Folk Who Meditate Decrease Mind Wandering

"[T]he hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect," says Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University.

The Yale experienced meditator work, in which i am collaborating and have been a subject, has been introduced earlier in this blog. The much anticipated paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has just issued last Monday. In discussions w/Jud last Friday, he indicated that 22 national and international news media sources have already contacted him for interviews, statements, etc. Surprisingly, as we saw for this work when it appeared in Forbes.com (77,000 hits - about 40X a typical forbes.com article), this work has captured major interest from folk who would not normally be expected to pay attention to scientific studies on meditation.

The paper demonstrated that folk who are experienced meditators are able to decrease activity in areas of the brain associated with daydreaming, or mind-wandering, and with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. "Less mind wandering is associated with increased happiness levels", says Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, and lead investigator on this work, who believes understanding how meditation works may aid investigations into a host of diseases.
“Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit smoking, cope with cancer, and even prevent psoriasis,” Brewer says.

In this study, Jud and his research team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on both experienced (10,000 hrs+ meditation) and novice meditators as they practiced three different meditation techniques. These meditation techniques were very familiar to the experienced meditators, who were all from one particular tradition. Experienced meditators had decreased activity in areas of the brain called the default mode network, which has been implicated in lapses of attention and disorders such as anxiety, attention deficit, and hyperactivity disorder, and even the buildup of beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease.

The decrease in activity in this network, consisting of the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, was seen in experienced meditators regardless of the type of meditation they were doing.

The scans also showed that when the default mode network was active, brain regions associated with self-monitoring and cognitive control, the anterior cingulate cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex, were increasingly co-activated in experienced meditators but not novices, possibly indicating that meditators are constantly monitoring and suppressing the emergence of “me” thoughts, or mind-wandering. In pathological forms, these states are associated with diseases such as autism and schizophrenia.

This decreased activity in the typical default mode network centers by the meditators occured both during meditation, and also when just resting—not doing anything in particular. This indicates that meditators have developed a new default mode in which there is more present-centered, and less self-centered, awareness.

“Meditation’s ability to help people stay in the moment has been part of philosophical and contemplative practices for thousands of years,” Brewer says.

“Conversely, the hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect. This gives us some nice cues as to the neural mechanisms of how it might be working clinically.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Veterans Affairs New England Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, and a Yale Clinical and Translational Science Award grant from the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health.

There is another article which has been submitted which focuses on watching the deactivation of the default mode network in real time, in a new type of fMRI called, not surprisingly, a "real time - fMRI" (rt-fMRI), as one meditates or not, and whether one is an experienced meditator or not.