Neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and pain.
Pain December 1, 2018 Fadel Zeidan, Tim V Salomons, Suzan R Farris et al.
People who naturally have higher trait mindfulness—the ability to nonreactively pay attention to the present moment—report lower pain intensity and unpleasantness when exposed to noxious heat. In 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated, higher scores on the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory were linked to less pain. Brain scans showed that more mindful individuals had greater deactivation of a region from the precuneus to posterior cingulate cortex during pain, areas involved in sensory, cognitive, and emotional processing. These results suggest that dispositional mindfulness reduces pain through specific neural mechanisms, pointing to mindfulness and the posterior cingulate cortex as potential targets for pain therapies.