Tapiès, contemplative practices and modern neuroscience

Antoni Tàpies’ exploration of materiality, emptiness, and transcendence offers a powerful analogue to the altered perceptual and self-referential dynamics observed in deep contemplative states such as jhana meditation. Both involve a progressive dissolution of form and content, converging toward minimal phenomenological experience. Modern neuroscience provides the tools to investigate these transformations, revealing how contemplative absorption modulates large-scale brain hierarchies and their functional integration. Building on recent models of brain dynamics and consciousness,I am to bridge aesthetic phenomenology and computational neuroscience to examine how states of contemplative states reorganize information flow and hierarchical processing in the brain.