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An investigation of brain processes supporting meditation

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Abstract

Meditation is an ancient spiritual practice, which aims to still the fluctuations of the mind. We investigated meditation with fMRI in order to identify and characterise both the “neural switch” mechanism used in the voluntary shift from normal consciousness to meditation and the “threshold regulation mechanism” sustaining the meditative state. Thirty-one individuals with 1.5–25 years experience in meditation were scanned using a blocked on–off design with 45 s alternating epochs during the onset of respectively meditation and normal relaxation. Additionally, 21 subjects were scanned during 14.5 min of sustained meditation. The data were analysed with SPM and ICA. During the onset of meditation, activations were found bilaterally in the putamen and the supplementary motor cortex, while deactivations were found predominately in the right hemisphere, the precuneus, the posterior cingulum and the parieto–temporal area. During sustained meditation, SPM analysis revealed activation in the head of nucleus caudatus. Extensive deactivations were observed in white matter in the right hemisphere, i.e. mainly in the posterior occipito–parieto–temporal area and in the frontal lobes. ICA identified 38 components including known baseline-resting state components, one of which not only overlaps with the activated area revealed in the SPM analysis but extends further into frontal, temporal, parietal and limbic areas, and might presumably constitute a combination of frontoparietal and cinguloopercular task control systems. The identified component processes display varying degrees of correlation. We hypothesise that a proper characterisation of brain processes during meditation will require an operational definition of brain dynamics matching a stable state of mind.

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Notes

  1. The citations from Patanjali have been adapted from the referenced translations by the first author.

  2. In the mindfulness tradition, some aspects of experiences (the content or “fluctuations” of the mind) may be attended to in specific ways during the initial process of training. This is motivated by the therapeutic use of the technique in a western setting, not because this is relevant to the method as a form of meditation in the traditional sense of the word.

  3. Although the Z group was also scanned during continuous meditation, these data were left out of the present analysis, because the scanning procedure was different for this group, making a combined analysis unacceptable. Data from two additional subjects from the M group was left out due to various unrecoverable deficiencies in the raw data. In the data from 6 subjects in the present set, slice dropouts were discovered in single pictures from the scans. A copy of the immediately preceding or following pictures substituted these pictures. Although this of course introduces disturbances in the data, an examination of trial analyses established that the substitution had only minimal, and actually non-detectable, effect on the results. These scans were therefore included in the group analysis.

  4. The following types of parameters for the group analysis were employed in separate analyses: Tensor ICA with Hpf cutoff at 250 s; Concatenation ICA with Hpf cutoff at 250, 100 and 50 s respectively. These analyses produced very similar results, and the present report only takes the results from the Concatenation ICA with Hpf cutoff at 250 s into account. Smoothing with 7 mm FWHM was also used in separate analyses, but resulted in the production of a multitude of extra noise components.

  5. The results of these analyses were surprising, inasmuch as it was only possible to obtain meaningful results for one component (IC 2). In order to filter out movement-related artefacts, we included the realignment parameters in the models of the fixed effects analyses. We subsequently carried out a fixed effects analysis of the data without including the realignment parameters; one analysis including all components, and one analysis including various specifically selected other components and the realignment parameters in the design matrix. None of these analyses could locate more than the same single component. The first analysis was therefore chosen for presentation in the present report.

  6. Because of large variations among the subjects, it turned out to be extremely difficult, in all but a few cases, to find consistent criteria to sort out which components were “noise”, and which might be meaningfully related to the meditation. One complicating factor may be the circumstance that the paces of the subject’s meditation were coupled to their respiratory cycles, as this may cause subtle movements. If all movement-related artefacts were removed, the risk is that some of the meditation-related effects would be removed as well.

  7. This procedure may not be optimal, but FSL does not give access to the power spectra of the Fourier transforms of the individual time series contributing to the component.

  8. When uncorrected statistics were used.

  9. Which is not identical to the time series from the individual scans, but these show at least as much variability.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by The Danish Research Council for the Humanities (the Rococo project) and The Research Fund of the University of Aarhus. Certain aspects of the approach have benefited much from inspiring discussions with the excellent researchers participating in the EU COST BM0601 action. The authors also acknowledge the invaluable support with initial data analysis received from Niels Væver Hartvig and Thordis Linda Thorarinsdottir, as well as the efforts of a substantial number of student assistants. We also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for constructive critique, and Philip Kyle for his help with the English.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

    Klaus B. Bærentsen, Bo Sommerlund, Johannes Damsgaard-Madsen, Mark Fosnæs & Anders C. Green

  2. MR Research Centre, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark

    Klaus B. Bærentsen, Hans Stødkilde-Jørgensen & Johannes Damsgaard-Madsen

  3. Centre for Psychiatric Research, Aarhus University Hospital, Risskov, Denmark

    Tue Hartmann

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  1. Klaus B. Bærentsen
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Bærentsen, K.B., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Sommerlund, B. et al. An investigation of brain processes supporting meditation. Cogn Process 11, 57–84 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-009-0342-3

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