Long-term Buddhist practitioners can self-induce sustained, high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony in the brain during meditation, as measured by electroencephalography. These EEG patterns differ from those of non-practitioners, especially over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. Before meditation, practitioners already show a higher ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) over medial frontoparietal electrodes compared to controls. This ratio increases sharply during meditation across most of the scalp and remains elevated afterward. The findings suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may produce both short-term and long-term neural changes.
Three months of intensive meditation training improved the ability to sustain attention, as measured by dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography. Training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, shown by enhanced theta-band phase consistency of neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Individuals with the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behavioral response variability. Reduced variability in neural processing also occurred for unattended deviant tones, suggesting meditation affects both distracter and target processing, possibly by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms.