DEC

Folk Who Meditate Decrease Mind Wandering

"[T]he hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with ones own thoughts, a
condition meditation seems to affect," says Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry at
Yale
University.
The Yale experienced meditator work, in which i am collaborating and have been a subject, has been
introduced earlier in this blog. The much anticipated paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science has just issued last Monday. In discussions w/Jud last Friday, he indicated that
22 national and international news media sources have already contacted him for interviews,
statements, etc. Surprisingly, as we saw for this work when it appeared in Forbes.com (77,000 hits about 40X a typical forbes.com article), this work has captured major interest from folk who would
not normally be expected to pay attention to scientific studies on meditation.
The paper demonstrated that folk who are experienced meditators are able to decrease activity in
areas of the brain associated with daydreaming, or mind-wandering, and with psychiatric disorders
such as autism and schizophrenia. "Less mind wandering is associated with increased happiness
levels", says Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, and lead
investigator on this work, who believes understanding how meditation works may aid investigations
into
a
host
of
diseases.
Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit
smoking,
cope
with
cancer,
and
even
prevent
psoriasis,
Brewer
says.
In this study, Jud and his research team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
scans on both experienced (10,000 hrs+ meditation) and novice meditators as they practiced three
different meditation techniques. These meditation techniques were very familiar to the experienced
meditators, who were all from one particular tradition. Experienced meditators had decreased activity
in areas of the brain called the default mode network, which has been implicated in lapses of
attention and disorders such as anxiety, attention deficit, and hyperactivity disorder, and even the
buildup of beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimers disease.

The decrease in activity in this network, consisting of the medial prefrontal andposterior cingulate
cortex, was seen in experienced meditators regardless of the type of meditation they were doing.

The scans also showed that when the default mode network was active, brain regions associated
with self-monitoring and cognitive control, the anterior cingulate cortex and the lateral prefrontal
cortex, were increasingly co-activated in experienced meditators but not novices, possibly indicating
that meditators are constantly monitoring and suppressing the emergence of me thoughts, or mindwandering. In pathological forms, these states are associated with diseases such as autism and
schizophrenia.
This decreased activity in the typical default mode network centers by the meditators occured both
during meditation, and also when just restingnot doing anything in particular. This indicates that
meditators have developed a new default mode in which there is more present-centered, and less
self-centered,
awareness.
Meditations ability to help people stay in the moment has been part of philosophical and
contemplative
practices
for
thousands
of
years,
Brewer
says.
Conversely, the hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with ones own
thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect. This gives us some nice cues as to the neural
mechanisms
of
how
it
might
be
working
clinically.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Veterans Affairs New England
Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, and a Yale Clinical and Translational
Science Award grant from the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of

Health.
There is another article which has been submitted which focuses on watching the deactivation of the
default mode network in real time, in a new type of fMRI called, not surprisingly, a "real time - fMRI"
(rt-fMRI), as one meditates or not, and whether one is an experienced meditator or not.
Posted 4th December 2011 by Gary Weber
Labels: Science of Meditation
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