Focus on the Breath: Brain Decoding Reveals Internal States of Attention During Meditation.

ABSTRACT: Meditation practices are often used to cultivate interoception or internally-oriented attention to bodily sensations, which may improve health via cognitive and emotional regulation of bodily signals. However, it remains unclear how meditation impacts internal attention (IA) states due to lack of measurement tools that can objectively assess mental states during meditation practice itself, and produce time estimates of internal focus at individual or group levels. To address these measurement gaps, we tested the feasibility of applying multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to single-subject fMRI data to: (1) learn and recognize internal attentional states relevant for meditation during a directed IA task; and (2) decode or estimate the presence of those IA states during an independent

SUBMITTER: Weng HY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7483757 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature