Abstract
The brain network governing meditation has been studied using a variety of meditation practices and techniques practices eliciting different cognitive processes (e.g., silence, attention to own body, sense of joy, mantras, etc.). It is very possible that different practices of meditation are subserved by largely, if not entirely, disparate brain networks. This assumption was tested by conducting an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of meditation neuroimaging studies, which assessed 150 activation foci from 24 experiments. Different ALE meta-analyses were carried out. One involved the subsets of studies involving meditation induced through exercising focused attention (FA). The network included clusters bilaterally in the medial gyrus, the left superior parietal lobe, the left insula and the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG). A second analysis addressed the studies involving meditation states induced by chanting or by repetition of words or phrases, known as “mantra.” This type of practice elicited a cluster of activity in the right SMG, the SMA bilaterally and the left postcentral gyrus. Furthermore, the last analyses addressed the effect of meditation experience (i.e., short- vs. long-term meditators). We found that frontal activation was present for short-term, as compared with long-term experience meditators, confirming that experts are better enabled to sustain attentional focus, rather recruiting the right SMG and concentrating on aspects involving disembodiment.
Highlights
Meditation is a complex cognitive task aiming at self-regulating the body and mind and is often associated with neurophysiological and psychological modifications (Cahn and Polich, 2006)
The inclusion of experts meditators was applied in all except for one study (Farb et al, 2007) in which data from mindfulness meditators who trained in an 8-week intensive course (Kabat-Zinn, 2003) were not excluded from the analysis due to the importance of including data from a comparison on two meditation practices, e.g., experiential focus vs. narrative focus meditation; three studies (Holzel et al, 2007), (Lutz et al, 2009), (Taylor et al, 2011) only reporting between groups comparisons were included since the reported activation clusters are driven by meditation in expert meditators only
META-ANALYSIS ACROSS ALL INCLUDED STUDIES Activations The 10 activation clusters resulting from the meta-analysis of all the included studies comprised bilaterally the superior medial gyrus, more superiorly the left superior medial gyrus, medially the left paracentral lobule and the right supplementary motor area (SMA), the left superior (Area 7a, cluster 3) and inferior parietal lobe (Area 2, extending to area 4p and 3b, cluster 4), and left insula
Summary
Meditation is a complex cognitive task aiming at self-regulating the body and mind and is often associated with neurophysiological and psychological modifications (Cahn and Polich, 2006). Practicing meditation is considered a way of training the mind (Barinaga, 2003; Knight, 2004). Meditation-related cognitive and physiological mechanisms involving refining the attention, enhancing attention skills, and developing very sophisticated means for investigating the nature of the mind from a first person perspective (Barinaga, 2003), have been consistently addressed by neuroscience regarding its potential benefit for mental and physical health (Davidson and McEwen, 2012). Whether the cognitive state induced by the different meditation forms is the same is not known (Tang et al, 2012). It is difficult to describe a meditation-related activation pattern independent of the practices needed to reach it
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