Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
June 1, 2025
Idil Sezer, Matthew D Sacchet
14 citations
Long-term meditators provide a way to study how extensive meditation training affects the autonomic nervous system. Research has described a state of 'relaxed alertness' with both sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, but findings vary widely, showing either branch alone, both, or shifting patterns. This review synthesizes these inconsistent results by considering three factors: the specific style of meditation, the meditator's expertise level, and within-practice variations. Accounting for these factors reveals consistent patterns, shifting from 'long-term' to a more precise 'advanced' meditation concept that highlights skills and stages. Specific heart rate variability patterns, including very low and low-frequency spectral power peaks and cardiac-respiratory coupling, emerge, which can inform improved meditation training.
Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)
January 1, 2025
Sebastian Ehmann, Idil Sezer, Isaac N Treves et al.
9 citations
Long-term meditators show a distinct pattern of cognitive and neural changes from prolonged mindfulness practice, including enhanced sensory integration, reduced negative emotional responses to pain, more rational decision-making, and altered self-awareness. Neuroimaging reveals increased activation in brain networks linked to interoception and pain (salience network), reduced connectivity between executive and salience networks, diminished fear and amygdala activation, and altered default-mode network activity associated with emotional neutrality and non-ordinary states of consciousness. Methodological limitations prevent firm conclusions about lasting trait effects, and a unified neurophenomenological framework is needed to systematically study advanced meditation's states and stages.
NeuroImage
November 19, 2025
Sebastian Ehmann, Idil Sezer, Arielle S Keller et al.
2 citations
Attention regulation is a core mechanism of mindfulness meditation. Long-term meditation enhances trait-level improvements in executive attention, sustained attention, orienting, and reduces the attentional blink. Preliminary evidence also shows improvements in response inhibition, alertness, and less mind-wandering. Alertness benefits most from long-term and intensive practice. Attention-based techniques outperform non-attention-based ones, while observe-and-release techniques aid orienting and detection of closely spaced stimuli. These findings suggest that meditation enhances attention according to training specificity, but meditative development is non-linear and multidimensional, requiring balanced cultivation of multiple faculties. Methodological limitations, such as heterogeneous designs and insufficient state-trait differentiation, complicate interpretations.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Catherine Prueitt, Idil Sezer, Matthew D Sacchet
Pain is an allostatic imperative that commands an organism to adapt a part of its body. Drawing on empirical studies of pain reprocessing during advanced meditation, allostatic paradigms of biological self-regulation, and the philosophy of pain in the classical Sanskrit Pratyabhijñā Śaivism tradition, this paper theorizes two components of an allostatic response: homeostatic responses, which are error-corrective and aim to return to a previous stable state, and heterostatic responses, which are anticipatory and shift to a new steady state to better prepare for future challenges. Successful adaptation depends on both error-correction and anticipatory change. A broad range of affect properly accompanies pain, and the model may extend to mental pain.