Journal of Sleep Research
July 29, 2025
Pierre Champetier, Anaïs Hamel, Claire André et al.
Long-term meditation practice in older adults is linked to more preserved brain activity during rest and sleep, and to EEG features that suggest higher cognitive states during NREM sleep. Expert meditators (mean age 70.7 years) slept longer, had less stage N1 sleep, and more stage N2 sleep than controls. During NREM sleep, they showed reduced delta power, increased alpha power, and greater theta permutation entropy. During REM sleep, they tended to have greater theta power. Self-reported sleep quality did not differ between groups. Greater meditation expertise was associated with less stage N1 sleep and tended to correlate with more stage N2 and REM theta power.
Scientific Reports
May 15, 2025
Florence Requier, Hamed Mohammadi, Harriet Demnitz-King et al.
Expert meditators in older age reported less external distraction and performed better on memory tasks compared to non-meditators, while no differences were found in attention, executive function, or global cognitive scores. These cross-sectional findings from 135 non-meditators and 27 expert meditators suggest that prolonged meditation practice may help preserve memory and manage distractions, two cognitive capacities important for healthy aging.
Imaging Neuroscience
January 1, 2025
Sacha Haudry, Sophie Dautricourt, Julie Gonneaud et al.
An 18-month meditation training in healthy older adults altered resting-state brain dynamics. Participants who meditated showed more frequent transitions between different brain connectivity states and spent less time in a weakly connected state and more time in a strongly connected state, patterns associated with lower and higher dementia risk, respectively. However, only the increase in transitions was significantly different from a non-native language training group. The small effect sizes and lack of group differences for time spent in states limit the conclusions.
February 13, 2024
Marco Schlosser, Stefano Poletti, Fabienne Collette et al.
preprint
More time spent practicing meditation is linked to greater perceived benefits from training, according to a study of 90 healthy older adults aged 65-84 who took part in an 18-month meditation program or a language training program. Higher engagement, measured as hours of formal practice, was the only factor associated with higher ratings of responsiveness by participants and teachers, including measures of connection, emotions, and meta-awareness during sessions and in daily life. Baseline traits like sex, education, personality, and cognition did not predict responsiveness. The findings suggest that adherence and practice time are key to perceived intervention effects, and future studies should track engagement and reasons for disengagement.
December 30, 2023
Stefano Poletti, Prisca R. Bauer, Antoine Lutz
preprint
Worldviews—the beliefs underlying how people conceive reality and selfhood—differ between novice mindfulness meditators and long-term Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. Interviews with 32 novices and 30 experts (over 20,000 hours of practice) revealed a gradient of dereification: experts showed less identification with thoughts and emotions, treating them as mental components. This gradient applied to views on subjectivity, agency, linear time, causality, and ontological substantialism (the belief in inherent essences). Experts also shifted from content-oriented to process-oriented thinking, with greater meta-cognitive awareness during interviews. The findings suggest meditative experience shapes worldviews through metacognitive functions, supporting the Buddhist emphasis on questioning beliefs through direct observation.
October 31, 2022
Marco Schlosser, Olga Klimecki, Fabienne Collette et al.
An 18-month meditation training program, combining mindfulness with compassion and loving-kindness practice, improved a global measure of psychological well-being in healthy older adults compared to both an active English training group and a no-intervention control. The global score reflected the meditation-based dimensions of awareness, connection, and insight. Meditation training was superior to English training on changes in each of these subscales individually. However, it did not outperform the comparators on the standard Psychological Well-being Scale total score, and improvements in psychological quality of life were not significant after adjusting for multiple comparisons. Participants who started with higher well-being showed smaller gains.
September 15, 2021
Enrico Fucci, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Oussama Abdoun et al.
preprint
Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a brain response linked to attention and perception, and recent theories suggest mindfulness meditation may alter it. This study attempted to replicate earlier findings that meditation states and expertise modulate MMN amplitude, using a larger sample for greater statistical power. Traditional analysis found no effects of meditation states or expertise on MMN amplitude, failing to replicate prior work. Bayesian analysis provided strong evidence against an interaction between expertise and meditation states, and only moderate evidence for a weak expertise effect during focused attention. However, increased alpha brainwave power during meditation was replicated. The null findings are discussed in light of low statistical power, flexible analysis methods, and possible publication bias in previous research.
November 7, 2020
Stefano Poletti, Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn et al.
preprint
People respond to pain based on psychological mechanisms, beliefs, and expectations. Mindfulness meditation helps regulate pain through positive reappraisal and emotional regulation, but how people subjectively experience pain in connection with meditation is not well understood. In a mixed-methods study combining qualitative interviews with an experimental thermal pain task, 32 novices who received short meditation training and 30 experts with over 10,000 lifetime hours of practice described their pain experiences. Five phenomenological clusters emerged: pain as an unpleasant sensation prompting avoidance-suppression, volitional agency-distanciation, or positive cognitive reappraisal and flexibility; and, mainly among experts, pain as an opportunity for metacognitive insights about mental processes and for deconstructing suffering, with the fifth cluster integrating shared human suffering and compassion. Each cluster correlated with distinct self-reports during the pain task.
