Review
Cognitive-emotional interactions
Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation

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Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

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Meditation as an explanandum

Despite a large number of scientific reports and theoretical proposals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, little is known about the neurophysiological processes involved in meditation and the long-term impact of meditation on the brain. The lack of statistical evidence, control populations and rigor of many of the early studies, the heterogeneity of the studied meditative states and the difficulty in controlling the degree of expertise of practitioners can, in part, account for the limited contributions made by

Neuroscientific study of focused attention meditation

The selective nature of attention and its importance for guiding goal-directed behavior has been one of the most extensively studied areas of Western psychology and neuroscience. Notably, there are remarkable parallels between the processes involved in FA meditation, as described in many meditation texts (Table 1), and recent cognitive (neuro)science conceptualizations of attention. Both Western scientists and Buddhist scholars recognize that the ability to focus and sustain attention on an

The neuroscientific study of OM meditation

Several predictions concerning the mental processes and brain systems involved in OM meditation can be derived from the description of this form of meditation given in Table 1. A first prediction is that because OM meditation involves no explicit attentional focus, it does not rely on brain regions involved in sustaining or engaging attention onto a specific object, but on brain regions implicated in monitoring, vigilance and disengaging attention from stimuli which distract attention from the

Neurodynamic framework

As noted earlier, traditional Buddhist scholars have emphasized the decreased need for voluntary attentional efforts to attain concentration following expertise in FA meditation. In addition, some variations of OM meditation advise practitioners to drop any explicit effort to control the occurrence of thoughts or emotions to further stabilize their meditation. These descriptions suggest that some meditation states might not be best understood as top-down influences in a classical

Future directions

The neuroscientific study of meditation is clearly still in its infancy but the initial findings reviewed earlier promise both to reveal the mechanisms by which such training might exert its effects and to underscore the plasticity of the brain circuits that underlie complex regulatory mental functions. These findings will need to be supplemented with more data, most crucially from longitudinal studies examining changes over time within the same individuals randomized either to meditation

Acknowledgements

Support for the work described here was provided by NCCAM U01AT002114–01A1, Fyssen foundation, to A.L. and NIMH P50-MH069315 to R.J.D. and by gifts from Adrianne and Edwin Cook-Ryder, Bryant Wangard, Keith and Arlene Bronstein and the John W. Kluge Foundation.

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