{"paper":{"title":"Clear Mind: Meditation and the Brain's Signal-to-Noise Ratio","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"q-bio.NC","authors_text":"Ruben Laukkonen","submitted_at":"2026-06-29T02:06:42Z","abstract_excerpt":"Meditation is quintessentially associated with a clear mind. This paper proposes that diverse findings in the science of meditation can be mapped onto a single, empirically tractable construct: functional signal-to-noise ratio in the brain, or f-SNR. Signal denotes neural variance that tracks the goal-relevant causes of sensory input, while noise denotes residual activity, including irrelevant endogenous fluctuations. Mechanistically, meditation increases f-SNR through two primary operations: selectively enhancing signal and \"decluttering\" noise. Deepening practice is further proposed to incre"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.29698","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.29698/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}