Focused attention meditation training modifies neural activity and attention: longitudinal EEG data in non-meditators.

Ai Hasegawa,Kazuki Yoshida,Kenta Takeda,Shiika Makinae,Shinya Sakai,Tetsuko Kasai,Yui Murakami

doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa020

Abstract

Focused attention meditation (FAM) is a basic meditation practice that cultivates attentional control and monitoring skills. Cross-sectional studies have highlighted high cognitive performance and discriminative neural activity in experienced meditators. However, a direct relationship between neural activity changes and improvement of attention caused by meditation training remains to be elucidated. To investigate this, we conducted a longitudinal study, which evaluated the results of electroencephalography (EEG) during three-stimulus oddball task, resting state and FAM before and after 8 weeks of FAM training in non-meditators. The FAM training group (n = 17) showed significantly higher P3 amplitude during the oddball task and shorter reaction time (RT) for target stimuli compared to that of the control group (n = 20). Furthermore, a significant negative correlation between F4-Oz theta band phase synchrony index (PSI) during FAM and P3 amplitude during the oddball task and a significant positive correlation between F4-Pz theta band PSI during FAM and P3 amplitude during the oddball task were observed. In contrast, these correlations were not observed in the control group. These findings provide direct evidence of the effectiveness of FAM training and contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the effects of meditation on brain activity and cognitive performance.

Highlights

Meditation is a form of mental training that aims to cultivate an individual’s core psychological capacities such as attentional and emotional self-regulation (Lutz et al, 2008; Tang et al, 2015)
A significant negative correlation between F4-Oz theta band phase synchrony index (PSI) during Focused attention meditation (FAM) and P3 amplitude during the oddball task and a significant positive correlation between F4-Pz theta band PSI during FAM and P3 amplitude during the oddball task were observed. These correlations were not observed in the control group. These findings provide direct evidence of the effectiveness of FAM training and contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the effects of meditation on brain activity and cognitive performance
Twelve participants failed to complete the study; three dropped out during the training, seven did not have sufficient trial numbers of event-related potential (ERP) in the oddball task, and two had incomplete EEG data due to technical problems. These 12 participants’ data were excluded from the analysis of oddball task and correlations between the P3 amplitude and PSI, but with respect to the seven participants who did not have sufficient trial numbers of ERPs, their data were included in the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and PSI analysis

Summary

Introduction

Meditation is a form of mental training that aims to cultivate an individual’s core psychological capacities such as attentional and emotional self-regulation (Lutz et al, 2008; Tang et al, 2015). Many studies have compared meditators and non-meditators to elucidate how meditation affects cognitive performance and. Among the diverse meditation practices that exist, focused attention meditation (FAM) and open monitoring meditation (OMM) are broadly applied as mindfulness-based interventions. FAM is a concentrative practice with a well-defined target object such as the breath sensation. Meditators repeatedly focus and maintain their attention on the target object avoiding distractions from internal (e.g. thought) or external (e.g. sounds) sources. OMM is a practice that focuses on staying in the nonreactive monitoring state without defining the target object. FAM is considered as a basic practice to cultivate attentional control and monitoring skills, which are necessary for OMM practice (Lutz et al, 2008)

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