A scientometric analysis of 16,310 documents from 1973 to 2023 reveals that mindfulness dominates mind–body intervention research, but each practice—Yoga, Qi-gong, Tai-chi, Vipassana, Zen, Loving-kindness, and Transcendental meditation—has distinct research clusters focused on different mental and physical health issues, such as substance abuse, schizophrenia, back pain, and dementia. The findings suggest that future research should recognize the unique contributions of each practice rather than treating them as a single category.
Meditation practices, which have been adapted into manualized interventions for conditions like depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety, show therapeutic promise, but their neuroscientific basis remains unclear. Current neuroimaging studies rely on small, heterogeneous datasets that vary in practice types, participant experience, clinical targets, and imaging methods, limiting generalizability and replicability. To address this, the ENIGMA-Meditation consortium was formed as a global collaboration to conduct systematic meta- and mega-analyses of distributed neuroimaging data using standardized methods. This framework aims to improve statistical power and rigorously characterize the neural mechanisms underlying meditation's effects on psychological and cognitive attributes, advancing the field of contemplative neuroscience.