Report from a Tibetan Monastery: EEG neural correlates of concentrative and analytical meditation

Concentrative meditation produces more numerous and marked changes in EEG power than analytical meditation, mainly increasing theta, alpha, and beta frequency ranges. Twenty-three Tibetan Buddhist monks and geshes from Sera-Jey Monastery in India participated in ecological EEG recordings within the monastery, performing analytical or concentrative meditation sessions at their best after a 5-minute baseline. The collaboration with the monastic community helped identify expert meditators and clarify differences between meditation types, addressing the limitation that heterogeneity of practices often hinders generalization of meditation research.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The positive effects of meditation on human wellbeing are indisputable, ranging from emotion regulation improvement to stress reduction and present-moment awareness enhancement. Changes in brain activity regulate and support these phenomena. However, the heterogeneity of meditation practices and their cultural background, as well as their poor categorization limit the generalization of results to all types of meditation. Here, we took advantage of a collaboration with the very singular and precious community of the Monks and Geshes of the Tibetan University of Sera-Jey in India to study the neural correlates of the two main types of meditation recognized in Tibetan Buddhism, namely concentrative and analytical meditation. Twenty-three meditators with different levels of expertise underwent to an ecological (i.e., within the monastery) EEG acquisition consisting of an analytical and/or concentrative meditation session at “their best,” and with the only constraint of performing a 5-min-long baseline at the beginning of the session. Time-varying power-spectral-density estimates of each session were compared against the baseline (i.e., within session) and between conditions (i.e., analytical vs. concentrative). Our results showed that concentrative meditation elicited more numerous and marked changes in the EEG power compared to analytical meditation, and mainly in the form of an increase in the theta, alpha and beta frequency ranges. Moreover, the full immersion in the Monastery life allowed to share the results and discuss their interpretation with the best scholars of the Monastic University, ensuring the identification of the most expert meditators, as well as to highlight better the differences between the different types of meditation practiced by each of them.