Body awareness is thought to be a cognitive mechanism of mindfulness, but neuroscience evidence is limited. Postural control during quiet standing relies on body cues, especially with eyes closed. Postural signals were recorded from 156 healthy participants standing quietly with eyes closed and eyes open. Each participant completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. Machine learning models were trained to estimate mindfulness scores and classify participants as mindful or non-mindful from their postural signals. Models using eyes-closed data performed much better than those using eyes-open data. These findings provide the first physiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that mindfulness involves enhanced body awareness.
A controlled randomized clinical pilot study compared scuba diving combined with mindfulness exercises (the Bathysmed® protocol) to a non-specific multisport program for reducing PTSD symptoms. The Bathysmed® protocol improved PCL-5 scores more than multisport, but the result was not significant. It significantly reduced intrusion symptoms after one month. Trait mindfulness scores improved up to one month after the course, but not significantly. Three months after the course, no differences between groups remained on PCL-5 or Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory scores. The authors suggest mindfulness must be practiced long-term for stable benefits and that further work is needed to confirm these partial but encouraging results.
A commentary on a neurocomputational model of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy argues that the model's two proposed mechanisms—increasing the precision of likelihood while decreasing the precision of prior—conflict when describing mindful functioning. The authors propose an alternative mechanism: the dynamic updating of prior beliefs as a function of context, which contributes to active inference. They suggest that the moment-to-moment attentional pattern of mindfulness could promote optimal adjustment of prior beliefs to the context of each present experience.