Mindful attention reduces both self-reported craving and brain activity linked to craving in smokers. Forty-seven meditation-naïve smokers who had not smoked for 12 hours viewed smoking and neutral images during fMRI, either passively or with mindful attention. Mindful attention lowered self-reported craving to smoking images and decreased neural activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), a craving-related brain region. It also reduced functional connectivity between sgACC and other craving-related regions, suggesting mindfulness decouples craving neurocircuitry. This indicates mindful attention may help reduce subjective and neural reactivity to smoking cues.
Higher perceived stress over the past month is associated with greater functional connectivity between the amygdala and the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) in a sample of 130 community adults. A subsequent randomized controlled trial with 35 stressed unemployed adults showed that a 3-day intensive mindfulness meditation training, compared to a relaxation training without mindfulness, reduced right amygdala-sgACC connectivity. The findings suggest that mindfulness meditation training may reverse stress-related increases in amygdala-sgACC connectivity, indicating a neural pathway for stress reduction.
Three days of intensive mindfulness meditation training, compared with relaxation training, strengthened functional connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and brain regions involved in executive control. In adults with high psychological distress, resting-state functional connectivity increased between left dlPFC and the right inferior frontal gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus, right supplementary eye field, right parietal cortex, and left middle temporal gyrus, and between right dlPFC and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that even brief mindfulness training can enhance neural circuit connectivity underlying executive function, extending prior work on active meditation by identifying specific resting-state networks affected in distressed individuals.