Wu Shr-Da, Lo Pei-Chen
Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, Republic of China.
Biomed Res. 2008 Oct;29(5):245-50. doi: 10.2220/biomedres.29.245.
Phenomenon of the heart rate variability (HRV) during various meditation techniques has been reported. However, most of these techniques emphasized the skill of slow breathing (<0.15 Hz). This paper reports our study on HRV during meditation which emphasizes inward attention. Inward attention has been an important approach for the Zen-meditation practitioners to enter into transcendental consciousness. Two groups of subjects were investigated, 10 experimental subjects with Zen-meditation experience and 10 control subjects without any meditation experience. We analyzed HRV both in time and frequency domains. The results revealed both common and different effects on HRV between inward-attention meditation and normal rest. The major difference of effects between two groups were the decrease of LF/HF ratio and LF norm as well as the increase of HF norm, which suggested the benefit of a sympathovagal balance toward parasympathetic activity. Moreover, we observed regular oscillating rhythms of the heart rate when the LF/HF ratio was small under meditation. According to previous studies, regular oscillations of heart rate signal usually appeared in the low-frequency band of HRV under slow breathing. Our findings showed that such regular oscillations could also appear in the high-frequency band of HRV but with smaller amplitude.
已有研究报道了各种冥想技巧过程中的心率变异性（HRV）现象。然而，这些技巧大多强调慢呼吸（<0.15赫兹）的技巧。本文报道了我们关于强调内观注意力的冥想过程中HRV的研究。内观注意力一直是禅宗冥想修行者进入超验意识的重要方法。我们调查了两组受试者，10名有禅宗冥想经验的实验受试者和10名没有任何冥想经验的对照受试者。我们在时域和频域对HRV进行了分析。结果揭示了内观注意力冥想与正常休息对HRV的共同和不同影响。两组之间影响的主要差异在于低频/高频比值和低频标准值的降低以及高频标准值的增加，这表明交感神经与副交感神经平衡向副交感神经活动倾斜的益处。此外，我们观察到在冥想过程中当低频/高频比值较小时心率有规律的振荡节律。根据先前的研究，心率信号的规律振荡通常出现在慢呼吸时HRV的低频波段。我们的研究结果表明，这种规律振荡也可能出现在HRV的高频波段，但幅度较小。
