Meditation and interoception: the role of the insula

冥想，深呼吸和瑜伽占所有CAM使用的近四分之一，尽管对冥想技术对健康产生影响的神经生物学机制知之甚少。许多使用冥想的疾病，如慢性疼痛，焦虑和吸毒成瘾，其特征是异常的情绪体验，对身体状态的异常感知，以及引起对身体内部状态的意识的大脑网络的异常活动。冥想的实践明确地强调了对身体的意识的重要性，跨越传统和经验水平。冥想技术作为治疗这些疾病的有效性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意识。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。与其在冥想状态下检查神经活动，我建议在执行内感受任务时检查神经活动：心跳检测。这项任务借鉴了冥想过程的组成部分，但更好地描述了，提供了关于受试者体验性质的可量化信息。将进行两项研究。第一个实验将比较有经验的冥想者和刚开始冥想的人在心跳检测过程中的大脑活动。第二个将纵向跟踪心跳检测过程中大脑活动的变化，这是学习冥想的结果。

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.