A brief behavior and imaging research review on meditation
A brief behavior and imaging research review on meditation
Abstract
Originated from Buddhism, developed in psychology, meditation has become a more a more popular topic among researchers from different domain. Here we briefly covered the topic of the origin, the meaning, the up-to-day results of how meditation affect human brain. Various behavioral and imaging researches are included.
Keywords
Meditation, attention, brain, gray matter, fMRI
Background
Modern technology and socio-economic development have provided convenience and development for individuals, while at the same time it brought more challenges to people's work and life. Under heavy work and life pressures, people focus less and do not enjoy the moment. People in real world appear to be more anxious, and restless. In college, students spend more and more time immersed in mobile phones, Internet, TV and portable games, and lack the time to spend with themselves. How to make modern people better focus on the moment, feel the moment, and enjoy the moment has become an important issue worthy of our attention. Originated in Buddhism and developed in psychology, meditation is of great significance and inspiration for us to adopt what kind of psychological attitude and behavior to actively respond to various challenges in the information age. In fact, as a philosophical concept of treating the real world, meditation has important implications for many fields. It is also the deep call of human self-awareness, integration and self-development, and it can better eliminate the urgent need for human survival anxiety.
Erich Fromm in the book "The nature of human" once wrote, "on one hand the development of highly technical material means to meet today's contradictory history , on the other hand it can not afford to put these techniques designed to safeguard the peace and happiness of the people. "The development of modern science and technology, economy and politics, and the development of transportation, media, and consulting not only provide new ways and space for individual survival and development, but also bring new opportunities for individual work, life, and learning. Opportunities and Challenges. Contrary to the expansion of our living space, we have more anxiety and tension in our hearts, and deeper depression and anxiety. Some experts believe that human beings are entering an era of national anxiety.
Anxiety is the feature in the era. Although information technology has brought convenience to people , at the same time, information technology has also changed people's survival concepts, think modes and behavior habits. The "Online" culture is intruding on people's lives, which is reflected not only in the decadence of college students, the loss of meaning in the world, the disconnection of moral knowledge, but also in the sluggish, unplanned, passionless. Studies have shown that the best way to destroy a child is to give him a cell phone. No matter adults or children, all of them are using new swiping the screen day by day, browsing meaningless messages, watching videos or playing games. Once they leave their phones, they will feel a sense of emptiness. However, the information medium is like a candy for the eyes, and it only brings temporary pleasure. We could have used this time to carry out more meaningful activities to enrich our lives. In the Internet era, people's attention is attracted by various network information, and information is over-consumed. In this state, people are tired of coping, exhausted, and restless.
Meditation can teach people to deal with various stressful situations and survival anxiety in social life with a peaceful, open and accepting attitude, so as to provide a way for those who are anxious inside and pursuing a deeper meaning of existence. In recent years, meditation practice has been highly sought after in the Western world, and has gradually developed a variety of physical and mental training systems, which are widely used in psychology, medicine, behavioral science, psychiatry, health science, cognitive neuroscience, and sports. Various fields such as science and pedagogy are combined with topics such as mental health, physical health, decompression of life, meditation, spirituality, healing, and creativity. Meditation helps to improve emotional control, psychological resilience and resilience through training interventions, so as to get rid of anxiety and restlessness, and make life happier, happier, and better.
The history of meditation
Meditation, which originated from Buddhist Zen, is the essence of Buddhist. The mindfulness, or righteousness, or meditation, of Buddhism's "eightfold path" is one of the methods of precepts, fixation, and wisdom. Regarding the scientific concept of meditation, many scholars hold different views. Some people think that the stimulus at this moment or what is happening to the individual forms an ideology of continuous perception. Some people define it as a flexible state of mind, which can help people create new categories, open up, accept new information, and make people look at problems from different perspectives. Some definition of meditation developed in practice for many years, with the experience of conscious awareness of attention to the current moment, and without a judge's attention by one moment in the emergence of expansion. The definition emphasizes a unique way of attention: conscious present. In this way, individuals are trained to concentrate on specific things. Other researchers have proposed four-factor definitions of meditation. As an intervention technique, meditation pays attention to the current experience with an attitude of openness and acceptance, and adjusts the corresponding attention. Patanjali proposed that the purpose of meditation is to reduce thoughts and eventually reach a state of no consciousness. This state is a state in which a person has a keen perception but no thought. Therefore, it is described as a state without any thought content. The state of pure attention, this state of "no attention content" seems to have a subjective connection with the feeling of positive emotions, which is described in Sanskrit as "Sat Chit Ananda" state, which means a state of pure attention and happiness. There are different types of meditation, which are divided into focused meditation and mindfulness meditation according to whether the meditator is paying attention or not; there are also scholars, according to them, meditation is divided into original meditation, Tai Chi, Vipassana meditation, Tibetan meditation.