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
preprint
A new questionnaire, the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP), captures how meditation experiences change over time across seven domains: context, intention, emotion, body, attention, thought, and self-awareness. Fifty-three experienced meditators completed the LAMP after each session during a 10-day retreat. Over 60% of the measured dimensions changed significantly, with distinct patterns for focused attention versus open monitoring meditation and for meditators of different expertise levels. Three clusters of individual trajectories emerged, linked to prior experience and difficulties during the retreat. The approach also replicated and extended prior findings on pain regulation. The findings suggest that meditation experience is dynamic and multidimensional, and the LAMP may help deepen understanding of meditation's mechanisms.
Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition
March 1, 2025
Florence Requier, Harriet Demnitz-King, Eric Frison et al.
Meditation training, compared to non-native language training, reduced older adults' self-reported vulnerability to external distractions after 18 months, but did not change their perception of internal attention or overall cognitive difficulties. The study included 134 healthy older adults randomly assigned to meditation, language training, or no intervention. Results suggest meditation may help older adults manage distracting information in daily life.
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
January 1, 2025
Perla Kaliman, María Jesús Álvarez-López, Asrar Lehodey et al.
Shorter telomeres are linked to a higher risk of cognitive decline and age-related diseases. An 18-month meditation training program in adults aged 65 and older did not significantly affect telomere length measures compared to a non-native language training or passive control group. Telomere length generally decreased over time across all groups. However, within the meditation group, greater class attendance and higher responsiveness to the intervention were associated with longer telomeres, and lower openness to experience correlated with fewer critically short telomeres. The findings suggest that while meditation did not show a main effect on telomere preservation, individual factors may influence outcomes.
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
November 1, 2024
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Loïc Daumail et al.
Long-term Buddhist practitioners show distinct, enduring patterns of large-scale brain functional connectivity that are present whether they are meditating or resting, indicating that meditation expertise produces trait-like neural changes. Comparing 28 expert meditators with 47 matched novices, a machine-learning classifier successfully decoded expertise from brain scans taken during both meditative and nonmeditative states. The experts' brains exhibited greater integration across multiple networks, including those involved in attention, emotion, body awareness, and cognitive control. This increased integration correlated with a stronger ability to create psychological distance from thoughts and emotions, suggesting that meditation cultivates an embodied cognition that persists beyond formal practice.
Connectomics in neuroimaging : First International Workshop, CNI 2017, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2017, Quebec City, QC, Canada, September 14, 2017, proceedings. CNI (Workshop) (1st : 2017 : Quebec, Quebec)
January 1, 2017
Yuan Wang, Moo K Chung, Daniela Dentico et al.
Topological data analysis (TDA) of EEG power maps can reveal differences in brain activity between long-term meditators and meditation-naive practitioners that standard methods miss. The authors propose a new inference procedure based on persistent homology, a TDA technique that tracks topological features across sublevel-set filtrations of high-density EEG topographic maps. Applied to simulated and real EEG data, the method compares persistent homological features of spectral power in high-frequency bands between the two groups. The findings suggest that TDA offers additional insight into the neuroplastic effects of meditation on brain activity beyond conventional statistical approaches.
Neuroimage
January 1, 2013
Antoine Lutz, Daniel R McFarlin, David M Perlman et al.
Expert meditators with over 10,000 hours of practice experience pain as intensely as novices but find it less unpleasant. Brain imaging during a mindfulness-like meditation showed that experts had enhanced activity in the dorsal anterior insula and anterior mid-cingulate cortex—part of the salience network—during pain, alongside lower baseline activity in these regions and the amygdala before pain. This pattern was linked to faster neural habituation in pain-related areas. The findings suggest that cultivating experiential openness reduces anticipatory responses to aversive events and increases attentional engagement during pain, leading to quicker habituation.
Advances in Consciousness Research
October 28, 2010
Antoine Lutz
Early neuroscientific research on meditation, though still in its infancy, promises to contribute to three key areas: neuroplasticity, revealing how brain circuits underlying complex mental functions respond to specific meditation techniques; mind-body interactions, uncovering mechanisms by which meditation training may benefit physical health; and subjectivity, where the introspective skills of experienced practitioners may illuminate the neural basis of subjective experience.
Neuroimage
September 1, 2009
Antoine Lutz, Lawrence L. Greischar, David M Perlman et al.
Compassion meditation strengthens the brain's representation of others' emotions and its connection to heart rate, especially in long-term practitioners. Brain scans showed that during compassion meditation, the insula and anterior cingulate cortex had stronger coupling with heart rate than during a neutral state. This coupling was more pronounced in expert meditators than novices in somatosensory areas and the right inferior parietal lobule, suggesting expertise enhances the brain's emotional and bodily responses to others' distress.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2008
Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagter, John D. Dunne et al.
Meditation encompasses a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Two commonly studied styles are focused attention meditation, which involves voluntarily focusing attention on a chosen object, and open monitoring meditation, which involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.