The Neuroscience of Meditation

Dr. Shock M.D., Ph.D.

Science of meditation: "Functional MRI shows how Mindfulness Meditation changes decision-making process" (freakingscience blog).

Meditation is different from either rest or sleep. It’s a wakeful hypometabolic state with lowered sympathetic activity as opposed to the fight and flight reactions that requires an active sympathetic system.

Parasympathetic activity is increased, which is important for relaxation and rest. This increase is characterized by reduced heart rate, lower systolic blood pressure, lower oxygen metabolism, and an increase in skin resistance.

So it is not only a rest state, but also physiological relaxation related to stress relief.

What is the effect of meditation on the brain?

During meditation not only general relaxation is experienced but also a reduction of mental activity and positive affect [emotion or feeling].

During meditation the reduced mental activity is modified by increased activation of networks of internalized attention. These trigger activity in regions that mediate positive emotions.

Activity in networks related to external attention and irrelevant processes are decreased.

The networks activated for internal attention and positive mood are mainly located in the frontal and subcortical brain regions. More specifically, this positive affect increases the activity in the left prefrontal and limbic region of the brain.

The internal focused attention is thought to originate in an activation of frontal and thalamic region of the brain. There is also some evidence that experienced meditators show these activations and deactivations to a greater extent than novice meditators.

In conclusion, there is converging evidence that fronto-parietal and fronto-limbic brain networks seem to be activated in the attention practices that lead to meditation, presumably reflecting processes of internalized sustained attention and emotion regulation.

It should be kept in mind that these findings relate to meditation in general.

Different kinds of meditation can result in slightly different activation and deactivation patterns. Different brain activation networks can thus be activated by different meditation traditions.

These findings mostly result from comparison of small groups of experienced meditators compared to novices.

Rubia, K. (2009). The neurobiology of Meditation and its clinical effectiveness in psychiatric disorders Biological Psychology, 82 (1), 1-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2009.04.003

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"Mind-reading" experiment highlights brain

"Mind-reading" experiment highlights how brain records emories

(ScienceDaily) It may be possible to "read" a person's memories just by looking at brain activity, according to research carried out by Wellcome Trust scientists.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology they show that our memories are recorded in regular patterns, a finding that challenges current scientific thinking.

Demis Hassabis and Professor Eleanor Maguire at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) have previously studied the role of a small area of the brain known as the hippocampus, which is crucial for navigation, memory recall, and imagining future events.

Now the researchers have shown how the hippocampus records memory.

When we move around, nerve cells (neurons) known as "place cells" located in the hippocampus, activate to tell us where we are.

Hassabis, Maguire, and colleagues used a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which measures changes in blood flow within the brain, to examine the activity of these places cells as a volunteer navigated around a virtual reality environment. The data were then analyzed by a computer algorithm developed by Demis Hassabis.

"We asked whether we could see any interesting patterns in the neural activity that could tell us what the participants were thinking, or in this case where they were," explains Professor Maguire, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

"Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment. In other words, we could 'read' their spatial memories." More

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