Brain-Heart Interactions Underlying Traditional Tibetan Buddhist Meditation.
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) March 21, 2020 Haiteng Jiang, Bin He, Xiaoli Guo et al. 40 citations
Meditation alters how the brain represents signals from the heart, particularly within the default mode network (DMN), and reorganizes large-scale brain networks. In a large group of long-term Tibetan Buddhist monks, meditation produced distinct, transient changes in the brain's response to heartbeats in the DMN and reconfigurations of EEG gamma and theta band networks. Theta-band connectivity between temporal and frontal regions decreased with more meditation experience, and gamma oscillations became directionally coupled to theta oscillations during meditation. These findings suggest that changes in the neural representation of cardiac activity and large-scale network integration underlie meditation's effects, implying that meditation induces both immediate and lasting plasticity in brain organization.