Meditation research has produced a sprawl of findings across attention, emotion, perception and self-report, and the literature has struggled to say what, if anything, connects them. This paper proposes one construct that might: functional signal-to-noise ratio in the brain.

The definitions are what make it testable. Signal means neural variance that tracks the goal-relevant causes of sensory input, the activity actually carrying information about what you are attending to. Noise means everything else, including endogenous fluctuations that have nothing to do with the task. Framed that way, the folk description of meditation as producing a clear mind becomes a quantitative claim rather than a metaphor.

Unifying proposals like this are useful even when wrong, because they are falsifiable in a way that a catalogue of separate findings is not. If f-SNR is the common thread, interventions that raise it should reproduce the scattered results, and if they do not, the proposal fails cleanly.