Human palm glows faintly, and meditation seems to quiet that light

Every living thing emits an extraordinarily faint glow. Biophotons, or ultraweak photon emissions in the visible spectrum, have been measured extensively in plants, germinating seeds and cell cultures, but in vivo measurements on the human body remain rare. A new research article in Frontiers in Photobiology reports what its authors describe as the first systematic multi-method complexity analysis of human ultraweak photon emission under controlled physiological modulation, using light recorded from the palm of a single person’s right hand.

The study involved three sessions conducted on different days. Each session comprised four consecutive 15-minute phases: a dark reference period, a pre-meditation resting state, a structured meditation phase based on the Sama Vritti box-breathing protocol, and a post-meditation recovery phase. The photon count series from each phase were then analysed with four complementary methods, each targeting a distinct aspect of the emission dynamics: distributional statistics including the Fano factor, skewness and tail Expected Shortfall; multiscale Fano factor and Allan deviation; stripe-filtered Diffusion Entropy Analysis; and Renyi entropy combined with a Time Reversal test.

The central finding is a convergence of these methods on a single coherent picture: a systematic reduction of emission intermittency during the meditative phase, detected consistently across all three sessions. In other words, the fluctuations in the palm’s ultra-weak light output became less bursty and more regular while the subject meditated, and this pattern repeated in every session regardless of the analytical lens applied.

The Diffusion Entropy Analysis placed the biological emission in the non-ergodic renewal regime, with a diffusion exponent above 0.5 and an estimated index of roughly 2.5 to 2.9, a regime previously reported for cell cultures and germinating seeds. The decrease of the diffusion exponent from the pre-meditation resting state to the meditation phase approached overall significance, with a Stouffer combined p-value of approximately 0.055.

The Renyi entropy analysis with the Time Reversal test revealed two distinct effects occurring simultaneously. One measure indicated a reduction of marginal amplitude burstiness, meaning the size of individual fluctuations became less extreme. A second measure showed an increase of sequential pattern structure, which the authors interpret as entrainment of the emission dynamics to the Sama Vritti breathing rhythm itself, as though the timing of the photon emissions began to follow the regular cadence of the box-breathing exercise.

Subject of Research: Ultraweak photon emission from the human palm during meditation analysed with multiple complexity methods

Article Title: Biophoton emission from human palm during meditation: a multi‐method complexity analysis

Article References: Pace, E., De Paolis, L., Felici, G., Vaglini, I., Sandrini, M., Pettini, M., Gemignani, A., & Benfatto, M. (2026). Biophoton emission from human palm during meditation: a multi‐method complexity analysis. Frontiers in Photobiology, 4, Article 1892522. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphbi.2026.1892522

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fphbi.2026.1892522

Keywords: biophotons, ultraweak photon emission, meditation, Sama Vritti breathing, Diffusion Entropy Analysis, Renyi entropy, Fano factor, complexity analysis, human physiology, pilot study, Biophoton, emission