"Thinking about Not-Thinking": Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation.

by Giuseppe Pagnoni[1], Milos Cekic[2], Ying Guo[3] 

[1] Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, Untied States of America. E-mail: gpagnon@emory.edu.

[2] Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, Untied States of America. 

[3] Department of Biostatistics, The Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, Untied States of America.

Abstract

Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically active during wakeful rest and consistently deactivate in a variety the performance of demanding tasks. This ‘‘default network’’ has been functionally linked to the stream of thoughts occurring automatically in the absence of goal-directed activity and which constitutes an aspect of mental behavior specifically addressed by many meditative practices. Zen meditation, in particular, is traditionally associated with a mental state of full awareness but reduced conceptual content, to be attained via a disciplined regulation of attention and bodily posture. Using fMRI and an amplified meditative condition interspersed with a lexical decision task, we investigated the neural correlates of conceptual processing during meditation in regular Zen practitioners and matched control subjects. While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neural response linked to conceptual processing in regions of the default network, suggesting that meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation.

Citation: Pagnoni G, Cekic M, Guo Y (2008) ‘‘Thinking about Not-Thinking’’: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation. PLoS ONE 3(9): e3083. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003083

Editor: Sheng He, University of Minnesota, United States of America Received February 28, 2008; Accepted August 8, 2008; Published September 3, 2008 Copyright: 2008 Pagnoni et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This study was supported by the Emory Center for Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Neurodegenerative Diseases (National Institute of Health Grant P30-AT00609).The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.