Instituto do Cérebro, Instituto Israelita de Ensino e Pesquisa Albert Einstein, São Paulo, Brazil.
Neuroimage. 2012 Jan 2;59(1):745-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.088. Epub 2011 Jul 7.
Meditation is a mental training, which involves attention and the ability to maintain focus on a particular object. In this study we have applied a specific attentional task to simply measure the performance of the participants with different levels of meditation experience, rather than evaluating meditation practice per se or task performance during meditation. Our objective was to evaluate the performance of regular meditators and non-meditators during an fMRI adapted Stroop Word-Colour Task (SWCT), which requires attention and impulse control, using a block design paradigm. We selected 20 right-handed regular meditators and 19 non-meditators matched for age, years of education and gender. Participants had to choose the colour (red, blue or green) of single words presented visually in three conditions: congruent, neutral and incongruent. Non-meditators showed greater activity than meditators in the right medial frontal, middle temporal, precentral and postcentral gyri and the lentiform nucleus during the incongruent conditions. No regions were more activated in meditators relative to non-meditators in the same comparison. Non-meditators showed an increased pattern of brain activation relative to regular meditators under the same behavioural performance level. This suggests that meditation training improves efficiency, possibly via improved sustained attention and impulse control.
冥想是一种心理训练，涉及注意力和保持专注于特定对象的能力。在这项研究中，我们应用了一种特定的注意力任务，只是简单地衡量具有不同冥想经验水平的参与者的表现，而不是评估冥想练习本身或冥想期间的任务表现。我们的目的是评估经常冥想者和非冥想者在 fMRI 适应 Stroop 字色任务（SWCT）中的表现，该任务需要注意力和冲动控制，使用块设计范式。我们选择了 20 名右利手的经常冥想者和 19 名年龄、教育年限和性别匹配的非冥想者。参与者必须在三种条件下选择单个单词的颜色（红色、蓝色或绿色）：一致、中性和不一致。在不一致的条件下，非冥想者在右侧内侧额回、中颞回、中央前回和中央后回以及豆状核中表现出比冥想者更大的活动。在相同的比较中，没有区域在冥想者中比非冥想者更活跃。非冥想者在相同的行为表现水平下，相对于经常冥想者表现出增加的大脑激活模式。这表明冥想训练通过改善持续注意力和冲动控制来提高效率。
