JMIR Research Protocols
August 18, 2026
Ludivine Nohales, Sandrine Touzet, Anne Termoz et al.
Abstract Background Hospital professionals face mental health challenges caused by the high demands of their work. Mindfulness meditation (MM) is a nonpharmacological practice with promising effects in promoting mental health and well-being across various hospital professionals. However, the benefits obtained from its implementation in the context of real work in hospital departments are...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
July 3, 2026
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun et al.
Nonduality is a foundational but conceptually elusive notion across several contemplative traditions. Nondual traditions challenge the assumption that a subject-object structure characteristic of ordinary experience is an intrinsic feature of conscious awareness. However, little remains known about the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with such experiential state. Here, we investigated how...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
November 7, 2025
Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Alexandre Foncelle, Éric Koun et al.
Active inference describes motor action as a prediction-driven inferential process, whereby ascending proprioceptive prediction errors are attenuated to allow the fulfillment of expected movement. Meditative practices typically involve a heightened attention to bodily sensations, begging the question of whether this could partially offset the normal proprioceptive suppression during a simple...
Scientific Reports
October 28, 2025
Sacha Haudry, Natacha Lambert, Christian Gaser et al.
Meditation is thought to promote healthy aging by improving mental health, preserving brain integrity and reducing Alzheimer's disease risk. We examined the impact of long-term meditation expertise and an 18-month meditation training on brain aging in older adults using machine learning. We included 25 Older Expert Meditators (OldExpMed) with > 20 years of practice and 135 Cognitively...
PsyArXiv
September 30, 2025
Christopher Timmermann, Tommaso Barba, James W. Sanders et al.
preprint
Meditation and psychedelics have separately been studied as powerful tools for probing consciousness through their capacity to deconstruct the sense of self. Yet, direct empirical comparisons remain scarce, particularly in expert meditators. Here, we report for the first time a case study in which an advanced meditator and Lama from the Mahāmudrā meditation tradition engaged in a traditional...
Journal of Sleep Research
July 29, 2025
Pierre Champetier, Anaïs Hamel, Claire André et al.
Meditation practice has been shown to impact resting-state EEG activity in expert meditators, but its benefits on sleep, which is particularly affected with age, are poorly understood. Our aim was to better understand the effects of long-term meditation practice on resting-state EEG and sleep in older adults. Twenty-seven elderly expert meditators (mean age ± SD: 70.7 ± 5.0 years) were compared...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
July 1, 2025
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
5 citations
A significant share of meditation research relies on trait psychometric measures of mindfulness, which neglect the complex and dynamic unfolding of experiential processes entailed by meditation over time. However, there have been a few attempts to capture ongoing changes in experience during meditation. In this study, we integrated and expanded on 3 of these previous approaches to create a...
Scientific Reports
May 15, 2025
Florence Requier, Hamed Mohammadi, Harriet Demnitz-King et al.
With aging, slight changes in some cognitive processes can be observed. Therefore, we aimed to assess if meditation expertise is associated with preserved cognition in key domains affected in aging. We used data from two older-adult samples of the Medit-Ageing Age-well Study: 135 non-meditators and 27 expert meditators. We examined group differences in four objective cognitive domains...
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Antoine Lutz, Oussama Abdoun, Yair Dor-Ziderman et al.
18 citations
There is a renewed interest in taking phenomenology seriously in consciousness research, contemporary psychiatry, and neurocomputation. The neurophenomenology research program, pioneered by Varela, rigorously examines subjective experience using first-person methodologies, inspired by phenomenology and contemplative practices. This review explores recent advancements in neurophenomenological...
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Saampras Ganesan, Fernando A Barrios, Ishaan Batta et al.
6 citations
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 12, 2025
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
14 citations
During wakefulness, our thoughts transition between different contents. However, there are moments that are seemingly devoid of reportable content, referred to as mind blanking (MB). It remains unclear what these blanks represent, highlighting the definitional and phenomenological ambiguities surrounding MB. We map out MB in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship...
Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition
March 1, 2025
Florence Requier, Harriet Demnitz-King, Eric Frison et al.
Aging is associated with cognitive changes, even in the absence of brain pathology. This study aimed to determine if meditation training, by comparison to active and passive control groups, is linked to changes in the perception of cognitive functioning in older adults. One hundred thirty-four healthy older participants from the Age-Well Randomized Clinical Trial were included: 45 followed a...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Yair Dor-Ziderman, Yoav Schweitzer, Ohad Nave et al.
