Previous Article |
Table of Contents
| Next Article 
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / NEUROSCIENCE
Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners
*W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, Medical College of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53226; Department of Radiology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506; and Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904
Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved May 29, 2007 (received for review August 3, 2006)
Meditation refers to a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. One of the most basic forms of meditation is concentration meditation, in which sustained attention is focused on an object such as a small visual stimulus or the breath. In age-matched participants, using functional MRI, we found that activation in a network of brain regions typically involved in sustained attention showed an inverted u-shaped curve in which expert meditators (EMs) with an average of 19,000 h of practice had more activation than novices, but EMs with an average of 44,000 h had less activation. In response to distracter sounds used to probe the meditation, EMs vs. novices had less brain activation in regions related to discursive thoughts and emotions and more activation in regions related to response inhibition and attention. Correlation with hours of practice suggests possible plasticity in these mechanisms.
attention | frontal | parietal | response inhibition
Author contributions: J.A.B.-L. and A.L. contributed equally to this work; A.L., H.S.S., and R.J.D. designed research; J.A.B.-L., A.L., and R.J.D. performed research; J.A.B.-L., A.L., and D.B.L. analyzed data; and J.A.B.-L. and R.J.D. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0606552104/DC1.
To whom correspondence should be addressed at: W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705. E-mail: rjdavids{at}wisc.edu
© 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles in HighWire Press-hosted journals:
|
|
 |
|
  E. Baron Short, S. Kose, Q. Mu, J. Borckardt, A. Newberg, M. S. George, and F. A. Kozel Regional Brain Activation During Meditation Shows Time and Practice Effects: An Exploratory FMRI Study{dagger} Evid. Based Complement. Altern. Med., October 27, 2007; (2007) nem163v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 Y.-Y. Tang, Y. Ma, J. Wang, Y. Fan, S. Feng, Q. Lu, Q. Yu, D. Sui, M. K. Rothbart, M. Fan, et al. Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation PNAS, October 23, 2007; 104(43): 17152 - 17156. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
