The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation

What happens to your brain when you meditate.

Mindfulness meditation is often described as non-judgemental attention to present moment experiences. Devotees of mindfulness meditation — including myself — are well-versed in the many benefits of the practice.

Benefits include the following:

• Relaxation
• Enhanced self-awareness
• Improved health and well-being
• Positive shifts in mood
• More focused attention

The Positive Health Benefits

Mindfulness meditation has a variety of positive subjective health benefits, as mentioned above. Although these positive benefits can vary between individuals, there is strong scientific evidence to date coming from analyses of data pooled from multiple studies — meta-analysis reviews.

One meta-analysis review of 47 trials with 3515 participants found moderate evidence in people participating in mindfulness meditation experiencing less pain, depression, and anxiety

Another meta-analysis of 163 studies found evidence regarding reduced negative neuroticism and emotions associated with the practice of meditation. Moreover, the impact of meditation was comparable to the impact of psychotherapy and behavioral treatments on patients.

The expanding scientific evidence that meditation has wide-ranging and measurable effects on various aspects of (mental) health results in more and more people becoming interested in mindfulness meditation.

Now, neuroscientists are becoming interested in investigating and explaining the biological mechanisms in the brain that underlie these positive mental health effects.

Evidence that Mindfulness Meditation Affects the Brain

An extensive review was published in the top-flight journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience took a look at the current state of neuroscience research on mindfulness meditation.

The authors of the review, “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation” stated:

“Although meditation research is still in its infancy, a number of studies have investigated changes in brain activation at rest and during specific tasks that are associated with the practice of, or that follow, training in mindfulness meditation. There is emerging evidence that mindfulness meditation might cause neuroplastic changes in the structure and function of brain regions involved in regulation of attention, emotion and self-awareness.”

The authors included Yi-Yuan Tang, a mind-body medicine researcher at the Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, who also practices Chinese medicine; Britta Holzel, a neuroscientist and yoga teacher at the Department of Neuroradiology, Technical University of Munich; and Michael Posner, a psychologist at the University of Oregon.

Changes in Brain Structure

In the last decade, various neuroimaging techniques have been implemented to investigate if the practice of mindfulness meditation alters brain structures.

Well, it does.

One meta-analysis gathered data from 21 neuroimaging studies examining the brains of roughly 300 experienced meditation practitioners. The researchers found that eight brain regions were consistently altered in experienced meditators.

The eight brain regions included the following:

• Anterior cingulate cortex and mid-cingulate cortex: Cortical regions involved in self-regulation, emotional regulation, attention, and self-control.
• Hippocampus: A pair of subcortical structures involved in memory formation and facilitating emotional responses.
• Sensory cortices and insular cortex: The main cortical hubs for processing tactile information such as touch, pain, conscious proprioception, and body awareness.
• Superior longitudinal fasciculus and corpus callosum: Subcortical white matter tracts that communicate within and between brain hemispheres.
• Rostrolateral prefrontal cortex: A region associated with meta-awareness (awareness of how you think), introspection, and processing of complex, abstract information.

Changes in brain structures were primarily seen in white matter fiber density, the thickness of brain tissue (indicating a greater number of neurons, glia, or fibers in a given region), the density of brain tissue, and cortical surface area.

The effect of meditation on these particular brain structures appeared to be about “medium” in magnitude — effect sizes that are comparable to the roughly “medium” effects of many other psychological, behavioral, and educational interventions.

The authors of this analysis suggested that the effects of meditation may involve multiple aspects of brain function and large-scale brain networks. This suggestion was made because many important brain regions were found to be involved in mindfulness meditation concerning the cerebral cortex, brain stem, cerebellum, and subcortical white and grey matter.

Alternating Patterns of Brain Activity

Not only changes in brain structure, but also changes in brain activation patterns can be measured in brain-imaging studies. Using those studies, Tang, Holzel, and Posner also investigated whether mindfulness meditation exerts its effects via altered activation of brain regions involved with attention, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.

One hypothesis regarding emotional regulation stated:

“The hypothesis that drives many of these studies is that mindful emotion regulation works by strengthening prefrontal cognitive control mechanisms and thus downregulates activity in regions relevant to affect processing, such as the amygdala.’’

Buddhist philosophy teaches that identification with the static concept of “self” causes psychological distress. Dis-identification from such a static self-concept results in the freedom to experience a more genuine way of being.

During mindfulness meditation, dis-identification can be enhanced through meta-awareness — making awareness itself an object of attention — facilitating a detachment from identification with the self as a static entity.

This statement is supported by an fMRI study that showed little activity in default mode network — a brain region involved in self-referential processing — in meditators compared to controls across different types of meditation. This has been interpreted as indicating diminished self-referential processing.

Moreover, studies of mindfulness in experienced meditators have shown that training is associated with higher self-esteem, higher acceptance of oneself, and more positive self-representation.

However, multiple studies show the insular is strongly activated during meditation. This is thought to represent amplified awareness of the present moment experience.

The authors stated:

“This shift in self-awareness is one of the major active mechanisms of the beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation.”

Future Questions

It should be pointed out that mindfulness meditation research is a young field and a lot of peer-reviewed studies are needed to support the above-mentioned hypothesis, despite the enthusiastic reporting of positive findings on the effects of meditation on the brain.

However, I have high expectations of the emerging new paradigm called contemplative neuroscience — the field in which neuroscience tools, like fMRI, are used to study the effects of meditation — in the near future.

Tang, Holzel, and Posner concluded:

“… the practice of mindfulness meditation might be promising for the treatment of clinical disorders and might facilitate the cultivation of a healthy mind and increased well-being.”

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