Real-time fMRI links subjective experience with brain activity during focused attention
Neuroimage November 1, 2013 K. Garrison, D. Scheinost, P. Worhunsky et al.
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.