The goals of the research grant were to examine the effects of mindfulness meditation training on pain and fear learning processes, in order to validate the efficacy of this practice in disorders involving fear of threatening stimuli (eg. anxiety, chronic pain). The effects long-term meditation training on fear learning and pain were assessed in highly …
Continue reading “Mindfulness and the neurophysiological substrates of fear conditioning”
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 …
Continue reading “Mindfulness Intervention to Study the Neurobiology of Depression (MIND)”
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. …
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”
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 …
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 …
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 …
Adolescents bear the burden of complex global challenges head, yet as recent events have shown, they are also drivers of change. Youth mindfulness programmes (YMPs), now increasingly prevalent in educational and juvenile justice settings, are thought to promote resilience and emotional skills, drawing on neuroscience to inform interventions. Moreover, neurobiological ideas are frequently incorporated into …
