Meditation practices have been claimed to have a positive effect on the regulation of mood and emotions for quite some time by practitioners, and in recent times there has been a sustained effort to provide a more precise description of the influence of meditation on the human brain. Longitudinal studies have reported morphological changes in cortical thickness and volume in selected brain regions due to meditation practice, which is interpreted as an evidence its effectiveness beyond the subjective self reporting. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography to quantify the changes in brain activity during meditation practice represents a challenge, as no clear hypothesis about the spatial or temporal pattern of such changes is available to date. In this article we consider MEG data collected during meditation sessions of experienced Buddhist monks practicing focused attention (Samatha) and open monitoring (Vipassana) meditation, contrasted by resting state with eyes closed. The MEG data are first mapped to time series of brain activity averaged over brain regions corresponding to a standard Destrieux brain atlas. Next, by bootstrapping and spectral analysis, the data are mapped to matrices representing random samples of power spectral densities in α, β, γ, and θ frequency bands. We use linear discriminant analysis to demonstrate that the samples corresponding to different meditative or resting states contain enough fingerprints of the brain state to allow a separation between different states, and we identify the brain regions that appear to contribute to the separation. Our findings suggest that the cingulate cortex, insular cortex and some of the internal structures, most notably the accumbens, the caudate and the putamen nuclei, the thalamus and the amygdalae stand out as separating regions, which seems to correlate well with earlier findings based on longitudinal studies.

Mining the mind: linear discriminant analysis of MEG source reconstruction time series supports dynamic changes in deep brain regions during meditation sessions / Calvetti, Daniela; Johnson, Brian; Pascarella, Annalisa; Pitolli, Francesca; Somersalo, Erkki; Vantaggi, Barbara. - In: BRAIN TOPOGRAPHY. - ISSN 0896-0267. - (2021). [10.1007/s10548-021-00874-w]

Mining the mind: linear discriminant analysis of MEG source reconstruction time series supports dynamic changes in deep brain regions during meditation sessions

Pitolli, Francesca
;
Vantaggi, Barbara
2021

Abstract

Meditation practices have been claimed to have a positive effect on the regulation of mood and emotions for quite some time by practitioners, and in recent times there has been a sustained effort to provide a more precise description of the influence of meditation on the human brain. Longitudinal studies have reported morphological changes in cortical thickness and volume in selected brain regions due to meditation practice, which is interpreted as an evidence its effectiveness beyond the subjective self reporting. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography to quantify the changes in brain activity during meditation practice represents a challenge, as no clear hypothesis about the spatial or temporal pattern of such changes is available to date. In this article we consider MEG data collected during meditation sessions of experienced Buddhist monks practicing focused attention (Samatha) and open monitoring (Vipassana) meditation, contrasted by resting state with eyes closed. The MEG data are first mapped to time series of brain activity averaged over brain regions corresponding to a standard Destrieux brain atlas. Next, by bootstrapping and spectral analysis, the data are mapped to matrices representing random samples of power spectral densities in α, β, γ, and θ frequency bands. We use linear discriminant analysis to demonstrate that the samples corresponding to different meditative or resting states contain enough fingerprints of the brain state to allow a separation between different states, and we identify the brain regions that appear to contribute to the separation. Our findings suggest that the cingulate cortex, insular cortex and some of the internal structures, most notably the accumbens, the caudate and the putamen nuclei, the thalamus and the amygdalae stand out as separating regions, which seems to correlate well with earlier findings based on longitudinal studies.
2021
MEG inverse problem, Activity map, Meditation, Spectral analysis, Linear discriminant analysis, Deep sources
01 Pubblicazione su rivista::01a Articolo in rivista
Mining the mind: linear discriminant analysis of MEG source reconstruction time series supports dynamic changes in deep brain regions during meditation sessions / Calvetti, Daniela; Johnson, Brian; Pascarella, Annalisa; Pitolli, Francesca; Somersalo, Erkki; Vantaggi, Barbara. - In: BRAIN TOPOGRAPHY. - ISSN 0896-0267. - (2021). [10.1007/s10548-021-00874-w]
File allegati a questo prodotto
File Dimensione Formato  
Calvetti_MiningMind_2021.pdf

accesso aperto

Tipologia: Versione editoriale (versione pubblicata con il layout dell'editore)
Licenza: Creative commons
Dimensione 3.88 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
3.88 MB Adobe PDF

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11573/1580252
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 6
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 4
social impact