Communications Biology
November 6, 2025
Alex Jinich-Diamant, Sierra Simpson, Juan Pablo Zuniga-Hertz et al.
4 citations
Abstract Mind-body interventions offer promising avenues for improving physical and mental health, yet the comprehensive biological effects of increasingly popular mind-body retreat interventions remain poorly understood. The neural and molecular effects of a 7-day retreat intervention combining meditation, reconceptualization, and open-label placebo healing rituals are investigated in an...
Mindfulness
2025
Juan P Zuniga-Hertz, Sierra Simpson, Ramamurthy Chitetti et al.
3 citations
Meditation has long been known to promote health. We utilized a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the impact of mind-body interventions on the body in a twin cohort during a week-long meditation retreat. This study was designed to address individual changes controlling for intersubject trait variation and explore the role of genetic background on multi-omic factors during meditation....
Cognitive Sciences
March 1, 2023
Leonardo Christov-Moore, Alex Jinich-Diamant, Adam Safron et al.
Our culture and its scientific endeavor direly need a holistic characterization of mind and body. Many phenomena attest to the profound effects of beliefs on bodily function (e.g., open-label placebo's effects on chronic pain) and interoceptive systems' role in mental processes (e.g., the emerging role of gut microbiomes in the mood). We need a mechanistic, integrative framework to account for...
Current Pain and Headache Reports
August 17, 2020
Alex Jinich-Diamant, Eric L Garland, Jennifer Baumgartner et al.
This review examines recent (2016 onwards) neuroscientific findings on the mechanisms supporting mindfulness-associated pain relief. To date, its clear that mindfulness lowers pain by engaging brain processes that are distinct from placebo and vary across meditative training level. Due to rapid developments in the field of contemplative neuroscience, an update review on the neuroimaging studies...
Alex Jinich-Diamant
preprint
Psychedelics, contemplative practice, and fasting are physiologically unrelated interventions that nevertheless converge, across cultures and centuries, on a common experiential endpoint: the mystical state. Here I propose that this convergence reflects shared disruption of a single computational architecture, the precision-weighted predictive hierarchy, through three mechanistically distinct...