In recent years, meditation has been widely used in various fields such as medicine, psychology, education, sports, and military, showing different values. Related research has shown that meditation can help relieve pain and reduce anxiety in patients; improve mood and happiness; Cope with stress and improve work efficiency; reduce mental migration, improve attention; enhance psychological resilience, improve psychological quality, etc.
Meditation is a series of self-regulation approach set together, these methods are emphasized through training attention to awareness and enhance self-control of mental processes, thus improving the overall psychological well-being, such as breed calm, clear, focused, etc. Specific capabilities. Meditation includes traditional meditation methods based on specific belief systems, such as: vipassana, Zen, yoga, etc., as well as religious and psychological.
Modern methods include a combination of meditation, such as: reduced pressure therapy Mindfulness (MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction), mindful recognition known therapy (MBCT, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy), and mindful prevent recurrence (MBRP, mindfulness-based relapse prevention), etc. Meditation is a hot research topic in recent years.
Due to its significant utility, more and more people participating in meditation exercises, and it has expanded from the initial clinical field to many fields such as schools, elderly care, workplaces and communities. Meditation-related research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience is becoming increasingly popular. Existing studies show meditation will have a positive impact on a variety of cognitive functions by increasing the capacity of attention, such as working memory, executive function, long credited memory and creative thinking, etc.
This article will mainly review the positive effects of meditation on the brain from the perspective of psychology, especially cognitive neuroscience in recent years.
Impact on Attention
Note that attention refers to awareness focus on a specific stimulus, while ignoring other unrelated stimuli. To enter meditation, a stable attention is a prerequisite condition, all meditation methods have to pay attention to the control. According to some researcher, provided different direction of meditation draws attention, it can be divided to: attention focused meditation (the FA, Focused Attention) and open monitoring meditation (OM, open monitoring) two forms. Note Focus Meditation (FA), refers to narrow the scope of attention, attention will be focused exclusively on a selected target object, this process will require the efforts of the individual to get rid of distractor. Open detection offerings think (OM), refers to expand the attention range, training consciousness to accept the awareness of the moment, including floating perception, thinking and emotion. In the actual course of meditation and OM typically is combined with FA exercise.
Meditation improves sustained attention. MacLean et al. (2010) explored the underlying mechanisms of meditation to improve sustained attention. The study used a sustained attention task (SAT, sustained- attention task), they measure the sensitivity of visual resolution, attention changes before, during and after a three months FA training. In the task, when a low frequency vertical lines appear, subjects were required to quickly and accurately press a correct key, and the high frequency vertical lines appears, they are required to not give any reaction. The correctness of the reaction will be feedback with a beep sound. The results of the study showed that after the meditation, participants had lower thresholds, improved visual resolution, and improved alertness. Researchers believe that for a long-time focused attention, information processing will lead to resource depletion attention, perceptual sensitivity decreased, alertness decline, sustained attention failed. And meditation will increase the visual resolution related to perceptual sensitivity, reduce the cognitive resources required in the process of target discrimination, and thus make continuous attention easier.
Thereafter, Jha et al. (2015) discussed the positive influence of training of the soldiers under high pressure. Subjects were divided into four groups: didactic style Mindfulness training group, participant style mindfulness training group, the control soldier group and control civilians’ group. Research is conducted on the use of sustained attention response task (SART, the Attention, Sustained to response Task) Notable changes have been found before and after training. The results showed, waiting control soldiers group attention performance was significantly lower than the pre-test and post-test scores were significantly lower than wait control system of civilian groups, indicating that long-term high pressure will increase errors, causing mind wander and leading to the mistakes of attention. However, mindfulness trained soldiers before and after the test results remain unchanged, and fewer mistakes than wait control soldiers, and participatory training group performance is better than didactic training group. This shows that although long-term high pressure will increase attention mistakes, but participatory meditation training will increase the performance of attention under high-pressure. Subsequently, the research of Badart et al. (2018) used single-channel visual conditions, single-channel auditory conditions, and dual-channel visual and auditory conditions to present a response conversion task (RST, response switching task), comparing the continuous attention difference between long-term FA meditators and non-meditators under different stimulation channel conditions. The results show that meditators show fewer attention errors in RST than non-meditators under all conditions. This illustrates the long-term FA exercise will improve the general condition of attention. Attention can be divided into three functional phases: alertness, positioning, and execution. Independent of each sub-system, the research uses Network Test (ANT, attention network test) to measure the three-meditation attention influence subsystem. The results found that meditation can improve execution attention, and whether meditation would have a positive effect on the alert Subsystems, the current conclusions are not consistent. Elliott et al. (2014) used ANT to explore the mechanism by which the FA improves the attention subsystem. Research also found that FA improves the ability to perform attention, reducing the executive function of the coupling between the executive attention and alert attention network. Note that the network link between the executive attention and alert attention is strong, reflecting the two competing neural resource sharing the common cognitive resources, and FA may increase the efficiency of resource shared by both networks, so that both can perform at the same time, and thus eventually improve two sub attention system. In addition, studies have shown that OM and FA have different effects on the attention subsystem. The research by Tsai et al. (2016) first conducted a horizontal study, comparing the performance of FA meditators, OM meditators, and non-meditators in the ANT task to explore the long-term different types of meditation pairs. The results of the study found that compared with the control group, long-term meditators in both groups had a higher ability to perform attention, and the OM group had a higher positioning ability than the other two groups.
