Long-term Buddhist practitioners can self-induce sustained, high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony in the brain during meditation, as measured by electroencephalography. These EEG patterns differ from those of non-practitioners, especially over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. Before meditation, practitioners already show a higher ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) over medial frontoparietal electrodes compared to controls. This ratio increases sharply during meditation across most of the scalp and remains elevated afterward. The findings suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may produce both short-term and long-term neural changes.
Intensive meditation training reduces the attentional blink—a phenomenon where a second target in a rapid stream is often missed when it appears shortly after a first target. Three months of daily mental practice led to a smaller attentional blink and decreased brain-resource allocation to the first target, measured by a smaller P3b brain potential. Individuals with the largest reduction in resource allocation to the first target showed the greatest improvement in detecting the second target. These findings indicate that mental training enhances control over limited attentional resources and supports lifelong brain plasticity.
Three months of intensive meditation training improved the ability to sustain attention, as measured by dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography. Training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, shown by enhanced theta-band phase consistency of neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Individuals with the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behavioral response variability. Reduced variability in neural processing also occurred for unattended deviant tones, suggesting meditation affects both distracter and target processing, possibly by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms.
The human mind has limited information processing capacity, as shown by the attentional blink—a failure to identify the second of two targets presented close together. This deficit is thought to arise from overinvesting limited resources in processing the first target. Previous research found that intensive meditation training aimed at reducing elaborate object processing decreased brain resource allocation to the first target and improved identification of the second.
Compassion meditation strengthens the brain's representation of others' emotions and its connection to heart rate, especially in long-term practitioners. Brain scans showed that during compassion meditation, the insula and anterior cingulate cortex had stronger coupling with heart rate than during a neutral state. This coupling was more pronounced in expert meditators than novices in somatosensory areas and the right inferior parietal lobule, suggesting expertise enhances the brain's emotional and bodily responses to others' distress.