Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3916?error=cookies_not_supported&code=891447d3-3845-46e5-9a77-332f93f09492
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 06:29:08+00:00

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Yi-Yuan Tang is the Presidential Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA. His basic research focuses on how experiences affect brain processing and reshape the brain networks that support attention, emotional regulation and cognitive performance. His translational research covers preventive intervention for behavioural problems and mental disorders. He uses multi-modal neuroimaging, physiological, psychosocial and genetic methods in healthy and patient populations of different ages. He developed a mindfulness-based preventive intervention — integrative body–mind training (IBMT) — and has studied its effects in randomized clinical trials since the 1990s. Yi-Yuan Tang's homepage.
Britta K. Hölzel obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Giessen, Germany. She now conducts MRI research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, to investigate the neural mechanisms of mindfulness practice. Her research focuses on the effects of mindfulness practice on attention and emotion regulation, as well as on structural changes in the brain. Britta K. Hölzel's homepage.
Michael I. Posner has, for more than 50 years, studied how mental operations, particularly those related to attention, are carried out by neural networks. He has used cognitive, imaging and genetic methods. He continues these studies as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA, and Adjunct Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, USA. His current work examines the mechanisms of changes in white matter resulting from various forms of training. Michael I. Posner's homepage.
Research over the past two decades broadly supports the claim that mindfulness meditation — practiced widely for the reduction of stress and promotion of health — exerts beneficial effects on physical and mental health, and cognitive performance. Recent neuroimaging studies have begun to uncover the brain areas and networks that mediate these positive effects. However, the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear, and it is apparent that more methodologically rigorous studies are required if we are to gain a full understanding of the neuronal and molecular bases of the changes in the brain that accompany mindfulness meditation.
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This work was supported by the US Office of Naval Research. We thank E. Luders for her contributions to an earlier version of this manuscript. We benefited from discussions with R. Davidson and A. Chiesa. We thank four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and R. Tang for manuscript preparation.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79409, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA.
Department of Neuroradiology, Technical University of Munich, 81675 Munich, Germany.
Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA.
Study designs that compare data from one or more groups at several time points and that ideally include a (preferably active) control condition and random assignment to conditions.
Study designs that compare data from an experimental group with those from a control group at one point in time.
Studies that assess the co-variation between two variables: for example, co-variation of functional or structural properties of the brain and a behavioural variable, such as reported stress.
(BOLD contrasts). Signals that can be extracted with functional MRI and that reflect the change in the amount of deoxyhaemoglobin that is induced by changes in the activity of neurons and their synapses in a region of the brain. The signals thus reflect the activity in a local brain region.
(ASL). An MRI technique that is capable of measuring cerebral blood flow in vivo. It provides cerebral perfusion maps without requiring the administration of a contrast agent or the use of ionizing radiation because it uses magnetically labelled endogenous blood water as a freely diffusible tracer.
The reliable patterns of brain activity that involve the activation and/or connectivity of multiple large-scale brain networks.
A parameter in diffusion tensor imaging, which images brain structures by measuring the diffusion properties of water molecules. It provides information about the microstructural integrity of white matter.
Derived from the eigenvalues of the diffusion tensor, their underlying biophysical properties are associated with axonal density and myelination, respectively.
A technique for coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data. It determines the convergence of foci reported from different experiments, weighted by the number of participants in each study.
A method of analysing functional MRI data that is capable of detecting and characterizing information represented in patterns of activity distributed within and across multiple regions of the brain. Unlike univariate approaches, which only identify magnitudes of activity in localized parts of the brain, this approach can monitor multiple areas at once.

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