Scientific Reports
August 2, 2022
Benno Bremer, Qiong Wu, María Guadalupe Mora Álvarez et al.
125 citations
One month of mindfulness meditation training increases functional connectivity between major large-scale brain networks, particularly the default mode network, salience network, and central executive network. In a study of 46 healthy, meditation-naïve adults, resting-state fMRI scans before and after 31 days of mindfulness training or an active control intervention revealed that mindfulness training strengthened connections between nodes of the default mode and salience networks, and between the salience network and key regions of the central executive network. These connectivity changes may represent a neural mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation on health and cognition.
Scientific Reports
March 27, 2024
Alyssa Torske, Benno Bremer, Britta Karen Hölzel et al.
24 citations
A 31-day web-based mindfulness meditation training, compared to a health training condition, increased mindfulness and reduced stress-eating, emotional-eating tendencies, and food cravings in 66 meditation-naïve adults who tend to stress-eat. These behavioral improvements were accompanied by changes in resting-state functional connectivity between the hypothalamus, reward regions, and default mode network areas, as well as between the insula and somatosensory areas. Additional connectivity changes occurred in brain regions linked to emotion regulation, awareness, attention, and sensory integration. The correlations between connectivity and behavioral changes suggest neural mechanisms underlying mindfulness effects on stress-eating.
Scientific Reports
December 19, 2023
María Guadalupe Mora Álvarez, Britta Karen Hölzel, Benno Bremer et al.
19 citations
A 31-day web-based mindfulness meditation training reduced perceived stress and anxiety and improved overall reaction time on an attention test, though no specific attentional components were affected. The training also increased flow experiences. Brain imaging showed increased activity in the superior frontal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and right hippocampus during an alerting task, and decreased stress and anxiety correlated with right hippocampus activation. Increased flow correlated with activity in all those areas. Diffusion imaging revealed improved white matter microstructure in the right uncinate fasciculus, linking the right hippocampus to frontal areas. An active control group showed no significant changes.
Scientific Reports
April 25, 2025
Alyssa Torske, Doris Schicker, Jessica Freiherr et al.
3 citations
Frequent exposure to food cues in modern environments can desensitize sensory systems, reducing eating pleasure and prompting overeating to compensate. A 31-day web-based mindfulness training, compared to health training, may reduce this habituation response to high-calorie food stimuli in stressed, hungry individuals. The training appears to increase neural activity in brain regions for visual, olfactory, and emotion processing, potentially improving attention to food and enhancing eating pleasure, which could curb overeating and associated weight gain and disease risks.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
January 1, 2016
Britta K. Hölzel, Vincent Brunsch, Tim Gard et al.
Mindfulness training helped maintain sensitivity to learned emotional cues, while controls lost that response. In a pilot study, 46 healthy participants were quasi-randomized to an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course or a waitlist control group. Before and after the course, they underwent a two-day fear conditioning, extinction learning, and extinction memory protocol. Skin conductance response showed that after MBSR, participants maintained a differential response to conditioned versus non-conditioned stimuli, whereas controls did not. MBSR participants also showed increased fractional anisotropy in the uncinate fasciculus, a white matter tract linked to emotional learning, though the group-by-time interaction was not significant. Changes in this tract correlated with changes in emotional response, suggesting neural plasticity from mindfulness practice.