Developmental biology is the study of how bodies and minds come to be. It is not just Frankenstein’s creature that is made of dead, inanimate parts: all of us are composed of recycled chemical materials, which come together to form an oocyte and eventually self-assemble into a new being that demarcates itself from the rest of the world. I spend a lot of time thinking about, and studying, the various aspects of how novel causal minds come into the world and transform. This is the study of the origin and mechanisms of collective intelligences, where active parts come together into a whole that is, in many interesting ways, more and different. The existential task of the whole is to keep its parts aligned toward higher-order agendas, and our job as scientists and philosophers is to understand the cognitive glue mechanisms by which this happens in diverse embodiments.
But what of the other end of the physical life cycle – what happens when the body disbands? How do collectives disconnect, when do the parts find out about it, and what happens next? This can happen in a number of ways, at different scales: the dissociative identity disorder of the cellular collective intelligence known as cancer, whole-body aging, and cell/tissue explantation. With trauma medicine, as with the cabbage in your fridge, it is often not easy to say when a being is “dead” – that transition is, like all important transitions, a continuum, and advancing clinical science (as well as bioengineering) has continued to demolish prior barriers-of-no-return. But, the consequences of death are usually obvious: decay so rapid and stereotypical that it is used in forensics to reconstruct the timelines of violent crimes.
And yet, like with most aspects of science, the exceptions may point to the most interesting opportunities for discovery. In this post, I want to introduce a new aspect of bodily death. Tukdam is a fascinating phenomenon in which a human (usually an advanced meditation practitioner) dies, but then the body shows few to none of the usual signs of decomposition, retaining a lifelike appearance for days or weeks. Numerous questions arise, with respect to the biophysical, metabolic, and immunological aspects of the somatic cells and the body’s microbiome.
Here is a talk about their Tukdam project by, and a discussion with,
- Tawni Tidwell, PhD, TMD, Research Assistant Professor and Tukdam Study PI, Center for Healthy Minds, UW-Madison
- Melanie Boly, MD, PhD, Director, Boly Lab; Assistant Professor, Neurology Dept, UW-Madison
- Robin Goldman, PhD, Director of Research Support Core, Center for Healthy Minds, UW-Madison
Tukdam Study site: https://www.centerhealthyminds.org/science/studies/the-field-study-of-long-term-meditation-practitioners
Resources and readings:
- Recent study publications:
- Delayed decompositional changes in indoor settings among Tibetan monastic communities in India: A case report, Forensic Sci. Int. Rep., Tidwell et al. (2024)
- Life in Suspension with Death: Biocultural Ontologies, Perceptual Cues, and Biomakrers for the Tibetan Tukdam Postmortem Meditative State, Cult Med Psychiatry, Tidwell (2024)
- No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State, Front Psychol, Lott et al. (2021)
- Related works:
- Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. PNAS, Borjigin et al. (2013)
- Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain. PNAS, Xu et al. (2023)
- Integrated Information Theory: A Consciousness-First Approach to What Exists. arXiv, Tononi & Boly (2025)
- Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice. PNAS 101, 16369–16373 Lutz et al. (2004).
- Neural correlates of pure presence. bioRxiv, Boly et al. (2024)
- Imaging Ultraweak Photon Emission from Living and Dead Mice and from Plants under Stress. J Phys Chem Lett. Salari et al (2025)
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