Positive Technology Journal

Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Jun 27;

Authors: Brefczynski-Lewis JA, Lutz A, Schaefer HS, Levinson DB, Davidson RJ

Meditation refers to a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. One of the most basic forms of meditation is concentration meditation, in which sustained attention is focused on an object such as a small visual stimulus or the breath. In age-matched participants, using functional MRI, we found that activation in a network of brain regions typically involved in sustained attention showed an inverted u-shaped curve in which expert meditators (EMs) with an average of 19,000 h of practice had more activation than novices, but EMs with an average of 44,000 h had less activation. In response to distracter sounds used to probe the meditation, EMs vs. novices had less brain activation in regions related to discursive thoughts and emotions and more activation in regions related to response inhibition and attention. Correlation with hours of practice suggests possible plasticity in these mechanisms.

PTSD symptoms, substance use, and vipassana meditation among incarcerated individuals.

J Trauma Stress. 2007 Jun 27;20(3):239-249

Authors: Simpson TL, Kaysen D, Bowen S, Macpherson LM, Chawla N, Blume A, Marlatt GA, Larimer M

The present study evaluated whether Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptom severity was associated with participation and treatment outcomes comparing a Vipassana meditation course to treatment as usual in an incarcerated sample. This study utilizes secondary data. The original study demonstrated that Vipassana meditation is associated with reductions in substance use. The present study found that PTSD symptom severity did not differ significantly between those who did and did not volunteer to take the course. Participation in the Vipassana course was associated with significantly greater reductions in substance use than treatment as usual, regardless of PTSD symptom severity levels. These results suggest that Vipassana meditation is worthy of further study for those with comorbid PTSD and substance use problems.

Cerebellar activity evoked by common tool-use execution and imagery tasks: an fMRI study.

Cortex. 2007 Apr;43(3):350-8

Authors: Higuchi S, Imamizu H, Kawato M

The purpose of this study is to identify the functional brain networks activated in relation to actual tool-use in humans. Although previous studies have identified brain activity related to tool-use gestures (Moll et al., 2000), they did not investigate the brain activity involved in such tool-use. We investigated brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while human subjects mentally imagined using sixteen common tools and while they actually used them. Brain activity for both actual and imagined tool-use was found in the posterior part of the parietal cortex, in the supplementary motor area, and in the cerebellum. Under imagined tool-use conditions, we found brain activity in the premotor and right pars opercularis. Under actual tool-use conditions, we found it in the primary motor area, in the thalamus, and in the left pars opercularis. Our precise analysis in the cerebellum indicated that activity evoked by imagery was located significantly more lateral to that evoked by actual use. We found a relationship between activity in the tool imagery and execution conditions by comparing their t-value-weighted centroid of activation coordinates. Moreover, for half of the subjects the spatial distribution pattern for each tool was similar, suggesting that neural mechanisms contributing to skillful tool-use are modularly organized in the cerebellum.

Motor imagery and action observation: cognitive tools for rehabilitation.

J Neural Transm. 2007 Jun 20;

Authors: Mulder T