The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week

Sam Harris's Waking Up launches Deep Rest Reset, its first wearable-integrated program, pulling data from Oura, WHOOP, and Fitbit

Deep Rest Reset is a 14-day program with kinesiology professor Andy Galpin (founder of Absolute Rest), running June 8 to 21 and pairing daily video lessons with a 10-minute guided meditation for nervous system downregulation each night. Users who connect a wearable get a personalised end-of-program report tracking how their sleep actually changed. Galpin told the Waking Up audience, "When it comes to sleep, being resilient is more scalable than being optimised," a formulation that borrows from the performance world and redirects it toward rest as practice. Two weeks after Oura filed its S-1 at an $11 billion valuation and SOND exited stealth with a closed-loop sleep earbud, the meditation app and the wearable are converging: contemplative content folded into the biometric loop to enable rest as a practice.

A Cambridge preprint found that conscious cognition actively reshapes the brain's activity beyond what biology alone would predict, giving neurofeedback hardware a measurable target

Andrea Luppi's team at Cambridge and Imperial College London, with collaborators at McGill, asked what shapes the brain's moment-to-moment activity patterns: ongoing cognition (what the person is consciously thinking and doing) or the brain's underlying biology (wiring, receptors, gene expression, metabolism). In awake participants, cognition was the dominant force, with brain activity following what the person was doing and producing patterns that biology alone would not predict. Under anaesthesia (sevoflurane, propofol, or ketamine) or in chronic disorders of consciousness, cognition's grip on activity collapsed, and the brain's patterns reverted to what biology alone would predict. The implication for Spirit Tech is that consciousness leaves a measurable signature on the brain's activity, the gap between what cognition is shaping and what biology alone would predict, and a May 2026 EEG study (103 participants, in the Mindfulness journal) showing meditators shift brainwave patterns within three minutes of practice may be detecting that same gap widening in real time.

Sydney hosted Spirit Tech's first APAC convening on June 10, joining Mind & Life and a new academic conference in India in a week of regional gatherings

The Sydney gathering drew 50 builders, practitioners, and capital allocators in a city already home to the Insight Timer meditation app (with 30 million users). Mind & Life (the contemplative-science institute co-founded by the Dalai Lama and Francisco Varela) held its Summer Research Institute at the Garrison Institute under the theme "Depolarization: Cultivating Connection in a Divided World", a five-day gathering of scientists, contemplatives, and policymakers asking what holds people together in an age of fracture and whether contemplative practice can help. Rama Devi Women's University in India ran a parallel two-day academic conference on AI and meditation tools. What these convenings share: in the era of AI acceleration and worsening social crisis, the question of how technology shapes the human spirit has become urgent enough to draw builders, scientists, contemplatives, and capital into the same conversation across three continents.