Meditation & Mindfulness

 

Recently, our lab has begun to investigate meditation practitioners. We are interested in the various behavioural improvements that meditation might engender, and particularly in the neural basis for these cognitive and emotional benefits. In one study we have shown that long-term meditation practitioners appear to provide more accurate, reliable introspective reports about their inner experiences (Fox, Zakarauskas, Dixon, Ellamil, Thompson, and Christoff, 2012). Our ongoing work is focusing on meta-analyzing the differences in the brain structure of meditation practitioners that have been found using morphometric neuroimaging (Fox, Nijeboer, Dixon, Floman, Ellamil, Rumak, Sedlmeier, & Christoff, 2014), as well as employing the expert introspective skills of long-term practitioners to investigate the arising of spontaneous thoughts (Ellamil et al., in prep).