# Core Question
How do neural rhythms, meditation, and state shifts expand or shrink awareness?

# Description
Focusing on dynamic shifts across brain states, this cluster evaluates how large-scale oscillations, contemplative training, or pharmacological interventions expand, shrink, or reshape conscious experience.

# Explananda
## Synesthesia
### Description
a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in other sensory or cognitive pathways.

### Challenge
Under a specific theory, it should account for how qualia channels can be inter-connected or otherwise shared between perceptual pathways

## Trainability of Experience
### Description
Individuals with extensive contemplative training consistently report reproducible changes in conscious experience, including greater attentional stability, finer discrimination of mental events, reduced identification with thoughts and emotions, and altered self-representation. Across diverse contemplative traditions, many of these phenomenological changes show striking convergence despite differing cultural and philosophical frameworks. Increasing behavioural and neural evidence suggests that at least some of these changes reflect systematic modifications to conscious experience rather than belief or interpretation.

### Challenge
A theory should explain how systematic training improves the resolution with which a conscious system can observe and discriminate its own experience. It should specify the mechanisms by which introspective precision, attentional stability, and other phenomenological capacities improve, predict which aspects of consciousness should change or remain invariant, and account for the convergence of similar reports across experienced practitioners.

## Progressive Reduction
### Description
Through systematic contemplative practice, practitioners often report a reproducible sequence in which aspects of experience, including inner speech, conceptual thought, autobiographical processing, agency, emotional identification and the sense of self, can be progressively attenuated while conscious awareness remains. These reports suggest that components of conscious experience can become dissociated in a structured and reproducible manner.

### Challenge
A theory should predict which components of conscious experience are expected to diminish, which can dissociate, and which constitute the minimum requirements for consciousness. It should explain why awareness is reported to persist (or even strengthen) as these functions are progressively reduced.

## The Less-is-More Effect
### Description
Individuals with contemplative training frequently report that as internally generated cognitive activity diminishes (incl. Inner speech, conceptual elaboration, self-referential thought, emotional reactivity, etc.), conscious experience becomes more vivid, stable, and finely differentiated. Ordinary sensory experience is reported with greater clarity and detail despite a reduction in cognitive complexity.

### Challenge
A theory should explain why reducing internally generated cognitive activity can coincide with a richer or more stable conscious experience. It should specify the mechanisms responsible, predict when this enhancement should occur or not, and distinguish changes in conscious experience itself from changes in attention, memory, reportability, or metacognitive access.

## Biological Oscillations
### Description
Provide a mechanism explaining why large-scale rhythmic oscillations (e.g., beta and gamma rhythms) are tightly associated with consciousness-related features across species (humans, octopuses,flies) and whether these rhythms must be physically present in the hardware or can be functionally modeled

### Challenge
Forces a stand on substrate independence. It separates “computational” theories (like GWT) from “biological” or “structural” theories (like biological naturalism or IIT)