Focus on the breath: Brain decoding reveals internal states of attention during meditation
bioRxiv Preprint Server June 17, 2020 H.y. Weng, J.a. Lewis-Peacock, F.m. Hecht et al. 9 citations preprint
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of fMRI data can identify five different internal attention states—breath attention, mind wandering, self-referential processing, attention to feet, and attention to sounds—in individual participants with accuracy well above chance (41% vs. 20% chance). In a mixed sample of 16 experienced meditators and novice controls, classifiers trained during a directed attention task successfully recognized these states in 87.5% of participants. When applied to a separate 10-minute meditation session, the classifiers indicated that participants spent more time attending to breath than to mind wandering or self-referential processing. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of using MVPA to objectively measure internal mental states during meditation at the individual level.