fMRI Scanning @ Yale on Meditation and Default Mode Network

i just completed extensive fMRI scanning @ Yale University on June 15 @ the Yale Medical School scanning center. Yale has five fMRI scanners for folk; 1.5 T(esla), 3.0T, 2 @ 5.0 T and a 7T. The higher the Tesla rating, the higher the magnetic strength, and generally, the higher the resolution.

Jud(son) Brewer, M.D., Ph.D. is running an extensive study on different forms of meditation and on "selfing", or the presence of a doer/I, during meditation. There is also a focus on the "default mode network". The "default mode" is basically what your mind reverts to when you aren't doing something; for most folk, this is a narrative of "blah-blah" in which virtually every thought has an I/me/my in it.

This study was one of the first to focus on experienced meditators, who had an average experience level over 10 years and an average of 10,000 hours of meditation. (i have done about 3X that.)

The experimental protocol was to do three standard "mindfulness meditation" approaches, a) concentration on the breath, b) loving-kindness (metta) and c) choiceless awareness. Each meditation was done twice for 4.5 minutes following a 30 second recorded instruction. This took about an hour.

A second protocol was done with "real time fMRI" (rt-fMRI) in one of the few such facilities on the NA continent. rt-fMRI means that one particular "selfing" center was focused on and its activity could be watched continuously throughout the run on a monitor that you could see. There were six runs with about a minute between them. The focus of the run was to be on a) above, i.e. concentration on the breath. This took about an hour as well.

This was followed by two hours of computer based testing outside of the fMRI w/standard protocols.

The rt-fMRI was particularly fascinating as you could watch "selfing" manifest or not.

There are some really important findings emerging from this study with regard to the default mode network, differences w/experienced meditators, and the "selfing" observations in the rt-fMRI. Although i have been deeply involved in discussions and analysis with Dr. Brewer, i am not at liberty to discuss my results, as the paper has not yet been published, although some results were presented this week in Canada @ the Imaging Conference.

i will keep you posted as the results become available to be made public.