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...ed groups of experienced Meditators and non-Meditators during mindfulness attention to their breathing contrasted with an arithmetical control task. Apriori regions of interest were used based on the findings of the study of Brefczynski–Lewis in anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and precuneus. The experienced Meditators compared to nonMeditators during mindful attention to their breathing showed enhanced activation in anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, which was interpreted as an indicator of enhanced attentional control in the Meditation experts (Hoelzel et al., 2007). A limitation of this study was the use of an arithmetic task as control condition that differed from the Meditation condition in several ways other than the meditative state such as mental effort, visual-stimulation, and response preparation. There is some evidence that functional brain changes during meditation are observable even after short periods of practice as shown by a study in short-term Meditators of mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR). MBSR involves daily exercises in focusing attention on the present moment, as described in Kabat-Zinn et al. (1992). An fMRI study compared t...

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...neural processing between expert meditators and novices (e.g., Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008; Slagter et al. 1545Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, & Davidson, 2007; =-=Holzel et al., 2007-=-; Lutz, Greischar, Rawlings, Richard, & Davidson, 2004), that mental processes are flexible skills that can be trained through purely mental training. Several other longitudinal studies have previousl...

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...fting of attention; and (iv) sustained attention. The results indicated that mind wandering prior to awareness was associated with the default network of the resting state as measured with MRI, whereas cognitive processes during awareness of mind wandering, shifting of attention, and sustained attention engaged parts of the attentional networks that include the lateral PFC and parietal cortex [63]. In another study, fifteen Vipassana meditators (mean practice: 7.9 years, 2 h daily) showed stronger activations in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and the ACC bilaterally, compared to controls [64]. Unfortunately, these studies did not measure the effort level in achieving the meditation state. Stage 3: advanced stage. In the advanced stage of training, usually thought to be obtained with little or no effort, meditation is maintained by activity in the ACC, left insula, and striatum. There is also a reduction of activity in the lateral PFC and parietal cortex [33,50–52] (Figure 1). The experienced practitioner achieves a state of high parasympathetic dominance with strong activation in the ACC and left insula [50,64–67]. Connections between the ACC, striatum and autonomic nervous system...

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...chsner and Gross, 2008). A nascent database has emerged on the neurocognitive correlates of yoga and meditation practice. Neuroimaging research has demonstrated differences in task-related brain function between experienced meditation practitioners and meditation naïve controls. For example, fMRI analyses indicate that meditation practitioners exhibit greater meditation-related neural activation in brain regions involved in attentional control (e.g., prefrontal cortex), conflict resolution (e.g., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) and emotional processing (e.g., medial/orbitofrontal cortices) (Hölzel et al., 2007; Baron Short et al., 2010). Moreover, compared to non-meditators, mindfulness practitioners evidence attenuated electrophysiological activation in frontal scalp regions to negative emotional stimuli during passive picture viewing (Sobolewski et al., 2011), and yoga meditation practitioners (YMP) exhibit sustained reductions in the late positive brain potential during cognitive reappraisal of negative emotional stimuli (Gootjes et al., 2011) and reduced power in high-frequency EEG spectrum during negative emotional information processing (Aftanas and Golosheykin, 2005). In addition, on an audi...

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...ple. Emerging functional and structural imaging studies highlight the potential for dispositional mindfulness (and mindfulness training) in altering the function and structure of these limbic regions =-=[37,38,39,40]-=-. For example, mindful individuals have reduced resting state amygdala activity [40], and reduced amygdala activity when instructed to regulate their emotional response using affect labeling [37]. Str...

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...mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). 255U. Kirk et al. / NeuroImage 100 (2014) 254–262work has suggested the neural implications for the psychological construct of such decentering abilities. For example, even a short training course of MT is effective in decoupling the activity of the insula from the activity of other regions involved in valuation and decision-making, such as the vmPFC (Falk, 2014; Farb et al., 2007; Tang et al., 2009). Other studies have observed increases in insular cortex coupled with decreases in posterior parietal cortex and vmPFC (Creswell et al., 2007; Farb et al., 2010; Holzel et al., 2007). Given the link between interoceptive processes in the insular cortex and MT, the current study tested the hypothesis that in the context of MT, value computation acquires input from areas involved in interoception such as the insular cortex, bymodulating value signals in the vmPFC. As several types of top-down inputs are integrated in value signals computed in the vmPFC at the time of choice (or reward delivery), we speculated that MT leads to an alteredweighing of different value signals. Specifically, we predicted that value signals computed in vmPFC in the group assigned to MT relative to...