Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Joseph C. C. Chen, David A Ziegler
6 citations
Mindfulness meditation can improve well-being, but people often struggle with adherence, session quality, or dosage. Closed-loop systems and real-time neurofeedback—using signals from fMRI or EEG—may help support mindfulness performance and engagement. This review describes how neurofeedback signals such as fMRI activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, central executive network, and salience network, as well as EEG alpha, theta, and gamma bands, have been used to provide subjective correlates of mindfulness states. Past work has focused on aligning interventions with the subjective meditation experience. Future research should use control conditions like mindfulness only or sham neurofeedback to quantify the effects of closed-loop and neurofeedback-guided meditation on cognition and well-being.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
November 21, 2025
Joseph C. C. Chen, Gabriella Mace, Avery Ostrand et al.
preprint
Awe, a positive emotion linked to well-being and social behavior, was studied using EEG and autonomic physiology in 23 healthy older adults watching a nature film. Awe was the dominant emotion reported, though joy was also common. During awe events, skin conductance decreased, and EEG alpha and theta power decreased—changes associated with low arousal and positive emotion. Awe also increased Lempel Ziv Complexity (LZC), a measure of neural signal entropy linked to richer conscious experience. LZC correlated positively with awe intensity and negatively with skin conductance. Three additional datasets using different induction methods (video clips and DMT) showed similar occipital LZC increases, suggesting LZC may be a generalizable neurophysiological marker of awe.
Brain Connectivity
March 1, 2021
Lucie Bréchet, David A Ziegler, Alexander J. Simon et al.
After six weeks of breath-focused, digital meditation training, young adults showed changes in resting-state brain networks measured by EEG microstates, particularly in the right insula, superior temporal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, and superior frontal gyrus bilaterally. These topographical changes were not seen in an active placebo control group. The results suggest that this low-cost, digital meditation practice can reorganize brain network connectivity and may offer a novel, noninvasive approach for treating neuropathological conditions.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2020
Helen Y. Weng, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock, Frederick M Hecht et al.
Multi-voxel pattern analysis of fMRI data can recognize five internal attentional states—breath attention, mind wandering, self-referential processing, attention to feet, and attention to sounds—in individual participants with accuracy well above chance (over 41% vs. 20% chance). In a mixed sample of 16 experienced meditators and novices, classifiers trained on a directed attention task successfully identified these states in 87.5% of participants. When applied to a separate 10-minute meditation session, the classifiers indicated that participants spent more time attending to breath than mind wandering or self-referential processing. The findings suggest that objective, participant-level measurement of mental states during meditation is feasible, potentially improving assessment of internally-oriented attention cultivated by meditation.
Nature Human Behaviour
June 3, 2019
David A Ziegler, Alexander J. Simon, C. Gallen et al.
Six weeks of using a meditation-inspired, closed-loop mobile app called MediTrain improved sustained attention and working memory in healthy young adults. These cognitive gains were accompanied by positive changes in neural signatures of attentional control, specifically frontal theta inter-trial coherence and parietal P3b latency, as measured by electroencephalography. The findings suggest that delivering aspects of focused-attention meditation through a modern technology-based approach can enhance attention in a population where such improvement has proven difficult.