10 citations
Human predictive capacity underlies its adaptive strength but also the potential for existential terror. Grounded in the predictive processing framework of brain function, we recently showed using a magnetoencephalogram visual mismatch-response (vMMR) paradigm that prediction-based self-specific neural mechanisms shield the self from existential threat-at the level of perception-by attributing...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Lars Sandved-Smith, Juan Diego Bogotá, Jakob Hohwy et al.
10 citations
The context for our paper comes from the neurophenomenology (NPh) research programme initiated by Francisco Varela at the end of the 1990s. Varela's working hypothesis was that, to be successful, a consciousness research programme must progress by relating first-person phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their third-person counterparts in neuroscience through "mutual...
Imaging Neuroscience
2025
Sacha Haudry, Sophie Dautricourt, Julie Gonneaud et al.
Meditation training in older adults has been proposed as a non-pharmacological intervention to promote healthy aging and lower the risks of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Resting-state dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) highlighted two brain states, the "strongly connected" and "default mode network (DMN)-negatively connected" states, associated with protective factors for...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
2025
Perla Kaliman, María Jesús Álvarez-López, Asrar Lehodey et al.
Shorter telomeres are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and age-related diseases. Developing interventions to promote healthy aging by preserving telomere integrity is of paramount importance. Here, we investigated the effect of an 18-month meditation intervention on telomere length (TL) measures in older people without cognitive impairment. A total of 137 adults age ≥65 years...
Sci Rep
November 27, 2024
Sacha Haudry, Anne-Laure Turpin, Brigitte Landeau et al.
3 citations
Decoding meditation mechanisms underlying brain preservation and psycho-affective health in older expert meditators and older meditation-naive participants.
Sci Rep
November 27, 2024
Sacha Haudry, Anne-Laure Turpin, Brigitte Landeau et al.
3 citations
Decoding meditation mechanisms underlying brain preservation and psycho-affective health in older expert meditators and older meditation-naive participants.
Scientific Reports
November 2, 2024
Marco Schlosser, Julie Gonneaud, Stefano Poletti et al.
2 citations
Understanding the factors that predict why some individuals perceive to respond more to meditation training than others could impact the development, efficacy, adherence levels, and implementation of meditation-based interventions. We investigated individual-level variables associated with self- and teacher-perceived responsiveness to longer-term meditation training. This study presents a...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
November 1, 2024
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Loïc Daumail et al.
5 citations
Short mindfulness-based interventions have gained traction in research due to their positive impact on well-being, cognition, and clinical symptoms across various settings. However, these short-term trainings are viewed as preliminary steps within a more extensive transformative path, presumably leading to long-lasting trait changes. Despite this, little is still known about the brain...
Scientific Reports
May 2, 2024
Sucharit Katyal, Oussama Abdoun, Hugues Mounier et al.
4 citations
While consciousness is typically considered equivalent to mental contents, certain meditation practices-including open monitoring (OM)-are said to enable a unique conscious state where meditators can experience mental content from a de-reified perspective as "ongoing phenomena." Phenomenologically, such a state is considered as reduction of intentionality, the mental act upon mental content. We...
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
February 22, 2024
Enrico Fucci, Oussama Abdoun, Constanza Baquedano et al.
5 citations
Within western social psychology and neuroscience, compassion is described as being conditioned by cost-benefit appraisals, such as the attribution of responsibility for the causes of suffering. Buddhist traditions maintain the possibility of cultivating and embodying unconditioned and universal forms of compassion. Whereas a growing body of empirical literature suggests that Buddhist-inspired...
February 13, 2024
Marco Schlosser, Stefano Poletti, Fabienne Collette et al.
preprint
Understanding the factors that predict why some individuals perceive to respond more to meditation training than others could impact the development, efficacy, adherence levels, and implementation of meditation-based interventions. We investigated individual-level variables associated with self- and teacher-perceived responsiveness to longer-term meditation training. This study presents a...
December 30, 2023
Stefano Poletti, Prisca R. Bauer, Antoine Lutz
preprint
Objective: Worldviews (WVs) are the set of beliefs that underlie the way we conceive of reality and selfhood. Buddhist meditation allegedly leads to long-lasting changes in WVs and trait-like neurophysiological and behavioral differences between novice and expert meditators support this possibility. Yet, this claim has not yet been fully tested and there is still no qualitative evidence. The...
PsyArXiv
August 21, 2023
Yair Dor-Ziderman, Yoav Schweitzer, Ohad Nave et al.
3 citations
preprint
Mindfulness meditators’ brains show an acceptance of death which predicts positively-valenced meditative self-dissolution experiences