Reward seeking is common and adaptive, but excessive pursuit of monetary rewards can reduce well-being. People trained in mindfulness meditation show lower brain reactivity to monetary incentives. In a functional MRI study, 34 meditators and 44 matched controls performed a monetary incentive delay task equally well, but meditators had lower activation in the caudate nucleus during reward anticipation and higher activation in the bilateral posterior insula. During reward receipt, meditators showed reduced activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Connectivity between the right caudate and bilateral anterior insula was weaker in meditators during anticipation. These findings indicate that mindfulness meditators are less susceptible to monetary rewards at a neural level.
A double-blind randomized controlled trial will test whether low doses of psilocybin, given alongside virtual reality exposure therapy, can reduce symptoms of social anxiety disorder. The protocol describes the planned methods but does not yet report results.
Four weeks of app-based mindfulness meditation enhanced fear extinction recall in healthy adults, reducing physiological and neural threat responses to extinguished cues. Mindfulness decreased activation in subcortical threat-processing regions (amygdala, striatum, supplementary motor area) without increasing cognitive control areas, suggesting direct modulation of fear circuits rather than top-down inhibition. This pattern indicates mindfulness may improve safety memory retrieval through implicit emotion regulation, offering preliminary neurobiological evidence for optimizing treatments for fear-based disorders. Replication in clinical samples is needed.