Brain-Heart Interactions Underlying Traditional Tibetan Buddhist Meditation.
Haiteng Jiang, Bin He, Xiaoli Guo, Xu Wang, Menglin Guo, Zhuo Wang, Ting Xue, Han Li, Tianjiao Xu, Shuai Ye, Daniel Suma, Shanbao Tong, Donghong Cui
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) March 21, 2020 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhz095 via PubMed
Summary
Long-term Tibetan Buddhist monk meditation practitioners show distinct changes in brain activity related to heartbeats, particularly in the default mode network (DMN). Meditation is associated with large-scale reconfigurations in EEG gamma and theta bands. Notably, temporal-frontal connectivity in the theta band decreases with more meditation experience, while gamma and theta oscillations are coupled during meditation. These findings suggest that meditation affects how the brain represents cardiac activity and may lead to lasting changes in brain network organization.
Study at a glance
| Population | long-term Tibetan Buddhist monk meditation practitioners |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Distinct transient modulations of neural responses to heartbeats occur in the DMN during meditation, indicating a fundamental neural mechanism associated with this practice. |
Abstract
Despite accumulating evidence suggesting improvement in one's well-being as a result of meditation, little is known about if or how the brain and the periphery interact to produce these behavioral and mental changes. We hypothesize that meditation reflects changes in the neural representations of visceral activity, such as cardiac behavior, and investigated the integration of neural and visceral systems and the spontaneous whole brain spatiotemporal dynamics underlying traditional Tibetan Buddhist meditation. In a large cohort of long-term Tibetan Buddhist monk meditation practitioners, we found distinct transient modulations of the neural response to heartbeats in the default mode network (DMN), along with large-scale network reconfigurations in the gamma and theta bands of electroencephalography (EEG) activity induced by meditation. Additionally, temporal-frontal network connectivity in the EEG theta band was negatively correlated with the duration of meditation experience, and gamma oscillations were uniquely, directionally coupled to theta oscillations during meditation. Overall, these data suggest that the neural representation of cardiac activity in the DMN and large-scale spatiotemporal network integrations underlie the fundamental neural mechanism of meditation and further imply that meditation may utilize cortical plasticity, inducing both immediate and long-lasting changes in the intrinsic organization and activity of brain networks.