Recently we proposed that the information contained in spontaneously emerging (resting-state) fluctuations may reflect individually unique neuro-cognitive traits. One prediction of this conjecture, termed the "spontaneous trait reactivation" (STR) hypothesis, is that resting-state activity patterns could be diagnostic of unique personalities, talents and life-styles of individuals. Long-term...
Mindfulness practice is beneficial for emotion regulation; however, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect are poorly understood. The current study focuses on effects of attention-to-breath (ATB) as a basic mindfulness practice on aversive emotions at behavioral and brain levels. A key finding across different emotion regulation strategies is the modulation of amygdala and prefrontal...
Normal aging is known to be accompanied by loss of brain substance. The present study was designed to examine whether the practice of meditation is associated with a reduced brain age. Specific focus was directed at age fifty and beyond, as mid-life is a time when aging processes are known to become more prominent. We applied a recently developed machine learning algorithm trained to identify...
Emotions have been shown to exert influences on decision making during economic exchanges. Here we investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of a training regimen which is hypothesized to promote emotional awareness, specifically mindfulness training (MT). We test the hypothesis that MT increases cooperative economic decision making using fMRI in a randomized longitudinal design involving...
The partial awareness hypothesis is a theoretical proposal that recently provided a reconciling solution to graded and dichotomous accounts of consciousness. It suggests that we can become conscious of distinct properties of an object independently, ranging from low-level features to complex forms of representation. We investigated this hypothesis using classic visual word masking adapted to a...
Thoughts arise spontaneously in our minds with remarkable frequency, but tracking the brain systems associated with the early inception of a thought has proved challenging. Here we addressed this issue by taking advantage of the heightened introspective ability of experienced mindfulness practitioners to observe the onset of their spontaneously arising thoughts. We found subtle differences in...
The effects of age on functional connectivity (FC) of intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) have largely been derived from cross-sectional studies. Far less is known about longitudinal changes in FC and how they relate to ageing-related cognitive decline. We evaluated intra- and inter-network FC in 78 healthy older adults two or three times over a period of 4years. Using linear mixed modeling...
Background: Meditation is increasingly showing beneficial effects for psychiatric disorders. However, learning to meditate is not straightforward as there are no easily discernible outward signs of performance and thus no direct feedback is possible. As meditation has been found to correlate with posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) activity, we tested whether source‐space EEG neurofeedback from...
The brain's default mode network (DMN) has become closely associated with self-referential mental activity, particularly in the resting-state. While the DMN is important for such processes, it has functions other than self-reference, and self-referential processes are supported by regions outside of the DMN. In our study of 88 participants, we examined self-referential and resting-state...
Mental health benefits of mindfulness techniques are thought to involve changes in self-processing, such as decreased attachment to the self, higher self-compassion and lower emotional reactivity to inner experience. However, self-related emotion processing in regular mindfulness practitioners is not extensively studied. In the current work we investigate differential neural and behavioral...
NeuroimageNovember 15, 2015Sandrine Bisenius, Sabrina Trapp, Jane Neumann et al.
Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) have been a topic of study for nearly two decades. In functional imaging studies, several regions have been proposed to constitute possible candidates for NCC, but as of yet, no quantitative summary of the literature on NCC has been done. The question whether single (striate or extrastriate) regions or a network consisting of extrastriate areas that...
NeuroimageSeptember 1, 2015Ju Lynn Ong, Danyang Kong, Tiffany T Y Chia et al.
Spontaneous eye-closures that herald sleep onset become more frequent when we are sleep deprived. Although these are typically associated with decreased responsiveness to external stimuli, it is less clear what occurs in the brain at these transitions to drowsiness and light sleep. To investigate this, task-free fMRI of sleep-deprived participants was acquired. BOLD activity associated with...
Initially described as task-induced deactivations during goal-directed paradigms of high attentional load, the unresolved functionality of default mode regions has long been assumed to interfere with task performance. However, recent evidence suggests a potential default mode network involvement in fulfilling cognitive demands. We tested this hypothesis in a finger opposition paradigm with task...
