Meditation and interoception: the role of the insula

描述（由申请人提供）：冥想，深呼吸和瑜伽占所有CAM使用的近四分之一，尽管人们对冥想技术对健康产生影响的神经生物学机制知之甚少。冥想治疗的许多疾病，如慢性疼痛、焦虑和药物成瘾，其特征是异常的情绪体验、对身体状态的异常感知，以及大脑网络中的异常活动，这些活动会引起对身体内部状态的意识。冥想的练习明确地强调了对身体的意识的重要性，跨越了传统和经验水平。冥想技术作为一种治疗这些疾病的有效方法，可能在于它们能够通过改变大脑网络的功能来改变对身体内部状态的认识。这个项目的目的是研究冥想如何改变内感受：对身体内部状态的意识。与其检查冥想状态下的神经活动，我建议检查执行内感受性任务时的神经活动：心跳检测。这项任务利用了冥想过程的组成部分，但更有特点，提供了关于受试者体验本质的可量化信息。将进行两项研究。第一项研究将比较有经验的冥想者和刚开始冥想者在心跳检测时的大脑活动。第二个将纵向跟踪学习冥想练习时心跳检测期间大脑活动的变化。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Meditation, deep breathing and yoga comprise nearly a quarter of all CAM usage, although little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms by which meditative techniques exert their effects on health. Many of the disorders for which meditation is used, such as chronic pain, anxiety and drug addiction, are characterized by abnormal emotional experiences, abnormal perceptions of body states, and abnormal activity in brain networks that give rise to awareness of the internal state of the body. The practice of meditation explicitly highlights the importance of awareness directed towards the body, across tradition and experience level. The effectiveness of meditative techniques as a treatment for these disorders may lie in their ability to change awareness of the internal state of the body, by modifying the function of this brain network. The purpose of this project is to examine how meditation changes interoception: awareness of the internal state of the body. Rather than examining neural activity during the meditative state, I propose to examine neural activity during performance of an interoceptive task: heart beat detection. This task draws on components of the meditative process but is better characterized, providing quantifiable information about the nature of the subject's experience. Two studies will be conducted. The first will compare brain activity during heartbeat detection between experienced and beginning meditators. The second will longitudinally track changes in brain activity during heartbeat detection that result from learning the practice of meditation.