Explanation of emotion regulation mechanism of mindfulness using a brain function model.
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society June 1, 2021 Haruka Nakamura, Yoshimasa Tawatsuji, Siyuan Fang et al.
Mindfulness meditation's emotion regulation mechanism involves two opposing brain processes. A computational model based on anatomical brain networks shows that mindfulness increases output from the thalamus and sensory cortex, activating the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. This can trigger top-down inhibition of the amygdala by the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. However, when bottom-up sensory processing dominates, amygdala activity increases through insula and ACC activation, revealing how previously reported neural patterns during mindfulness arise from information propagation across brain regions.