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 …
Continue reading “What is it about yoga? Isolating the effect of structured movement sequences on cognition, interoception, and stress markers”
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 …
Continue reading “Examining the relationship of meditation experience to the neural correlates of spontaneous emotion regulation”
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 …
Continue reading “The effects of contemplative training on brain structure and function in 6-year-old children”
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 …
Continue reading “Embodied dreaming and procedural memory consolidation following daytime nap in Vipassana meditators and non-meditating controls: A neurophenomenological study”
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 …
Continue reading “The role of endogenous opioidergic systems in mindfulness meditation-related pain relief”
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 …
Continue reading “Critical Neuroscience and the Politics of Mindfulness Interventions for Youth: A Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Working Group”
Meditation practices and interventions, derived from contemplative religious traditions, have become increasingly popular in clinical, educational and scientific research contexts. Meditation is being applied to the treatment of a wide range of psychiatric conditions, from depression to psychosis, and implemented in schools, businesses and prisons to promote performance and wellbeing and decrease stress and anxiety. …
Continue reading “The varieties of contemplative experience”
The accuracy of subjective reports, especially those involving introspection of one’s own internal processes, remains unclear. ‘Introspective accuracy’ (IA) can putatively be quantified by a variety of methods that combine introspective reports of subjective, mental phenomena with some objective (neural, physiological, or behavioral) measure of these same phenomena. A subject’s IA with respect to a …
Continue reading “The neural basis of enhanced introspective accuracy in long-term meditation practitioners”
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a state of cognitive decline between typical aging and dementia characterized by impaired memory function, particularly for episodic memory—the capacity to mentally relive past experiences—and prospective memory—the ability to recollect future intentions. People diagnosed with MCI are 20-50% more likely to develop dementia over a period of 2 to 3 …
Continue reading “The effect of MBSR on episodic and prospective memory function in aging adults”
