Authors
Judson A Brewer, Patrick D Worhunsky, Jeremy R Gray, Yi-Yuan Tang, Jochen Weber, Hedy Kober
Publication date
2011/12/13
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
108
Issue
50
Pages
20254-20259
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Description
Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that “living in the moment” increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive controls as they performed several different meditations (Concentration, Loving-Kindness, Choiceless Awareness). We found that the main nodes of the default-mode network (medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices) were relatively deactivated in experienced meditators across all meditation types. Furthermore, functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger coupling in experienced meditators between the posterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (regions previously …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
JA Brewer, PD Worhunsky, JR Gray, YY Tang, J Weber… - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011