Abstract
Many disciplines/traditions that promote interoceptive (inner sensation of body parts) attention/awareness (IAA) train practitioners to both attend to and be aware of interoceptive sensory experiences in body parts. The effect of such practices has been investigated in previous imaging studies but limited to cerebral neural activity. Here, for the first time, we studied the impact of these practices on the spinal neural activity of experts and novices. We also attempted to clarify the effect of constant and deep breathing, a paradigm utilized in concentration practices to avoid mind wandering, on IAA-related spinal neural activity. Subjects performed IAA tasks with and without a deep and constant breathing pattern in two sessions. Results showed that neural activity in the spinal segment innervating the attended-to body area increased in experts (P = 0.04) when they performed IAA and that this increase was significantly larger for experts versus novices in each of the sessions (P = 0.024). The significant effects of IAA and expertise on spinal neural activity are consistent with and elaborate on previous reports showing similar effects on cerebral neural activity. As the spinal cord directly innervates body parts, the results might indicate that IAA has an instantaneous (possibly beneficial) effect on the physical body after extended training.
Highlights
Many disciplines/traditions (e.g., Chinese Qi, Japanese Kokyuho, Iranian Movazeneh, and Indian Yoga) train practitioners to attend to and be aware of the visceral sensory experiences of body parts
Various studies have investigated the neural correlates or impact of such practices on the brain [4, 6,7,8,9], and results show structural changes in cortical areas as well as functional alterations among those who are expert in such practices
We studied the effect of a constant breathing paradigm, a strategy used to enhance the outcome of the practices, on the spinal neural activity related to the IAA task
Summary
Many disciplines/traditions (e.g., Chinese Qi, Japanese Kokyuho, Iranian Movazeneh, and Indian Yoga) train practitioners to attend to and be aware of the visceral sensory experiences of body parts. Most disciplines believe that long-term training and devotion are needed to achieve the ability to practice optimally [16, 17] Such a requirement for expertise can be inferred from previous studies, which indicated that novices exhibit more mind wandering than do expert practitioners when performing attention/meditation tasks [7]. We expected that the interaction between expertise and breathing method would have a positive effect on spinal activity due to experts’ additional practice of controlledbreathing patterns in conjunction with IAA For this experiment, we chose a body part with a relatively high potential to be better attended to by experts compared with novices: the pubic/lower abdominal region, which is more highly emphasized in East Asian practices than are other parts of the body. All previous studies investigated spinal neural activity in the presence of sensory stimuli [21, 24] or during the performance of motion tasks [25, 26]
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