Mental training techniques rooted in meditation are associated with attention improvement, increased activation and cortical thickening of attention/executive-related brain areas. Interestingly, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with behavioural deficits, hypo-activation and cortical thinning of similar networks. This study assessed the relationship between prior...
Zen meditation has been associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. Given reports of gray matter differences in meditators as well as between chronic pain patients and controls, the present study investigated whether differences in brain morphometry are associated with the low pain sensitivity observed in Zen practitioners. Structural MRI scans were...
The notion of consciousness is at the core of an ongoing debate on the existence and nature of hypnotic states. Previously, we have described changes in brain activity associated with hypnosis (Rainville, Hofbauer, Paus, Duncan, Bushnell, & Price, 1999). Here, we replicate and extend those findings using positron emission tomography (PET) in 10 normal volunteers. Immediately after each of 8 PET...