Intracranial substrates of meditation- induced neuromodulation in the amygdala and hippocampus

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Maher, Christina; Tortolero, Lea; Jun, Soyeon; Cummins, Daniel D.; Saad, Adam; Young, James; Martinez, Lizbeth Nunez; Schulman, Zachary; Marcuse, Lara; Waters, Allison; Mayberg, Helen S.; Davidson, Richard J.; Panov, Fedor; Saez, Ignacio
• 署名单位: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-10838
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.240942312
• 发表日期: 2025-02-11
• 关键词: top-down; attention; oscillations; activation; circuits; state

摘要

Meditation is an accessible mental practice associated with emotional regulation and well- being. Loving- kindness meditation (LKM), a specific subtype of meditative prac-tice, involves focusing one's attention on thoughts of well- being for oneself and others. Meditation has been proven to be beneficial in a variety of settings, including therapeutic applications, but the neural activity underlying meditative practices and their positive effects are not well understood. It has been difficult to understand the contribution of deep limbic structures given the difficulty of studying neural activity directly in the human brain. Here, we leverage a unique patient population, epilepsy patients chronically implanted with responsive neurostimulation devices that allow chronic, invasive electrophysiology recording to investigate the physiological correlates of LKM in the amygdala and hippocampus of novice meditators. We find that LKM- associated changes in physiological activity were specific to periodic, but not aperiodic, features of neural activity. LKM was associated with an increase in gamma (30 to 55 Hz) power and an alternation in the duration of beta (13 to 30 Hz) and gamma oscillatory bursts in both the amygdala and hippocampus, two regions associated with mood disorders. These findings reveal the nature of LKM- induced modulation of limbic activity in first- time meditators.