Which meditation is suitable for me? A neurophysiological perspective

Abstract

In Eastern, philosophy meditation is considered part of a yogic lifestyle. Meditation is increasingly being popular amongst the masses and routinely practiced for well-being and as a means to alleviate stress and related disorders. There are various types of meditation practices prevalent across the world and with a boom in social media and communication technology we are widely exposed to many types of meditation practices. Still, the selection of meditation is mainly based on common intuition or layman recommendations. However, there are large variations in personality, temperament, and external circumstances of an individual. With the progress of scientific research in the meditation field, all kinds of meditation can be broadly classified into major three types: focussed attention (FA), open monitoring (OM) and automatic transcendence (AT). The neurophysiology of meditation has given insight into selective functional brain networks activation such as executive control network (ECN) in FA type and default mode network (DMN) in AT type of meditation. ECN provides substratum for the focussed attention and DMN for the mind-wandering state. One fundamental question is what factors lead to oscillations of the brain between two states. Here, we are proposing that oscillations of the brain in these two states are chiefly determined by the daily life challenges and a nice way to group daily life challenges is by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The individuals lower in this hierarchy are required to execute more of ECN for the successful survival. In this paper, we are hypothesising the detailed intricacies of the selection of meditation based on the position of an individual in the pyramid of needs and their predominant functional brain states.