Breakdown of Long-Range Correlations in Heart Rate Fluctuations During Meditation
Nikitas Papasimakis, Fotini Pallikari
arXiv Preprint Archive January 27, 2009 preprint
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational study |
|---|---|
| Intervention | Meditation |
| Topics | Meditation |
| Keywords | Q-bio.to Biophysics physics.bio-ph Heartbeat dynamics Data analysis physics.data-an |
| Key findings | Meditation induces a significant loss of complexity in heart rate variability at larger time scales, suggesting a change in physiological mechanisms. |
Abstract
The average wavelet coefficient method is applied to investigate the scaling features of heart rate variability during meditation, a state of induced mental relaxation. While periodicity dominates the behavior of the heart rate time series at short intervals, the meditation induced correlations in the signal become significantly weaker at longer time scales. Further study of these correlations by means of an entropy analysis in the natural time domain reveals that the induced mental relaxation introduces substantial loss of complexity at larger scales, which indicates a change in the physiological mechanisms involved.