Does meditation training lead to enduring changes in the anticipation and experience of pain?

For many years, meditation remained largely outside the purview of scientific research. Clinicians and researchers commonly considered meditation synonymous with reflection or relaxation, if they considered it at all. However, recent years have witnessed a surge in the scientific study of meditation. This remarkable change appears to be the result of at least two factors. First, meditation-based interventions have become widespread in clinical settings [4]. Second, a more sophisticated understanding of the history and cultural context of meditation traditions has lead scientists to conceive of meditation as a kind of cognitive training. While the heterogeneity of meditative techniques obviates any definition that is both simple and inclusive, in general meditation involves the continuous direction of attention towards some aspect of one’s present experience. The goal is not to think about the mental or perceptual representations one is attending to, but simply to observe or perceive them without additional mental elaboration. Many forms of meditation place particular emphasis on a nonreactive, nonjudgmental cognitive stance. In the present issue, Brown and Jones [1] provide novel evidence that long-term meditation training may influence pain processing. They compared ratings of unpleasantness and eventrelated potentials (ERPs) between meditators and matched controls in a laser-evoked pain paradigm. As in previous studies, pain unpleasantness was lower in the experienced meditators compared to inexperienced meditators and controls, and these ratings negatively correlated with the duration of meditation training. An important and novel contribution of the current study is the use of ERPs to examine the role of anticipatory neural activity. Brown and Jones reasoned that the present-centered, nonreactive attentional stance cultivated in meditation practice might reduce pain-related cognition immediately prior to the noxious stimulus. Indeed, meditators showed lower anticipatory activity in right inferior parietal cortex and midcingulate cortex. Strikingly, the magnitude of this activity correlated with meditation experience. While the present study was not designed to dissociate effects of meditation experience on anticipatory activity, stimulus-evoked activity and pain unpleasantness, these findings argue for the need to consider anticipatory activity in understanding the relationship between meditation experience and pain. Interestingly, while previous studies primarily examined pain experience during the practice of meditation, meditators in the current study were not instructed to meditate during the task. Thus, although other explanations are possible, the meditation-related differences Brown and Jones observed appear to reflect the long-term effects of meditation training on cognitive abilities and tendencies, rather than transient effects of the meditative state itself. Future work will need to confirm this interpretation by ruling