A systematic review of ten studies on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for people with at least mild depressive symptoms found mixed results for cognitive outcomes. Three studies showed no improvements in cognitive measures, while seven studies showed at least one improvement. The review highlights inconsistencies in terminology, samples, and methodology across studies, which may explain the mixed findings. The authors recommend a more streamlined approach for future research on cognitive outcomes in depressed individuals undergoing these interventions.
Mindfulness, defined as nonjudgmental present-moment awareness, can help initiate and maintain behavior change, which is crucial for preventing and treating chronic medical and psychiatric illnesses. This integrative review synthesizes the neuroscience of mindfulness, integrating motivation and learning mechanisms into a mindful self-regulation model that explains how mindfulness affects behavior change. It also reviews clinical research on mindfulness-based interventions for health behaviors relevant to psychiatric care. The authors highlight current research limitations and propose mechanisms for future study to enhance mindfulness's impact on behavior change.
In both novice and experienced meditators, decreased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) corresponded with the subjective experience of effortless awareness during meditation. Participants could volitionally control the PCC signal in the direction associated with that state. Novice meditators achieved the target state a median of 77.97% of the time, and experienced meditators a median of 89.83% of the time. Median confidence ratings linking PCC activity to effortless awareness were 8 out of 10 for novices and 9 for experienced meditators. The findings suggest EEG neurofeedback from the PCC could serve as a tool for meditation training.
Experienced meditators, who are expert in introspection, can link their subjective experience of focused attention and mind-wandering to real-time feedback from their own brain activity. Using real-time fMRI, participants received feedback from the posterior cingulate cortex, a brain region activated during mind-wandering and deactivated during meditation. In a first experiment, both meditators and non-meditators reported correspondence between the feedback graph and their experience. When instructed to volitionally decrease the feedback graph, only meditators showed significant deactivation of the posterior cingulate cortex. These results were replicated in a separate group of meditators using a step-wise protocol without prior knowledge of the expected relationship. The findings support using real-time fMRI to link objective brain measures with subjective reports and demonstrate generalization of introspective expertise.