Another longitudinal study was conducted to investigate the effect of 3 - month FA training on the attention subsystem, and the results showed that short-term FA training improved executive attention. The results show that FA improves execution attention and OM improves execution attention and positioning attention. Meditation can affect selective attention distribution and expand attention by making the allocation of attention resources more reasonable. Meditation not only improve the identification of upcoming target stimulus, reduced attention Blink (AB), but also to raise the awareness of the unexpected stimulation of non-target and reduce inattentional blind (IB).
Top-down attention control forms a parallel information processing method, which reduces the competition between task-related and irrelevant information, thereby expanding the scope of attention and reducing attention flicker. On the contrary FA increases the attention of top-down control of the formation of a single-channel serial. Van Vugt et al. (2014) divided the subjects into two groups. One group are those who have more than two years of meditation experience and the other group are subjects who have fewer experience, and compare the difference of attention blink after OM FA training. The results show, rich meditation experience group has less attention blink after OM than after FA, and fewer experience groups show no significant difference. That means advanced meditators can reach more flexibility to choose the information-related tasks after OM, control their attention in an intended state. In addition, Schofield et al. (2015) investigated the effects of mindfulness training on unintentional blindness. Unintentional blindness means that when subjects are focused on an event or object, they often fail to notice the distinctive and significant non-target objects. In the experiment, the letters T and F will be on the computer screen for edge collision motion, and the participants are required to count the number of edge collisions of the two letters. At the same time there will be an unexpected stimulus " +" from one side of the screen to the other. If the subject was able to speak of a characteristic of the unexpected stimulus, it means that he was aware of the unexpected stimulus, otherwise it was an unintentional blindness. Research study results show, mindfulness training group compared with the control group they show less attention blindness. It can be concluded that mindfulness training improved active attention rather than passive attention, raise awareness of the unexpected stimulation of the task.
Impact on brain structure
The distribution of gray matter volume (GMV) in our brain plays an important role in our mental health, behavior, and cognitive function. Serigio et al. (2)Found that compared with non-meditators , the gray matter volume of meditators is larger in the right hemisphere, mainly in several brain island area : inner frame frontal cortex , temporal cortex, parietal lobe and the left prefrontal ventral lateral cortex and left insula. These changes include brain regions associated with continuous attention, self-control, compassion, and mutual feeling. Compared with meditators, non-meditators did not find areas of increased gray matter volume. In addition, the depth of silent events of long-term meditators is related to the volume of brain gray matter, which is mainly manifested in the medial frontal area. The longer the silent event is, the greater the gray matter volume of the prefrontal cortex. This has to do with top-down control of cognition, emotion, and attention.
Impact on brain function
In functional magnetic resonance imaging, when the brain is active, neurons are excited, and electrical activity causes increased cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption, but the oxygen consumption is lower than the increase in cerebral blood flow, so the content of deoxyhemoglobin decreased, that is, the corresponding brain active area can be detected. Kathleen et al. Found (3), long-term meditators in the process of meditation, the activeness in the posterior cingulate gyrus, anterior wedge, left middle cingulate gyrus, upper left gyrus, angular gyrus, temporal activity in brain areas are lower than the new-meditators, this finding suggests that there are difference in the process of meditation between the long-term meditators and new meditators. Different brain regions involved in cognitive strategies between groups, more involvement in areas of the brain that related to sympathy, social cognition, internal speech and memory processes, for new meditators. The area is less involved than the original meditator. In addition, short-term meditation brain function changes are mainly in the right anterior cingulate gyrus, frontal medial gyrus, and dorsal lateral frontal gyrus. Long-term meditation has a more positive impact on conflict control and positive emotional expectations, and can improve executive function and have a positive impact on mental health.
Conclusion
Compared with non-meditators, meditators show significant differences in attention, brain structure, brain function, and brain network connection. With the updating of functional magnetic resonance imaging technology and the application of new technology, more researches about the positive effect of meditation on brain structure, brain function, and brain network can be conducted. The mechanism of change will be further investigated. We believed that with deeper understanding, meditation will play a more and more important role in the treatment of various psychological and clinical aspects.
Reference:
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[2] Sergio Elías Hernández, José Suero , Alfonso Barros, et al. Increased Grey Matter Associated with Long Term sahaja Yoga Meditation: A voxel- Based MorPhometry Study. PLos ONE, 2016, 11 (3)
[3] Kathleen A. Garrison , Dustin Scheinost, R. Todd Constable, et al. BOLD signal and functional connectiv ity associated with loving kindness meditation, Brain and behaviror, 2014.4 (3) .337-347
