Psychophysiology
December 1, 2025
Kaoru Nashiro, B Rael Cahn, Paul Choi et al.
Prior research suggests that meditation may slow brain aging and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, we lack research systematically examining what aspect(s) of meditation may drive such benefits. In particular, it is unknown how breathing patterns during meditation might influence health outcomes associated with AD. In this study, we examined whether two types of mindfulness...
medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences
March 11, 2025
Kaoru Nashiro, B Rael Cahn, Paul Choi et al.
2 citations
preprint
Prior research suggests that meditation may slow brain aging and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, we lack research systematically examining what aspect(s) of meditation may drive such benefits. In particular, it is unknown how breathing patterns during meditation might influence health outcomes associated with AD. In this study, we examined whether two types of mindfulness...
Global advances in integrative medicine and health
2024
Eunmi Kim, Diane Joss, Frannie Marin et al.
1 citation
Heart-Smile Training (HST) is an interoceptive compassion-based behavioral intervention that in case reports has been beneficial for depression. Interoception refers to the awareness and regulation of physiological signals from inside the body. Depressed patients often have diminished interoceptive awareness and often experience disconnection from bodily needs and sensations. In addition to...
PLoS One
November 7, 2018
Cassandra Vieten, Helané Wahbeh, B Rael Cahn et al.
124 citations
The science of meditation has grown tremendously in the last two decades. Most studies have focused on evaluating the clinical effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, neural and other physiological correlates of meditation, and individual cognitive and emotional aspects of meditation. Far less research has been conducted on more challenging domains to measure, such as group and...
PLoS One
2017
Claire Braboszcz, B Rael Cahn, Jonathan Levy et al.
Despite decades of research, effects of different types of meditation on electroencephalographic (EEG) activity are still being defined. We compared practitioners of three different meditation traditions (Vipassana, Himalayan Yoga and Isha Shoonya) with a control group during a meditative and instructed mind-wandering (IMW) block. All meditators showed higher parieto-occipital 60-110 Hz gamma...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Willoughby B. Britton, Jared R. Lindahl, B Rael Cahn et al.
Buddhist meditation practices have become a topic of widespread interest in both science and medicine. Traditional Buddhist formulations describe meditation as a state of relaxed alertness that must guard against both excessive hyperarousal (restlessness) and excessive hypoarousal (drowsiness, sleep). Modern applications of meditation have emphasized the hypoarousing and relaxing effects...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Claire Braboszcz, B Rael Cahn, Bhavani Balakrishnan et al.
Meditation has lately received considerable interest from cognitive neuroscience. Studies suggest that daily meditation leads to long lasting attentional and neuronal plasticity. We present changes related to the attentional systems before and after a 3 month intensive meditation retreat. We used three behavioral psychophysical tests - a Stroop task, an attentional blink task, and a...
International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology
April 1, 2009
B Rael Cahn, John Polich
A three-stimulus auditory oddball series was presented to experienced Vipassana meditators during meditation and a control thought period to elicit event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in the two different mental states. The stimuli consisted of a frequent standard tone (500 Hz), an infrequent oddball tone (1000 Hz), and an infrequent distracter (white noise), with all stimuli passively...