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 …
Continue reading “Does meditation cause pain relief through endogenous opioids?”
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 …
Continue reading “Neural dynamics of attention and meta-attention during meditation”
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Endogenous opioids have been repeatedly shown to be involved in the cognitive inhibition of pain. Mindfulness meditation, a practice premised on directing nonjudgmental attention to arising sensory events, reduces pain by engaging mechanisms supporting the cognitive control of pain. However, it was unknown if mindfulness-meditation-based analgesia is mediated by opioids, an important consideration for using …
Terror management theory research suggests that self-esteem acts as an anxiety buffer and high self-esteem can reduce implicit death thoughts and worldview defense. Our research investigated self-compassion that enhances wellbeing by making people feel safe and secure, whereas self-esteem makes people feel superior and sometimes unrealistically self-confident. Results in our series of studies failed to …
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This proposal is based on a running project, wherein 15 proficient mindfulness meditators were scanned for resting state and meditation in both fMRI (at the Weizmann Institute, as part of the postdoc project of the author, supervised by Prof. Rafael Malach and Dr. Amos Arieli) and MEG (Bar-Ilan University, in collaboration with the author, supervised …
