A recent meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies over about 300 meditation practitioners has shown that meditation practice is consistently associated with changes in morphology of the prefrontal cortex and body awareness regions.

Together these studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of meditative practices on perception, cognition, emotional processing, and neuroplasticity. The recent interest in these ancient mental practices is concomitant with the development of new brain imaging technologies as well as the incorporation of mindfulness, one of the core psychological components of these practices, into psychotherapeutic and clinical interventions. Scientific publications on meditation have dramatically increased over the last decade. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. įunding: This work was supported by BIAL foundation (grant 162/08, ) to AD, Mind and Life Institute Varela grant 2009 ( ) to BRC, Centre Nationale pour la Recherche Scientifique PhD grant to CB, and Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM) PhD extension grant to CB. 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.ĭata Availability: Data for this publication are available on Zenodo. Received: JAccepted: DecemPublished: January 24, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Braboszcz et al. University of Pécs Medical School, HUNGARY We showed that meditation practice is correlated to changes in the EEG gamma frequency range that are common to a variety of meditation practices.Ĭitation: Braboszcz C, Cahn BR, Levy J, Fernandez M, Delorme A (2017) Increased Gamma Brainwave Amplitude Compared to Control in Three Different Meditation Traditions. In addition, we observed higher 7–11 Hz alpha activity in the Vipassana group compared to all the other groups during both meditation and instructed mind wandering and lower 10–11 Hz activity in the Himalayan yoga group during meditation only.

Independent component analysis was used to show that gamma activity did not originate in eye or muscle artifacts. Moreover, this gamma power was positively correlated with participants meditation experience. All meditators showed higher parieto-occipital 60–110 Hz gamma amplitude than control subjects as a trait effect observed during meditation and when considering meditation and IMW periods together.

We compared practitioners of three different meditation traditions (Vipassana, Himalayan Yoga and Isha Shoonya) with a control group during a meditative and instructed mind-wandering (IMW) block. Despite decades of research, effects of different types of meditation on electroencephalographic (EEG) activity are still being defined.

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