Scientific Reports
April 16, 2020
Sage K. Iwamoto, Marcus Alexander, Mark Torres et al.
Clinical evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety, depression, and stress, and improves emotion regulation due to modulation of activity in neural substrates linked to the regulation of emotions and social preferences. However, less was known about whether mindfulness meditation might alter pro-social behavior. Here we examined whether mindfulness meditation activates human...
Scientific Reports
April 8, 2020
Rafael González-Moret, Ausiàs Cebolla, X. Cortés et al.
Mindfulness-based interventions have shown some efficacy in decreasing stress levels and improving quality of life. However, so far, only a few studies have studied this type of intervention among patients with inflammatory bowel disease and none of them have studied their effects on inflammatory biomarkers. This current study was a two-armed, single-centre, randomised (2:1 ratio) controlled...
Scientific Reports
March 5, 2020
José Carlos Bouso, Daniel Jiménez‐garrido, María de Lourdes Gómez-sousa et al.
111 citations
Abstract Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic decoction used as a traditional medicine in several Amazonian regions. The ritualistic use of ayahuasca has spread throughout many countries, making it necessary to study its risks and benefits. Two sub-studies were designed for this investigation. In sub-study 1, a psychiatric interview and a battery of questionnaires were administered to subjects (n =...
Scientific Reports
February 25, 2020
Deniz Vatansever, Manuel S. Schröter, Ram Adapa et al.
Patterns of functional interactions across distributed brain regions are suggested to provide a scaffold for the conscious processing of information, with marked topological alterations observed in loss of consciousness. However, establishing a firm link between macro-scale brain network organisation and conscious cognition requires direct investigations into neuropsychologically-relevant...
Scientific Reports
February 11, 2020
Ji-Min Lee, Pil-Jong Kim, Hong-Gee Kim et al.
Nitrous oxide, the least potent inhalation anesthetic, is widely used for conscious sedation. Recently, it has been reported that the occurrence of anesthetic-induced loss of consciousness decreases the interconnection between brain regions, resulting in brain network changes. However, few studies have investigated these changes in conscious sedation using nitrous oxide. Therefore, the present...
Scientific Reports
February 10, 2020
Frederick S. Barrett, Manoj K. Doss, Nathan D. Sepeda et al.
375 citations
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic compound that may have efficacy for the treatment of mood and substance use disorders. Acute psilocybin effects include reduced negative mood, increased positive mood, and reduced amygdala response to negative affective stimuli. However, no study has investigated the long-term, enduring impact of psilocybin on negative affect and associated brain function....
Scientific Reports
January 23, 2020
Thomas F. Varley, Andrea I. Luppi, Ioannis Pappas et al.
86 citations
The brain is possibly the most complex system known to mankind, and its complexity has been called upon to explain the emergence of consciousness. However, complexity has been defined in many ways by multiple different fields: here, we investigate measures of algorithmic and process complexity in both the temporal and topological domains, testing them on functional MRI BOLD signal data obtained...
Scientific Reports
2020
Juliana Yordanova, Vasil Kolev, Federica Mauro et al.
42 citations
Meditation has been integrated into different therapeutic interventions. To inform the evidence-based selection of specific meditation types it is crucial to understand the neural processes associated with different meditation practices. Here we explore commonalities and differences in electroencephalographic oscillatory spatial synchronisation patterns across three important meditation types....
Scientific Reports
2020
Shogo Kajimura, Naoki Masuda, Johnny King L. Lau et al.
29 citations
Research has shown that focused attention meditation not only improves our cognitive and motivational functioning (e.g., attention, mental health), it influences the way our brain networks [e.g., default mode network (DMN), fronto-parietal network (FPN), and sensory-motor network (SMN)] function and operate. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the possibility that meditation...
Scientific Reports
November 22, 2019
Isaac N Treves, Lawrence Y. Tello, Richard J. Davidson et al.
118 citations
Abstract Although awareness of bodily sensations is a common mindfulness meditation technique, studies assessing the relationship between mindfulness and body awareness have provided mixed results. The current study sought to meta-analytically examine the relationship between mindfulness operationalized as a dispositional trait or a construct trained through short- (i.e., randomized controlled...
Scientific Reports
November 7, 2019
Meichao Zhang, Nicola Savill, Daniel S. Margulies et al.
48 citations
Often, as we read, we find ourselves thinking about something other than the text; this tendency to mind-wander is linked to poor comprehension and reduced subsequent memory for texts. Contemporary accounts argue that periods of off-task thought are related to the tendency for attention to be decoupled from external input. We used fMRI to understand the neural processes that underpin this...
Scientific Reports
October 30, 2019
Jane Plailly, Manon Villalba, Raphael Vallat et al.
42 citations
Abstract The question of a possible link between dream content and memory consolidation remains open. After a comprehensive review of the literature, we present novel findings from an experiment testing whether the incorporation of recently learned stimuli into dream reports is associated with improved post-sleep memory performance. Thirty-two high dream recallers freely explored new...
Scientific Reports
October 14, 2019
Eugénie Samson-Daoust, Sarah-Hélène Julien, Dominic Beaulieu-Prévost et al.
