Older adults experiencing subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have a higher risk of dementia. Reducing this risk through behavioral interventions, which can increase emotional well-being (mindfulness and compassion) and physical activity, is crucial in SCD. SCD-Well is a multicenter, observer-blind, randomized, controlled, superiority trial. Three hundred forty-seven participants (mean [standard...
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...
We recently showed using a magnetoencephalogram visual mismatch-response paradigm that self-specific prediction-based neural mechanisms shield the self from existential threat by attributing death to the ‘other’. Here we test the pre-registered hypothesis that mindfulness meditation is associated with a reduction in the brain’s defensiveness towards mortality. Additionally, we examine putative...
Nonpharmacological interventions are a potential strategy to maintain or promote cognitive functioning in older adults. To investigate the effects of 18 months' meditation training and 18 months' non-native language training on cognition in older adults. This study was a secondary analysis of the Age-Well trial, an 18-month, observer-masked, randomized clinical trial with 3 parallel arms....
Older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) recruited from memory clinics have an increased risk of developing dementia and regularly experience reduced psychological well-being related to memory concerns and fear of dementia. Research on improving well-being in SCD is limited and lacks non-pharmacological approaches. We investigated whether mindfulness-based and health education...
As the world population is ageing, it is vital to understand how older adults can maintain and deepen their psychological well-being as they are confronted with the unique challenges of ageing in a complex world. Theoretical work has highlighted the promising role of intentional mental training such as meditation practice for enhancing human flourishing. However, meditation-based randomised...
No contemporary unifying framework has been provided for the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs) despite increased interest in hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelics. NSCs induce shifts in experiential contents (what appears to the experiencer) and/or structure (how it appears). This can allow the investigation of the plastic and dynamic nature of experience from a multiscale...
Objectives: As the world population is ageing, it is vital to understand how older adults can maintain and deepen their psychological well-being as they are confronted with the unique challenges of ageing in a complex and vulnerable world. Theoretical work has highlighted the promising role of intentional mental training such as meditation practice for enhancing human flourishing. However,...
Importance: No lifestyle-based randomized clinical trial directly targets psychoaffective risk factors of dementia. Meditation practices recently emerged as a promising mental training exercise to foster brain health and reduce dementia risk. Objective: To investigate the effects of meditation training on brain integrity in older adults. Design, Setting, and Participants: Age-Well was a...
Older individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) perceive that their cognition has declined but do not show objective impairment on neuropsychological tests. Individuals with SCD are at elevated risk of objective cognitive decline and incident dementia. Non-pharmacological interventions (including mindfulness-based and health self-management approaches) are a potential strategy to...
The perception of pain is sensitive to various mental processes such as expectation about the nociceptive stimulus or individual differences in the affective and cognitive evaluations of pain. A promising approach to the investigation of the neurocomputational principles of pain perception is the theory of predictive processing which offers a general framework to understand perception and...
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness-based interventions are widely used to target pain, yet their neural mechanisms of action are insufficiently understood. The authors studied neural and subjective pain response in a randomized active-control trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) alongside long-term meditation practitioners. METHODS: Healthy participants (N=115) underwent functional...
Studies purporting to show changes in brain structure following the popular, 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course are widely referenced despite major methodological limitations. Here, we present findings from a large, combined dataset of two, three-arm randomized controlled trials with active and waitlist (WL) control groups. Meditation-naïve participants ( n = 218) completed...
The auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a well characterized event-related potential component which has gained recent attention in theoretical models describing the impact of various styles of mindfulness meditation on attentional processes and perceptual inference. Previous findings highlighted a distinct modulation of the MMN amplitude by different meditation practices and degrees of...
This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as computational phenomenology because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy...
PURPOSE Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) offers a unique window on brain dynamics with excellent temporal and spatial resolution and is less prone to recording artefacts than surface EEG. This study used a within-subject design to explore the feasibility to compare iEEG data during mind wandering, mindfulness meditation and hypnosis. RESULTS Three patients who had iEEG for clinical...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) represents a major health and societal issue; there is no treatment to date and the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying this disease are not well understood. Yet, there is hope that AD risk factors and thus the number of AD cases can be significantly reduced by prevention measures based on lifestyle modifications as targeted by non-pharmacological preventive...
Mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) are increasingly utilized to improve mental health. Interest in the putative effects of MBPs on cognitive function is also growing. This is the first meta-analysis of objective cognitive outcomes across multiple domains from randomized MBP studies of adults. Seven databases were systematically searched to January 2020. Fifty-six unique studies (n = 2,931) were...
Abstract Studies purporting to show changes in brain structure following the popular, eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course are widely referenced despite major methodological limitations. Here, we present findings from a large, combined dataset of two, three-arm randomized controlled trials with active and waitlist (WL) control groups. Meditation-naive participants (n=218)...
Introduction: Older adults experiencing subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have a heightened risk of developing dementia and frequently experience subclinical anxiety, which is itself associated with dementia risk. Objective: To understand whether subclinical anxiety symptoms in SCD can be reduced through behavioral interventions. Methods: SCD-Well is a randomized controlled trial designed to...
Objectives: Deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which meditation practices impact well-being and human flourishing is essential for advancing the science of meditation. The phenomenologically grounded classification system introduced by Dahl, Lutz, and Davidson (2015) distinguishes attentional, constructive, and deconstructive forms of meditation based on the psychological...
BACKGROUND: The way people respond to pain is based on psychological mechanisms, beliefs and expectations. Mindfulness meditation (MM) has been shown to regulate pain and mental suffering through different mechanisms such as positive reappraisal, attentional and emotional regulation. Yet, subjective experience and meaning of pain in connection with MM are still largely unexplored. METHODS: The...
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness meditation can downregulate the experience of pain. However, its specific underlying regulatory mechanisms are still largely unknown. Here, we aimed to investigate the role of cognitive defusion-a form of psychological distancing from internal experiences-in mindfulness-based pain regulation. METHODS: We implemented a thermal heat paradigm that was designed to amplify the...
Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically,...
Meta-awareness refers to the capacity to explicitly notice the current content of consciousness and has been identified as a key component for the successful control of cognitive states, such as the deliberate direction of attention. This paper proposes a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference. To do so, we cast mental action as policy...