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 …
Continue reading “Mindfulness and beyond: A qualitative study of advanced Mahasi meditators’ experience”
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”
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”
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 …
Continue reading “Exploring mindfulness induced state and trait alterations in “self” networks: A combined fMRI-MEG neurophenomenological study”
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”
As adolescents struggle with the multitude of physiological and socioemotional changes taking place during this developmental period, the goal of this study was to implement a mindfulness program for teens and measure both self-report assessments of emotional well-being (perceived stress, life satisfaction, positive and negative affect) and physiological responses to a laboratory social stressor (heart …
Continue reading “Exploring the impact of a mindfulness intervention on adolescents’ self-compassion and emotional well-being”
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”
Mindfulness and meditation are increasingly used in clinical practice to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and addiction. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying these practices are not yet well-known and theoretical frameworks are sparse. Two important explanatory mechanisms that will be considered in this workshop are sticky thinking (cognitive fusion) and the sense of self. …
Continue reading “Mechanisms of Meditation and Consequences for Clinical Practice”