Although emotions are reported in a large majority of dreams, little is known about the factors that account for night-to-night and person-to-person variations in people's experience of dream affect. We investigated the relationship between waking trait and state variables and dream affect by testing multilevel models intended to predict the affective valence of people's everyday dreams....
Scientific Reports
October 3, 2019
Mario de la Fuente Revenga, Jong M. Shin, Hiba Vohra et al.
57 citations
Abstract Head-twitch behavior (HTR) is the behavioral signature of psychedelic drugs upon stimulation of the serotonin 5-HT 2A receptor (5-HT 2A R) in rodents. Following the previous report of a semi-automated detection of HTR based on the dynamics of mouse’s head movement, here we present a system for the identification of individual HTR events in a fully automated fashion. The validity of...
Scientific Reports
October 1, 2019
Charlotte Martial, Armand Mensen, Vanessa Charland-Verville et al.
36 citations
The neurobiological basis of near-death experiences (NDEs) is unknown, but a few studies attempted to investigate it by reproducing in laboratory settings phenomenological experiences that seem to closely resemble NDEs. So far, no study has induced NDE-like features via hypnotic modulation while simultaneously measuring changes in brain activity using high-density EEG. Five volunteers who...
Scientific Reports
September 13, 2019
Catherine I. Andreu, Ismael Palacios, Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz et al.
Response inhibition - the ability to suppress inappropriate thoughts and actions - is a fundamental aspect of cognitive control. Recent research suggests that mental training by meditation may improve cognitive control. Yet, it is still unclear if and how, at the neural level, long-term meditation practice may affect (emotional) response inhibition. The present study aimed to address this...
Scientific Reports
September 11, 2019
Jonathan Fine, Rachel M. Lackner, Ram Samudrala et al.
33 citations
We have developed the Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform to infer homology of drug behaviour at a proteomic level by constructing and analysing structural compound-proteome interaction signatures of 3,733 compounds with 48,278 proteins in a shotgun manner. We applied the CANDO platform to predict putative therapeutic properties of 428 psychoactive compounds that...
Scientific Reports
August 19, 2019
Cole Korponay, Daniela Dentico, Tammi R. A. Kral et al.
49 citations
Interest has grown in using mindfulness meditation to treat conditions featuring excessive impulsivity. However, while prior studies find that mindfulness practice can improve attention, it remains unclear whether it improves other cognitive faculties whose deficiency can contribute to impulsivity. Here, an eight-week mindfulness intervention did not reduce impulsivity on the go/no-go task or...
Scientific Reports
July 29, 2019
Chuan-Chih Yang, Alfonso Barrós‐loscertales, Meng Li et al.
Increasing neuroimaging evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation expertise is related to different functional and structural configurations of the default mode network (DMN), the salience network (SN) and the executive network at rest. However, longitudinal studies observing resting network plasticity effects in brains of novices who started to practice meditation are scarce and generally...
Scientific Reports
June 27, 2019
Jon G Dean, Tiecheng Liu, Sean Huff et al.
111 citations
N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic compound identified endogenously in mammals, is biosynthesized by aromatic-L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) and indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase (INMT). Whether DMT is biosynthesized in the mammalian brain is unknown. We investigated brain expression of INMT transcript in rats and humans, co-expression of INMT and AADC mRNA in rat brain and...
Scientific Reports
June 20, 2019
Laura Sophie Imperatori, Monica Betta, Luca Cecchetti et al.
The weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and the weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) represent two robust and widely used methods for MEG/EEG functional connectivity estimation. Interestingly, both methods have been shown to detect relative alterations of brain functional connectivity in conditions associated with changes in the level of consciousness, such as following severe brain injury...
Scientific Reports
March 26, 2019
Minji Lee, Benjamin Baird, Olivia Gosseries et al.
98 citations
The neuronal connectivity patterns that differentiate consciousness from unconsciousness remain unclear. Previous studies have demonstrated that effective connectivity, as assessed by transcranial magnetic stimulation combined with electroencephalography (TMS-EEG), breaks down during the loss of consciousness. This study investigated changes in EEG connectivity associated with consciousness...
Scientific Reports
March 20, 2019
Chiara F Tagliabue, D. Veniero, C. Benwell et al.
How neural representations of low-level visual information are accessed by higher-order processes to inform decisions and give rise to conscious experience is a longstanding question. Research on perceptual decision making has revealed a late event-related EEG potential (the Centro-Parietal Positivity, CPP) to be a correlate of the accumulation of sensory evidence. We tested how this evidence...
Scientific Reports
March 13, 2019
Emily Ridge, Sudhan Pachhain, S. Choudhury et al.
25 citations
Hyperthermia induced by 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) can be life-threatening. Here, we investigate the role of the gut microbiome and TGR5 bile acid receptors in MDMA-mediated hyperthermia. Fourteen days prior to treatment with MDMA, male Sprague-Dawley rats were provided water or water treated with antibiotics. Animals that had received antibiotics displayed a reduction in gut...
Scientific Reports
March 12, 2019
Junling Gao, Hang Kin Leung, Bonnie Wai Yan Wu et al.
Despite extensive research on various types of meditation, research on the neural correlates of religious chanting is in a nascent stage. Using multi-modal electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods, we illustrate that during religious chanting, the posterior cingulate cortex shows the largest decrease in eigenvector centrality, potentially due to regional endogenous generation of delta...