A new theory proposes an intriguing idea about where meditation may have come from: not as a wholly novel human invention, but as a cultural refinement of an ancient survival response known as defensive freezing. Defensive freezing is the state animals and humans can enter when facing possible threat—becoming still, highly alert, and physiologically prepared for action. The authors argue that over deep evolutionary time, this basic response may have provided the raw behavioral template that human communities gradually shaped into meditative practices.
The central claim is not that meditation and fear are the same thing. Rather, it suggests that some recognizable features of meditation—stillness, narrowed attention, heightened awareness, and changes in bodily state—may share roots with older defensive systems conserved across species. In this account, early humans may have taken elements of freezing and, through repetition, social learning, ritual, and verbal instruction, transformed them into structured contemplative practices.
That idea matters because it shifts the usual story. Meditation is often discussed as a spiritual, philosophical, or psychological practice. This paper instead asks a biological origins question: what pre-existing response repertoire could have existed before formal traditions such as Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian contemplative systems emerged? The authors propose that defensive freezing is a plausible answer, especially because it already includes immobility, vigilance, and attentional orienting—features that resemble at least some forms of meditation.
The article also places strong emphasis on culture. According to the authors, freezing alone would not be enough to produce meditation as we know it. What made the difference, they suggest, was social reinforcement: imitation, storytelling, ritual, teaching, and verbal communities that preserved and elaborated these behaviors across generations. In that view, meditation is both biological and cultural—grounded in ancient defensive systems, then shaped into practices with spiritual, social, and therapeutic meaning. The framework figure in the paper depicts this pathway as moving from first-instance defensive freezing, to operant shaping and stimulus-control transfer, to culturally canalized meditation.
The historical analysis does not prove that meditation evolved from freezing, and the authors acknowledge that the account is inferential and meant to generate testable hypotheses. They also explicitly note that they are not claiming all forms of meditation derive exclusively from freezing, or that structural similarity means the two states are functionally identical.
That caution is essential for public interpretation. The publication offers a provocative new framework, not settled evidence. Its value lies in opening a fresh interdisciplinary conversation across evolutionary biology, neuroscience, behavior science, and contemplative studies. Whether future work supports or weakens the hypothesis, the paper adds an original question to meditation research: could one of humanity’s most enduring contemplative practices have grown out of one of our oldest survival responses?
Black, D. S., & Reed, P. (2026). Defensive Freezing and the Evolutionary Origins of Meditation in Humans. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1557(1), e70249.
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