The meditative brain: State and trait changes in harmonic complexity for long-term mindfulness meditators
Selen Atasoy, Anira Escrichs, Eloise Stark, Kendra G. M. Terry, Estela Càmara, Ana Sanjuán, Shamil Chandaria, Gustavo Deco, Morten L. Kringelbach
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) November 17, 2023 preprint DOI: 10.1101/2023.11.16.567347 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Intervention | Mindfulness meditation |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Citations | 6 |
| Key points | The authors report that mindfulness meditation increases the power, energy, and complexity of the connectome harmonic repertoire and alters brain dynamics in a frequency-selective way. They state that these frequency-specific changes reverse during resting-state group comparisons, which they present as the first evidence of long-term trait changes, and they argue the results support the entropic brain hypothesis. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT Meditation is an ancient practice that is shown to yield benefits for cognition, emotion regulation and human flourishing. In the last two decades, there has been a surge of interest in extracting the neural correlates of meditation, in particular of mindfulness meditation. Yet, these efforts have been mostly limited to the analysis of certain regions or networks of interest and a clear understanding of meditation-induced changes in the whole-brain dynamics has been lacking. Here, we investigate meditation-induced changes in brain dynamics using a novel connectome-specific harmonic decomposition method. Specifically, utilising the connectome harmonics as brain states - elementary building blocks of complex brain dynamics - we study the immediate (state) and long-term (trait) effects of mindfulness meditation in terms of the energy, power and complexity of the repertoire of these harmonic brain states. Our results reveal increased power, energy and complexity of the connectome harmonic repertoire and demonstrate that meditation alters brain dynamics in a frequency selective manner. Remarkably, the frequency-specific alterations observed in meditation are reversed in resting state in group-wise comparison revealing for the first time the long-term (trait) changes induced by meditation. These findings also provide evidence for the entropic brain hypothesis in meditation and provide a novel understanding of state and trait changes in brain dynamics induced by mindfulness meditation revealing the unique connectome harmonic signatures of the meditative brain.