Religious beliefs and mystical experiences can be found in human societies across the globe and throughout history. Self-transcendence (ST)—a state characterized by the loss of boundaries between self and others and a feeling of connectedness to everything—is a primary feature of such spiritual experiences. However, little is known about the brain’s role in this uniquely …
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Mindfulness Intervention to Study the Neurobiology of Depression (MIND)
Mindfulness was taught to teenagers with a history of depression as one strategy for being aware of maladaptive thinking patterns such as rumination. Mindfulness was also taught as an alternative to “getting stuck in your head”. Teenagers who received 8 weeks of this intervention, experienced a reduction in residual depression symptoms compared to teenagers who …
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Mechanisms of mindfulness and stress resilience: A mobile app mindfulness training study
Thousands of studies show that mindfulness interventions improve cognitive, affective, stress, and health outcomes, but very little experimental work attempts to explain the mechanisms underlying this broad range of effects. This study uses a novel smartphone training paradigm to experimentally dismantle the components of mindfulness training and test their effects on affective and stress outcomes. …
Does meditation cause pain relief through endogenous opioids?
There is growing evidence that meditation practice can reduce the experience of pain. However, what is going on in the brain during meditation that causes this pain relief has been a mystery. We guessed that meditation might reduce pain by releasing natural brain chemicals called endogenous opioids. Endogenous opioids reduce pain via the same brain …
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Neural dynamics of attention and meta-attention during meditation
Mindfulness meditation can reduce the effects of mind-wandering, but how? Meditation may reduce mind-wandering directly by reducing distracting thoughts or improving sustained attention. Alternatively, meditation may not reduce mind-wandering itself, but enhance the ability to detect and correct mind-wandering. Disentangling these mechanisms is difficult because subjective reports of mind-wandering depend on both factors, but in …
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What is it about yoga? Isolating the effect of structured movement sequences on cognition, interoception, and stress markers
Yoga-based practices (YBP) typically involve a combination of movement sequences, conscious regulation of the breath, and techniques to engage attention. However, little is known about whether effects of YBP result from the synergistic combination of these components, or whether a subset may yield similar effects. In this study we compared the effect of two 8-week …
Mindfulness and beyond: A qualitative study of advanced Mahasi meditators’ experience
The recent convergence of Asian and Western culture has generated interest in meditation as a practice and clinical intervention. The Burmese Mahasi style of vipassana meditation, in particular, has been a wellspring from which mindfulness-based treatment protocols have been derived. And while these clinical interventions have proven efficacious in treating a wide range of psychological …
Examining the relationship of meditation experience to the neural correlates of spontaneous emotion regulation
Training in mindfulness meditation has been associated with more adaptive emotional and behavioral responding, as indicated by reductions in symptoms of a range of clinical disorders, increased psychological well-being in non-clinical populations, and reduced mind-wandering. Despite compelling evidence for a relationship between meditation and mental health, the mechanisms responsible for its salutary effects are largely …
The effects of contemplative training on brain structure and function in 6-year-old children
A Parent-Child Mindfulness Based Training (PC-MBT) program was developed to examine whether children who learned strategies of emotion regulation and self-compassion prior to completing a working memory training program would show greater subsequent gains in memory capacity. A secondary aim was to determine whether measures of brain structure and function would reflect training-related changes in …
Embodied dreaming and procedural memory consolidation following daytime nap in Vipassana meditators and non-meditating controls: A neurophenomenological study
Sleep is thought to play a role in consolidation of new memories. However, how exactly does sleep facilitate learning, which stages of sleep are involved, and whether there may be different styles of learning, are still open questions. Because our brains are plastic—change with practice of specific skills—we decided to test a hypothesis that meditation …
