Not long ago, the idea that brain scans might one day map the contours of consciousness would have sounded absurd. Now, it’s a serious research field—one fueled by the mainstream rise of meditation, the psychedelic renaissance, and a broader cultural hunger for answers to the question of what consciousness is in its most stripped-down form—what some call “pure-awareness.”
However, a review published in Frontiers in Psychology argues that the scientific rush to pin down “pure awareness” may be chasing the wrong target.
According to psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Zoran Josipovic of New York University, many studies claiming to measure pure consciousness may actually be detecting something else entirely. Attention, relaxation, altered states, or subtle cognitive processes are mistaken for awareness itself.
“Perhaps the most commonly found obstacle to advancing research on nondual awareness is the belief that it does not exist,” Dr. Josipovic writes, warning that when researchers misunderstand what it is, they end up labeling other mental phenomena as consciousness.
This is significant because misidentifying a target leads to misdirected science. If researchers are measuring the wrong thing, the neuroscience that follows may end up mapping attention, absorption, calm, or altered perception—essentially everything around consciousness, rather than consciousness itself.
Ultimately, Dr. raises a troubling possibility, that after decades of research, scientists may still not be studying consciousness itself.
The Scientific Race to Isolate Pure-Awareness
Consciousness remains one of the most profound unsolved problems in neuroscience. Alongside the question of whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, it stands as one of humanity’s greatest and most enduring mysteries.
Researchers have long sought to explain how electrical activity in the brain produces subjective experience—the feeling of awareness.
In recent years, scientists have increasingly turned to meditation and psychedelic states as tools to study consciousness in its purest form. These states can quiet mental chatter, dissolve the sense of self, and produce what participants often describe as raw, pure awareness.
The hope is that by stripping away thoughts and sensory distractions, researchers can isolate consciousness itself. However, Dr. Josipovic argues that this assumption may be fundamentally flawed.
“Consciousness itself, or consciousness as such, a.k.a. nondual awareness, is still insufficiently researched,” he writes, despite major progress in studying perception and cognition. In other words, scientists may be studying the mind’s contents—not the awareness that makes those contents possible.
Mistaking Calm, Attention, and Altered States for Pure-Awareness
One of the paper’s central warnings is that many mental states commonly associated with “pure awareness” are not, in fact, consciousness itself. Deep calm, for example, is often treated as a proxy for pure consciousness. However, calmness is a feeling, a type of mental content, not awareness itself.
Similarly, attention—the brain’s ability to focus on something—is frequently confused with consciousness. But attention is a cognitive function, not the underlying awareness that enables experience.
Dr. Josipovic emphasizes that nondual awareness is fundamentally different. “Non-dual awareness refers to consciousness itself or consciousness as such, a foundational awareness that does not rely on mental representations to know, and so it does not structure experience into the conceptually reified duality of subject and object,” he explains.
Even psychedelic-like experiences, which can dissolve the sense of self and produce feelings of unity, may not represent pure awareness. Instead, they may simply be altered states occurring within consciousness, but not consciousness itself.
The Problem With Studying the Wrong Thing
Dr. Josipovic argues that this confusion has serious consequences for neuroscience. If researchers mistake calmness, attention, or altered states for awareness itself, their conclusions about consciousness may be fundamentally flawed.
It would be like trying to understand the nature of a movie screen by studying the images projected onto it. The distinction may sound philosophical, akin to Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” but it has practical implications for brain research.
“Non-dual awareness is a type of awareness that knows both itself and phenomena without relying on mental representations,” Dr. Josipovic writes, distinguishing true consciousness from ordinary mental processes.
Unlike attention or perception, which come and go, pure-awareness may remain constant across different mental states.
Awareness Without a Thinker
One of the paper’s most provocative arguments is that “pure awareness” isn’t constructed from the familiar layers that make up our sense of self—bodily ownership, agency, or narrative identity. Instead, Dr. Josipovic suggests it can become explicit even when those self-related processes quiet down or temporarily drop away.
In ordinary life, consciousness typically feels personal—like experience is happening to you, from a stable point of view. However, Dr. Josipovic argues that this “observer” may be something the mind constructs, rather than a requirement for awareness itself. In states of pure awareness, he writes, “there is no separate subject experiencing nondual awareness as if it were an object; there is only nondual awareness that knows itself inherently.”
During pure awareness, he writes, “there is no separate subject experiencing nondual awareness as if it were an object; there is only nondual awareness that knows itself inherently.”
This idea challenges deeply held assumptions in neuroscience, which often treat the self as central to conscious experience. Instead, the self may be just another mental event occurring within awareness.
Always There, But Rarely Recognized
According to the paper, pure-awareness may not be something that needs to be created. It may already be present in every conscious experience.
“Non-dual awareness is thought to be present in every conscious experience, though usually only implicitly, covered up by habitual conceptualizations about subject and object,” Dr. Josipovic writes.
The reason people rarely notice it, he suggests, is that attention is constantly focused on thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. Awareness itself remains in the background.
Meditation or psychedelic-induced mind-altering experiences may help reveal it, not by creating it, but by quieting the mental activity that obscures it.
A Scientific Blind Spot
Dr. Josipovic argues that one of the biggest barriers to progress is a widespread misunderstanding of what consciousness actually is. Many scientists assume that consciousness must emerge from brain activity, just as thoughts and perceptions do. However, if awareness itself is not just another mental process, this assumption may be wrong.
“Without understanding that nondual awareness is phenomenally real and unique, a mistaken inference can be made that it is merely a result of conceptually mislabeling some other aspect of experience, like wakefulness, attention, monitoring, or meta-cognition,” he writes.
This misidentification could explain why consciousness has remained so difficult to explain scientifically.
The Stakes for Neuroscience
If Dr. Josipovic’s warnings about the research of pure-awareness are correct, the implications could be profound. It would mean that decades of research may have mapped the brain’s activities without fully identifying consciousness itself.
It could also reshape efforts to understand meditation, anesthesia, coma, and psychedelic states.
Significantly, it might change how scientists approach one of the deepest questions in science: how the brain produces awareness. Or whether it produces awareness at all.
For now, pure awareness remains elusive. Scientists continue to race to capture, measure, and explain it. However, Dr. Josipovic’s paper suggests they may first need to answer a more basic question: Are they studying consciousness itself—or just its reflections?
In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for reality because it’s all they’ve ever seen. Dr. Josipovic suggests consciousness research risks a modern version of that trap. If “pure awareness” is the thing we’re trying to isolate, then the brain signatures we can most easily capture may be only its byproducts.
“It can then be mistaken for the effect it has on content and state, or for some specific content or state,” Dr. Josipovic writes. Plato offered a similar caution for those still fixed on the cave wall, “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com