Everyone Can Meditate: Characterizing a Personalized Connectomic State Space among Meditation Groups and Non-meditators
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) June 20, 2020 Jacob van Doorn, Mengqi Xing, B. Rael Cahn et al. 1 citation preprint
Brain connectivity patterns differ between meditation states and instructed mind-wandering, regardless of meditation experience or tradition. Experienced meditators from Isha Yoga, Himalayan Yoga, and Vipassana traditions, along with meditation-naïve individuals, performed breath awareness, autobiographical thinking, and their own meditation practice while 64-electrode EEG recorded brain activity. A new method called Thought Chart mapped each person's dynamic functional connectivity. Both breath awareness and meditation tasks showed consistently different connectivity patterns compared to mind-wandering, measured by Hausdorff distance. The meditation state most closely resembled breath awareness across all groups. These differences were not driven by specific frequency bands, and no significant group differences emerged.