Who I'm looking for
Someone with a PhD in neuroscience, cognitive science, or experimental psychology, with a real research history in contemplative practice. Not dabbling in mindfulness as a side interest. Someone whose work has actually measured what sitting does to the brain.
Published research in the field matters more than seniority. Whether your line of work is default-mode-network suppression, attentional regulation, interoception, HRV-and-meditation, or oscillatory EEG signatures of advanced practice — what I'm looking for is somebody who already knows the literature and can write a study into it.
You should also be willing to design and run one rigorous study end-to-end, not supervise from a distance.
What you'd work on
- Designing a controlled study on how The Sacred Act's AI-generated meditations affect the brain — against teacher-led practice, silent baseline, or whatever comparison the question actually demands.
- Choosing the instrumentation honestly. High-density EEG, HRV, possibly 7T fMRI if a partner lab aligns. CRED-NF-grade preregistration, sample-size justification, blinding, artifact handling. No shortcuts on rigor because the result needs to stand up to a Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience review.
- Pairing first-person reports with neural data — neurophenomenology, not surveys glued onto a scan. The lived practice is part of the measurement.
- Recruiting participants, running sessions, analyzing data, and writing the paper. Publishing in a real peer-reviewed venue is the bar.
What I'll bring
- A meditation app actively used by TestFlight users, generating practice data the study can ground in.
- Full access to the corpus, the prompting layer, and the underlying AI behavior — the study won't be operating on a black box. You'll see the same generation traces I see.
- Funding for the study itself, plus equity that ties the finding to the company that backed it.
- A founder who already meditates daily and reads the source material, so the conversation with you isn't a translation exercise.
What I won't do
- Treat contemplative neuroscience as a branding move.
- Push you to publish before the data justifies it, or to soften a finding because it doesn't market well.
- Pretend I want results. If the model doesn't do anything measurable — or worse, if it does something measurably wrong — I want to know first.
If you've thought seriously about what AI-generated practice means for the science of meditation, write to me with one paragraph on what you'd actually want to measure first, and what instrument you'd reach for.