Meditation training has been shown to enhance attention and improve emotion regulation. However, the brain processes associated with such training are poorly understood and a computational modeling framework is lacking. Modeling approaches that can realistically simulate neurophysiological data while conforming to basic anatomical and physiological constraints can provide a unique opportunity...
How does cognition emerge from neural dynamics? The dominant hypothesis states that interactions among distributed brain regions through phase synchronization give basis for cognitive processing. Such phase-synchronized networks are transient and dynamic, established on the timescale of milliseconds in order to perform specific cognitive operations. But unlike resting-state networks, the...
NeuroimageMay 15, 2015Pigorini Andrea, Sarasso Simone, Proserpio Paola et al.
During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep (stage N3), when consciousness fades, cortico-cortical interactions are impaired while neurons are still active and reactive. Why is this? We compared cortico-cortical evoked-potentials recorded during wakefulness and NREM by means of time-frequency analysis and phase-locking measures in 8 epileptic patients undergoing intra-cerebral...
The neural basis and cognitive functions of various spontaneous thought processes, particularly mind-wandering, are increasingly being investigated. Although strong links have been drawn between the occurrence of spontaneous thought processes and activation in brain regions comprising the default mode network (DMN), spontaneous thought also appears to recruit other, non-DMN regions just as...
NeuroimageJanuary 3, 2015Anne Hauswald, Teresa Übelacker, Sabine Leske et al.
Experienced meditators are able to voluntarily modulate their state of consciousness and attention. In the present study, we took advantage of this ability and studied brain activity related to the shift of mental state. Electrophysiological activity, i.e. EEG, was recorded from 11 subjects with varying degrees of meditation experience during Zen meditation (a form of open monitoring...
NeuroimageNovember 15, 2014F Imamoglu, J Heinzle, A Imfeld et al.
Stimulus visibility is associated with neural signals in multiple brain regions, ranging from visual cortex to prefrontal regions. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate to which extent the perceived visibility of a "low-level" grating stimulus is reflected in the brain activity in high-level brain regions. Oriented grating stimuli were presented under varying...
During binocular rivalry, visual perception alternates spontaneously between two different monocular images. Such perceptual reversals are slowed or halted if stimuli are presented intermittently with inter-stimulus intervals larger than ~400 ms--a phenomenon called stabilization. Often, the neural correlates of reversal and stabilization are studied separately, and both phenomena in turn are...
A primary goal in cognitive neuroscience is to identify neural correlates of conscious perception (NCC). By contrasting conditions in which subjects are aware versus unaware of identical visual stimuli, a number of candidate NCCs have emerged; among them are induced gamma band activity in the EEG and the P3 event-related potential. In most previous studies, however, the critical stimuli were...
Humans spend much of their time engaged in stimulus-independent thoughts, colloquially known as "daydreaming" or "mind-wandering." A fundamental question concerns how awake, spontaneous brain activity represents the ongoing cognition of daydreaming versus unconscious processes characterized as "intrinsic." Since daydreaming involves brief cognitive events that spontaneously fluctuate, we tested...
With the advent of new analysis methods in neuroimaging that involve independent component analysis (ICA) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM), investigations have focused on measuring both the activity and connectivity of specific brain networks. In this study we combined DCM with spatial ICA to investigate network switching in the brain. Using time courses determined by ICA in our dynamic...
NeuroimageFebruary 1, 2014Martin Ulrich, Johannes Keller, Klaus Hoenig et al.
Flow refers to a positive, activity-associated, subjective experience under conditions of a perceived fit between skills and task demands. Using functional magnetic resonance perfusion imaging, we investigated the neural correlates of flow in a sample of 27 human subjects. Experimentally, in the flow condition participants worked on mental arithmetic tasks at challenging task difficulty which...
Recent advances in brain imaging have improved the measure of neural processes related to perceptual, cognitive and affective functions, yet the relation between brain activity and subjective experience remains poorly characterized. In part, it is a challenge to obtain reliable accounts of participant's experience in such studies. Here we addressed this limitation by utilizing experienced...