Yoga is the most popular complementary health approach practiced by adults in the United States. It is an ancient mind and body practice with origins in Indian philosophy. Yoga combines physical postures, rhythmic breathing and meditative exercise to offer the practitioners a unique holistic mind-body experience. While the health benefits of physical exercise are well established, in recent...
bioRxivDecember 18, 2019JeYoung Jung, A. Bungert, R. Bowtell et al.
preprint
Stimulating the primary motor cortex (M1) using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) causes unique multisensory experience such as the targeted muscle activity, afferent/reafferent sensory feedback, tactile sensation over the scalp and ‘click’ sound. Although the human M1 has been intensively investigated using TMS, the experience of the M1 stimulation has not been elucidated at the whole...
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, is predominantly known for his conception of the id, ego and super-ego, representing a part of his meta-psychology of the psychic apparatus. Nowadays, with the advancements in technology and science, his meta-psychological structural model of the psyche might be either confirmed or denied by comparing the account of the psychic apparatus of the...
Understanding the relationship between brain structure, function and self-reports has hardly been addressed until now in meditation research. Here we demonstrate such relationship, using Mindfulness meditation (MM). MM aims to reduce thought-related processes and enhance bodily awareness, thereby reducing identification with thought content and deconstructing maladaptive self-schema. We thus...
Abstract Subanesthetic administration of ketamine is a pharmacological model to elicit positive and negative symptoms of psychosis in healthy volunteers. We used resting‐state pharmacological functional MRI (rsPhfMRI) to identify cerebral networks affected by ketamine and compared them to the functional connectivity (FC) in schizophrenia. Ketamine can produce sedation and we contrasted its...
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...
Prominent theories of consciousness emphasise different aspects of neurobiology, such as the integration and diversity of information processing within the brain. Here, we combine graph theory and dynamic functional connectivity to compare resting-state functional MRI data from awake volunteers, propofol-anaesthetised volunteers, and patients with disorders of consciousness, in order to...
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a stage of sleep that evolved in part to provide a privileged time in each day when the brain is disconnected from sensory input and freed of intentional, directed thought. The neurochemistry and neurophysiology of the brain during REM sleep is optimized for the exploration of normally ignored connections and associations within the brain’s vast repertoire of...
The psychedelic research renaissance is gaining traction. Preliminary clinical studies of the hallucinogenic fungi, psilocybin, with psychological support, have indicated improvements in mood, anxiety and quality of life. A seminal, open-label study demonstrated marked reductions in depression symptoms in participants with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). The associated neurobiological...
Research on yoga interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is plentiful, but none to date have studied the neural effects and benefits of a yogic practice on the default mode network (DMN) in PTSD.Common features of PTSD, such as mind-wandering and emotional dysregulation, are linked to altered neural functioning of the DMN due to initial trauma exposure.Symptom severity is also...