Nice article. I noticed that the effect the researchers observed was described as "drifiting into unconsciousness," which suggests a mechanism different from that of fruition. Still, seems possible that there could be a lot of overlap between what they are describing and the highly synchronized states one can experience later in the vipassana sequence.
Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi's team found that the woman's loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can't distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging.