized by a brief loss of consciousness that usually last a few seconds (, ). As described by practitioners, one may emerge from a cessation event with a feeling of deep bliss and that something fundamental within them has reset or changed (). There exists a research interest in cessations to not only explore the neuroscience of the events themselves, but also better understand the limits of meditation and human consciousness more broadly. Three previous papers have conducted neuroscientific investigation of cessation events. analyzed a total of six cessations in two participants and found an increase in global long-range gamma synchronization during these events (please note that these authors refer to cessations as “fruitions”). Next were two intensively sampled case studies that used the same dataset as the present paper. First, showed a large-scale linear decrease in alpha-power and modest linear theta-power increase leading up to cessation with a linear recovery in alpha power post-cessation. Additionally, demonstrated a linear decrease in large-scale whole-brain functional interactions in the alpha band pre-cessation, and then a linear recovery to baseline after cessation. Although these studies provide evidence regarding power and functional connectivity neural correlates surrounding cessation events, they do not provide information regarding critical dynamics of the brain.