Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density

By Britta K. Hölzel, J. Carmody, M. Vangel, C. Congleton, S. Yerramsetti, T. Gard, Sara W. Lazar. Psychiatry Research, 2010

1,847 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Therapeutic interventions that incorporate training in mindfulness meditation have become increasingly popular, but to date, little is known about neural mechanisms associated with these interventions. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), one of the most widely used mindfulness training programs, has been reported to produce positive effects on psychological well-being and to ameliorate symptoms of a number of disorders. Here, we report a controlled longitudinal study to investigate pre-post changes in brain gray matter concentration attributable to participation in an MBSR program. Anatomical MRI images from sixteen healthy, meditation-naïve participants were obtained before and after they underwent the eight-week program. Changes in gray matter concentration were investigated using voxel-based morphometry, and compared to a wait-list control group of 17 individuals. Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the MBSR group compared to the controls. The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f29d9215ee3ad7cc8590b78db30d55412595accd

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Citations in the corpus

The Biological Underpinnings of Peer Victimization: Understanding Why and How the Effects of Bullying Can Last a Lifetime (2013, background): “…positive neuroplastic changes to the amygdala (a brain structure that plays an important role in detecting stressful stimuli and initiating a response to cope) among individuals who participated in a mindfulnessbased stress-reduction intervention (Hölzel et al., 2010; Hölzel et al., 2011).”
Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity (2011, background): “found increased gray-matter concentration in the PCC (44).”
Mentalizing in the Development and Treatment of Attachment Trauma (2013, result): “Lazar and colleagues’ findings are dramatic, yet a subsequent group of researchers including Lazar (Holzel et al., 2011) pointed out that later studies have not shown consistent differences between meditators and non-meditators and, moreover, such cross-sectional studies”
Mindfulness‐based interventions for improving cognition, academic achievement, behavior, and socioemotional functioning of primary and secondary school students (2017, background): “Evidence suggests that mindfulness positively effects self-regulation, as operationalized and measured in a variety of ways, and has been associated with changes in brain regions underlying self-regulation (Holzel et al., 2011).”
Developing mindfulness with children and young people: a review of the evidence and policy context (2013, methodology): “Pre-post analysis showed that five days of 20-minute mindfulness meditations in adults reduced anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue, improved immunereactivity and decreased cortisol (a stress hormone), while four days of mindfulness training was sufficient to improve mindfulness, visual-spatial me”
The state of wellbeing science: Concepts, measures, interventions, and policies (2014, background): “For example, a recent study showed structural changes in brain regions subserving some of the above benefits functioning following a standard 8-week MBSR course (Hölzel et al., 2011), as well as improvements in executive function (Tang, Yang, Leve, & Harold, 2012).”
How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective (2011, neutral): “Although 8 weeks of mindfulness practice did not reveal changes in gray matter concentration in the insula (Hölzel et al., 2011), the same study did reveal that 8 weeks of practice led to increases in gray matter concentration in the temporo-parietal junction.”
Mindfulness at Work: A New Approach to Improving Individual and Organizational Performance (2015, background): “…of the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for key functional capabilities such as learning, memory, affective processing, emotion regulation, perspective taking, and facilitating adaptive responses to stress (Davidson et al., 2003; Hölzel et al., 2011; Modinos et al., 2010).”
Mediating role of self-esteem on the relationship between mindfulness, anxiety, and depression (2016, background): “The brain areas responsible for affect regulation, and stress impulse reaction are also affected with mindfulness training (Davidson et al., 2003; Hölzel et al., 2011; Lazar et al., 2005).”
Active Inference, Curiosity and Insight (2017, background): “…aspect is consistent with the physiological mediation of the abductive reasoning afforded by Bayesian model selection during sleep (and reflection or mind wandering) (Bar, Aminoff, Mason, & Fenske, 2007), which is mediated by synaptic regression and competition (e.g., (Holzel et al., 2011).”
Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: A fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states (2012, positive): “In general, longitudinal studies within subjects over the course of meditation training are needed to more fully understand the plasticity that occurs with repeated practice, and recent work in this area shows promise (Holzel et al., 2011; Tang et al., 2010).”
Contemplative Education: A Systematic, Evidence-Based Review of the effect of Meditation Interventions in Schools (2015, methodology): “In similar findings from Hölzel et al. (2011), changes in grey matter density were tracked over an 8-week MBSR intervention with adults.”