Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 22, 2020
Takuma Miyoshi, Kensuke Tanioka, Shoko Yamamoto et al.
This study examines the effects of focused-attention meditation on functional brain states in novice meditators. There are a number of feature metrics for functional brain states, such as functional connectivity, graph theoretical metrics, and amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF). It is necessary to choose appropriate metrics and also to specify the region of interests (ROIs) from a...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2020
Helen Y. Weng, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock, Frederick M Hecht et al.
9 citations
Meditation practices are often used to cultivate interoception or internally-oriented attention to bodily sensations, which may improve health via cognitive and emotional regulation of bodily signals. However, it remains unclear how meditation impacts internal attention (IA) states due to lack of measurement tools that can objectively assess mental states during meditation practice itself, and...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2020
correction
An erratum on: Hunt T and Schooler JW (2019) The Easy Part of the Hard Problem: A Resonance Theory of Consciousness. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 13:378. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00378Due to a production error, block quotes were formatted as normal text throughout the article.The publisher apologizes for this mistake. The original version of this article has been updated.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 18, 2019
Qin Xiao, Xing‐Rong Zhao, Guoli Bi et al.
Mindfulness is described as the non-judgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment. The sustained practice of mindfulness may also have beneficial effects on an individual’s well-being. For instance, mindfulness meditation is an effective approach for improving emotion regulation. Specifically, the early stage of mindfulness meditation training enhances emotional monitoring systems...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 15, 2019
Mariza van Wyk, Mark Solms, Gosia Lipinska
37 citations
Background: Dreaming is a universal experience, yet there is considerable inter-individual variability in dream recall frequency (DRF). One dominant model, the ‘arousal-retrieval’ model, posits that intra-sleep wakefulness is required for dream traces to be encoded into long-term storage, essentially proposing that a better memory for dreams underlie increased DRF. A recent study utilizing...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
September 4, 2019
E. Nyhus, W. Engel, Tomas Donatelli Pitfield et al.
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve episodic memory and increase theta oscillations which are known to play a role in episodic memory retrieval. The present study examined the effect of mindfulness meditation on episodic memory retrieval and theta oscillations. Using a longitudinal design, subjects in the mindfulness meditation experimental group who underwent 4 weeks of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 27, 2019
Qin Zhang, Zheng Wang, Xinqiang Wang et al.
This study examined mood enhancement effects from 4-week focusing attention (FA) meditation and 4-week open monitoring (OM) meditation in an 8-week mindfulness training program designed for ordinary individuals. Forty participants were randomly assigned to a training group or a control group. All participants were asked to perform cognitive tasks and subjective scale tests at three time points...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
April 12, 2019
Tracie D. Parkinson, J. Kornelsen, Stephen D. Smith
Mindfulness has been described as an orienting of attention to the present moment, with openness and compassion. Individuals displaying high trait mindfulness exhibit this tendency as a more permanent personality attribute. Given the numerous physical and mental health benefits associated with mindfulness, there is a great interest in understanding the neural substrates of this trait. The...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
March 26, 2019
Seoyeon Kwak, Tae Young Lee, W. Jung et al.
While recent studies have explored the maintenance of the effect of meditation on stress resilience, the underlying neural mechanisms have not yet been investigated. The present study conducted a highly controlled residential study of a 4-day meditation intervention to investigate the brain functional changes and long-term effects of meditation on mindfulness and resilience. Thirty participants...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2019
Ravinder Jerath, Connor Beveridge, Michael Jensen
17 citations
Bioelectric oscillations occur throughout the nervous system of nearly all animals, revealed to play an important role in various aspects of cognitive activity such as information processing and feature binding. Modern research into this dynamic and intrinsic bioelectric activity of neural cells continues to raise questions regarding their role in consciousness and cognition. In this...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2019
Paul Dennison
1 citation
The "neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC) is a familiar topic in neuroscience, overlapping with research on the brain's "default mode network." Task-based studies of NCC by their nature recruit one part of the cortical network to study another, and are therefore both limited and compromised in what they can reveal about consciousness itself. The form of consciousness explored in such...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2019
Tam Hunt, Jonathan W. Schooler
Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense seems to have an integral relationship with consciousness itself. One of the possible "neural correlates of consciousness" in mammalian brains is a specific combination of gamma, beta and theta electrical synchrony. More broadly, we see similar kinds of resonance patterns in living and non-living...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
November 27, 2018
Marcel Prestel, Paul Steinfath, Michael Tremmel et al.
