Edited by Marcus E. Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, and approved October 4, 2011 (received for review July 22, 2011)
Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that “living in the moment” increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive controls as they performed several different meditations (Concentration, Loving-Kindness, Choiceless Awareness). We found that the main nodes of the default-mode network (medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices) were relatively deactivated in experienced meditators across all meditation types. Furthermore, functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger coupling in experienced meditators between the posterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (regions previously implicated in self-monitoring and cognitive control), both at baseline and during meditation. Our findings demonstrate differences in the default-mode network that are consistent with decreased mind-wandering. As such, these provide a unique understanding of possible neural mechanisms of meditation.
Author contributions: J.A.B., P.D.W., J.R.G., and H.K. designed research; J.A.B. performed research; P.D.W. and H.K. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; J.A.B., P.D.W., J.R.G., Y.-Y.T., J.W., and H.K. analyzed data; and J.A.B., P.D.W., J.R.G., Y.-Y.T., J.W., and H.K. 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/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1112029108/-/DCSupplemental.
