Meditation-induced effects on whole-brain structural and effective connectivity

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Growing scientific interest in neural correlates of meditation training.
• Mechanisms underlying meditation remain elusive.
• Need to characterize meditation-related changes in brain structure and function.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate meditation-related changes in functional dynamics and structural connectivity (SC).
• Characterize and distinguish short-term and long-term modifications in brain structure and function.
• Utilize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to acquire structural and functional data.

Main Methods:

• Scanned experienced meditators and naive controls using MRI.
• Acquired structural and functional data during resting-state and focused attention meditation.
• Calculated whole-brain effective connectivity (EC) using a dynamical network model, comparing EC, functional connectivity (FC), and SC features.

Main Results:

• Machine learning demonstrated EC features were more informative than FC and SC alone.
• Most informative EC links discriminating meditators from controls involved large-scale networks, primarily in the left hemisphere.
• Differences in functional connectivity were reflected to a lesser extent in anatomical connectivity, with strengthened pathways in meditators.

Conclusions:

• Meditation training induces significant changes in brain effective connectivity, particularly within left-hemisphere networks.
• Functional and structural brain modifications associated with meditation were identified.
• The study provides insights into the causal relationships at the structure-function level underlying meditation.