A Computational Approach to Meditation

Introduction Meditation is a form of complementary alternative medicine and has been defined clinically. Since 1957 there has been numerous studies to understand the physiology of meditation. These include EEG, ERP, PET, SPECT and more recently fMRI studies (Cahn & Polich, 2006). Some of these studies have shown that meditation can have positive health effects e.g., reduction of depression, emotion regulation, etc. To our knowledge, no study has focused on understanding the neural basis for meditation using computational modeling although such an approach has been used to investigate related cognitive behaviors such as visual attention (Koch & Itti, 2001) and consciousness (Miranker, 2000). A similar approach can be used to simulate meditation mechanisms. In preliminary work, such a model was developed and tested, based on controlling the dynamics of a single computational element.