Meditation
Recently, meditation, particularly in the form of mindfulness ‘packages’ involving many different meditation techniques, have become widely available as training programs. One common reason people meditate is to improve their emotional experience and regulation ability. While many studies show that meditation can be clearly beneficial for some people, this is not true for all people. It is therefore important to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms of meditation and link them to individual differences.
Neural mechanisms of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (van der Velden and Scholl et al., 2023)
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is an intervention to reduce the risk of depression relapse in patients who are currently well. In this study, we looked at the brain changes due to this intervention (compared to treatment as usual). We found that when ruminating, brain areas term together the ‘salience network’ (including anterior insula dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) showed increased connectivity with posterior (complex visual processing) brain areas. This change was related to an improvement in interoceptive awareness with the mindfulness intervention.
Meditation and psychotic-like experiences (Palmer et al., preprint )
In a survey of 613 regular meditators, we link different techniques of meditation to symptoms of psychosis (e.g. hallucinations and delusions) and mystical experiences. We found that techniques that were less body-focused (or ‘null-directed’, i.e. aimed at reducing phenomenological content; e.g. singing mantras) increased the frequency of both psychotic-like experiences and mystical experiences in daily life. In contrast, people who practiced more body-focused (or techniques aimed at an ‘enhanced cognitive state’, e.g. mindfulness of the body), reported fewer psychotic-like experiences.