24 citations
Goal: We aimed to identify electroencephalographic (EEG) signal fluctuations within independent components (ICs) that correlate to spontaneous blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activity in regions of the default mode network (DMN) during eyes-closed resting state. Methods: We analyzed simultaneously acquired EEG and fMRI eyes-closed resting state data in a convenience sample of 30...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
November 13, 2018
Andressa A Magalhaes, L. Oliveira, M. Pereira et al.
Background: Despite several attempts to review and explain how meditation alters the brain and facilitates emotion regulation, the extent to which meditation and emotion regulation strategies share the same neural mechanisms remains unclear. Objective: We aim to understand the influence of meditation on the neural processing of negative emotional stimuli in participants who underwent meditation...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 9, 2018
Roderik J S Gerritsen, G. Band
327 citations
Contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga, are increasingly popular among the general public and as topics of research. Beneficial effects associated with these practices have been found on physical health, mental health and cognitive performance. However, studies and theories that clarify the underlying mechanisms are lacking or scarce. This theoretical review aims to address and...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 4, 2018
Andrea Scalabrini, Clara Mucci, Georg Northoff
58 citations
The concept and the assessment of personality have been extensively discussed in psychoanalysis and in clinical psychology over the years. Nowadays there is large consensus in considering the constructs of the self and relatedness as central criterions to assess the personality and its disturbances. However, the relation between the psychological organization of personality, the construct of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
September 4, 2018
Lorenzo Moccia, Marianna Mazza, Marco Di Nicola et al.
Pleasure is more than a mere sensory event, but rather it can be conceptualized as a complex, multiform experience involving memory, motivation, homeostasis, and, sometimes, negative affects. According to Freud, affect is a perceptual modality that registers the internal drive state of the subject rather than the objective experience of the external world, and the quality of this perceptual...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
August 6, 2018
Catherine J. Norris, Daniel Creem, R. Hendler et al.
Past research has found that mindfulness meditation training improves executive attention. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have indicated that this effect could be driven by more efficient allocation of resources on demanding attentional tasks, such as the Flanker Task and the Attention Network Test (ANT). However, it is not clear whether these changes depend on long-term practice. In two...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
August 2, 2018
Stefanie Blain-Moraes, Eric Racine, George A. Mashour
Current paradigms in Western medicine often fail to differentiate clearly between consciousness, responsiveness and personhood. The growing number of individuals who exist with sustainable cardiopulmonary systems but who are behaviorally unresponsive has prompted a cultural reconsideration of the relationship between the presence of consciousness and what it means to be a person. This article...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 11, 2018
Elisa H. Kozasa, Joana B Balardin, João R. Sato et al.
Meditation as a cognitive enhancement technique is of growing interest in the field of health and research on brain function. The Stroop Word-Color Task (SWCT) has been adapted for neuroimaging studies as an interesting paradigm for the understanding of cognitive control mechanisms. Performance in the SWCT requires both attention and impulse control, which is trained in meditation practices. We...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
February 16, 2018
Hyoungkyu Kim, Anthony G. Hudetz, Joseph W Y Lee et al.
The integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a quantitative measure, denoted as Φ, of the amount of integrated information in a physical system, which is postulated to have an identity relationship with consciousness. IIT predicts that the value of Φ estimated from brain activities represents the level of consciousness across phylogeny and functional states. Practical limitations, such as...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Brice Martin, Nicolas Franck, Michel Cermolacce et al.
32 citations
For years, phenomenological psychiatry has proposed that distortions of the temporal structure of consciousness contribute to the abnormal experiences described before schizophrenia emerges, and may relate to basic disturbances in consciousness of the self. However, considering that temporality refers mainly to an implicit aspect of our relationship with the world, disturbances in the temporal...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Eddy J Davelaar, Joe M Barnby, Soma Almasi et al.
29 citations
In a neurofeedback paradigm, trainees learn to willfully control their brain dynamics. How this is realized remains an open question. We evaluate the hypothesis that learning success is associated with a specific phenomenology. To address this proposal, we combined quantitative and qualitative analyses of a short neurofeedback training (NFT) session during which participants enhanced...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Gonzalo Boncompte, Diego Cosmelli
The nature of the proper neural signature of conscious perception remains a topic of active debate. Theoretical support from integrative theories of consciousness is consistent with such signature being P3b, one of the main candidates in the literature. Recent work has also put forward a mid-latency and more localized component, the Visual Awareness Negativity (VAN), as a proper Neural...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Antonio Alcaro, Stefano Carta
Recent neuro-psychoanalytic literature has emphasized the view that our subjective identity rests on ancient subcortical neuro-psychic processes expressing unthinking forms of experience, which are "affectively intense without being known" (Solms and Panksepp, 2012). Devoid of internal representations, the emotional states of our "core-Self" (Panksepp, 1998b) are entirely "projected" towards...