I’m the founder of Jhourney, a neurotech startup mapping the neural correlates of extraordinarily high-valence meditative states known as jhanas (Hagerty et al. 2013, Dennison 2019). It often takes hundreds of hours to learn these states, but doing so is often described as “life-changing” and the Hagerty paper postulates the meditation technique may result in (non-addictive) self-stimulation of one’s reward system. We hope to develop interventions like neurofeedback to make them more accessible.
Our Head of Neuroscience (co-advised by Anil Seth and Karl Friston) is leaving us to pursue an opportunity to collect jhana data from monks in India, and we’re looking for a replacement: someone with 3+ years professional human EEG experience to lead our work from study design to data collection and interpretation. The role is a mix of academia and industry – our team members have the opportunity to affiliate with and, if relevant, collaborate with the Harvard Neurospiritualty Lab and the Center for Psychedelics at the University of California, Berkeley. But we’re also a startup, and candidates should be excited by the most pragmatic version of research: making informed guesses to get things working faster, prioritizing building over publishing, and stepping into “head of science” responsibilities to set our R&D agenda alongside our ML and SWE engineers.
If you or someone you know would be interested, please reach out to stephen@jhourney.io.
Stephen