ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide consortium for neuroscientific investigations of meditation practices
Saampras Ganesan, Aki Tsuchiyagaito, Greg J. Siegle, Philippe R. Goldin, Lisa T. Eyler, Isaac N. Treves, Antoine Lutz, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Paulina Clara Dagnino, Anira Escrichs, Luigi Francesco Saccaro, Matthew D. Sacchet, Vaibhav Tripathi, Ishaan Batta, Ruchika Shaurya Prakash, Kirk Warren Brown, Nicco Reggente, Sahib S. Khalsa, Timothy J. Mcdermott, Sofie L. Valk, Yi‐yuan Tang, Negar Fani, Gustavo Deco, Eric L. Garland, Vince D Calhoun, Svend Davanger, Camille Piguet, Clemens Bauer, Fernando A. Barrios, Gaël Chételat, Namik Kirlić, David M. Fresco, Hadley Rahrig, Alyssa Torske, Yoona Kang, Joshua Cain, Norman A. S. Farb, Rahul Garg, Matthew D. Turner, Suruchi Fialoke, Danella Hafeman, Janine M. Dutcher, Judson A. Brewer, J. David Creswell, Todd S. Braver, Fadel Zeidan, David R. Vago, Sara W. Lazar, Richard J. Davidson, Christopher R. K. Ching, Neda Jahanshad, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Paul M. Thompson, Andrew Zalesky, Jessica Turner, Anthony P. King
April 8, 2024 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/f2rvx via OpenAlex
Abstract
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualised meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions (MIs), that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past decade, neuroimaging has examined the neuroscientific basis of meditation practices, effects, states, and outcomes for clinical and non-clinical populations. However, the generalizability and replicability of current neuroscientific models of meditation are yet to be established, as they are largely based on small datasets entrenched with heterogeneity along several domains of meditation (e.g., practice types, meditation experience, clinical disorder targeted), experimental design, and neuroimaging methods (e.g., preprocessing, analysis, task-based, resting-state, structural MRI). These limitations have precluded a nuanced and rigorous neuroscientific phenotyping of meditation practices and their potential benefits. Here, we present ENIGMA-Meditation, the first worldwide collaborative consortium for neuroscientific investigations of meditation practices. ENIGMA-Meditation will enable systematic meta- and mega-analyses of globally distributed neuroimaging datasets of meditation using shared, standardized neuroimaging methods and tools to improve statistical power and generalizability. Through this powerful collaborative framework, existing neuroscientific accounts of meditation practices can be extended to generate novel and rigorous neuroscientific insights, accounting for multi-domain heterogeneity. ENIGMA-Meditation will inform neuroscientific mechanisms underlying therapeutic action of meditation practices on psychological and cognitive attributes, advancing the field of meditation and contemplative neuroscience.