Does the «ENIGMA-Meditation collaboration» explain the hard to understand or explain data whe recently found in the web? – PETER GAMMA (Director & Physiologist), MEDITATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE SWITZERLAND (MRIS)

Last Updated on May 7, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

Meditation researcher Atoine Lutz recently published a paper about:

ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide consortium for neuroscientific investigations of meditation practices

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=de&user=biXgcqQAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=biXgcqQAAAAJ:ZuybSZzF8UAC

Together with a large group of co-authors

Saampras Ganesan, Aki Tsuchiyagaito, Greg Siegle, LT Eyler, IN Treves, A Lutz, G Pagnoni, PC Dagnino, A Escrichs, LF Saccaro, M Sacchet, V Tripathi, I Batta, R Prakash, KW Brown, N Reggente, SS Khalsa, TJ McDermott, S Valk, Y Tang, N Fani, G Deco, E Garland, VD Calhoun, S Davanger, C Piguet, CC Bauer, FA Barrios, G Chételat, N Kirlic, DM Fresco, H Rahrig, A Torske, Y Kang, J Cain, NAS Farb, R Garg, MD Turner, S Fialoke, DM Hafeman, JM Dutcher, JA Brewer, JD Creswell, TS Braver, F Zeidan, DR Vago, S Lazar, R Davidson, CR Ching, N Jahanshad, SI Thomopoulos, P Thompson, A Zalesky, J Turner, AP King

Abstract

Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states.
Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualised meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions (MIs), that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety.
Over the past decade, neuroimaging has examined the neuroscientific basis of meditation practices, effects, states, and outcomes for clinical and non-clinical populations.
However, the generalizability and replicability of current neuroscientific models of meditation are yet to be established, as they are largely based on small datasets entrenched with heterogeneity along several domains of meditation (e.g., practice types, meditation experience, clinical disorder targeted), experimental design, and neuroimaging methods (e.g., preprocessing, analysis, task-based, resting-state, structural MRI).
These limitations have precluded a nuanced and rigorous neuroscientific phenotyping of meditation practices and their potential benefits.
Here, we present ENIGMA-Meditation, the first worldwide collaborative consortium for neuroscientific investigations of meditation practices.
ENIGMA-Meditation will enable systematic meta- and mega-analyses of globally distributed neuroimaging datasets of meditation using shared, standardized neuroimaging methods and tools to improve statistical power and generalizability.
Through this powerful collaborative framework, existing neuroscientific accounts of meditation practices can be extended to generate novel and rigorous neuroscientific insights, accounting for multi-domain heterogeneity.
ENIGMA-Meditation will inform neuroscientific mechanisms underlying therapeutic action of meditation practices on psychological and cognitive attributes, advancing the field of meditation and contemplative neuroscience.

We found for instance a picture of Antoine Lutz from the year 2012: