STUDY OBJECTIVES We have recently shown higher parietal-occipital EEG gamma activity during sleep in long-term meditators compared to meditation-naive individuals. This gamma increase was specific for NREM sleep, was present throughout the entire night and correlated with meditation expertise, thus suggesting underlying long-lasting neuroplastic changes induced through prolonged training. The a...

OBJECTIVES Although long-term meditation has been found to reduce negative mood and cardiovascular variables, the effects of a brief mindfulness meditation intervention when compared to a sham mindfulness meditation intervention are relatively unknown. This experiment examined whether a 3-day (1-hour total) mindfulness or sham mindfulness meditation intervention would improve mood and cardiovas...

Our goal in this study was to advance the understanding of the neural pathways of meditation by addressing the cerebral blood flow (CBF) responses associated with two different meditation practices performed by the same individuals and how such changes related to the "stress" circuits in the brain. Ten experienced meditators performed two types of meditation, a "focused-based" practice and a "b...

Meditation practice alters intrinsic resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) in the default mode network (DMN). However, little is known regarding the effects of meditation on other resting-state networks. The aim of current study was to investigate the effects of meditation experience and meditation-state functional connectivity (msFC) on multiple resting-state networks (RSNs). Meditation...

One way of training cognitive functions and triggering plasticity can be through exercising meditation (Barinaga, 2003; Knight, 2004). Accordingly, it has been shown that this complex cognitive state induces both neurophysiological and psychological modifications, which have been consistently addressed by neuroscience regarding their potential benefit for mental and physical health (Davidson an...

Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or li...

An investigation on collective dynamics of brain during meditation is conducted using the methods of nonlinear dynamics and phase synchronization. The relevance of degree of co ordination of different regions of brain as well as the nonlinear dynamical parameters likes correlation dimension and Kolmogorov entropy is evaluated. It has been found that before meditation each region of the brain in...

Recent studies have shown that meditation inhibits or relieves pain perception. To clarify the underlying mechanisms for this phenomenon, neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, and neurophysiological methods, such as magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography, have been used. However, it has been difficult to interpret the results, because there is some para...

Title of Thesis: QUANTIFYING BARRIERS TO MEDITATION AS A HEALTH BEHAVIOR: EXPLORATORY AND CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE DETERMINANTS OF MEDITATION PRACTICE INVENTORY Carly Hunt Rietschel, Master of Arts, 2016 Thesis Directed By: Professor Mary Ann Hoffman, PhD Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education Although the benefits of mindfulness meditation practices have b...

The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance ima...