Meditation has been a spiritual and healing practice in the East for thousands of years. However, the neurophysiologic mechanisms underlying its traditional form remain unclear. In this study, we recruited a large sample of monks (n = 73) who practice Tibetan Buddhist meditation and compared with meditation-naive local controls (n = 30). Their electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiogram...
Summary Background There have been mixed reports on the beneficial effects of meditation in cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is widely considered the leading cause of death worldwide. Methods To clarify the role of meditation in modulating the heart-brain axis, we implemented an extreme phenotype strategy, i.e., Tibetan monks (BMI > 30) who practised 19.20 ± 7.82 years of meditation on...
Despite accumulating evidence suggesting improvement in one's well-being as a result of meditation, little is known about if or how the brain and the periphery interact to produce these behavioral and mental changes. We hypothesize that meditation reflects changes in the neural representations of visceral activity, such as cardiac behavior, and investigated the integration of neural and...
Meditation is a progressive process in which meditators may experience different stages to finally reach a deep meditation state. However, the temporal-dynamic process of meditation remains unclear. In this study, we recruited 38 experienced Tibetan Buddhism meditators to explore the dynamic process from resting to deep meditation from the aspects of EEG oscillations and networks. We found that...