PLoS ONE (Jan 2015)

Effortless Attention as a Biomarker for Experienced Mindfulness Practitioners.

  • Guaraci Ken Tanaka,
  • Tolou Maslahati,
  • Mariana Gongora,
  • Juliana Bittencourt,
  • Luiz Carlos Serramo Lopez,
  • Marcelo Marcos Piva Demarzo,
  • Henning Budde,
  • Silmar Teixeira,
  • Luis Fernando Basile,
  • Javier Garcia Campayo,
  • Mauricio Cagy,
  • Pedro Ribeiro,
  • Bruna Velasques

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138561
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 10
p. e0138561

Abstract

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The present study aimed at comparing frontal beta power between long-term (LTM) and first-time meditators (FTM), before, during and after a meditation session. We hypothesized that LTM would present lower beta power than FTM due to lower effort of attention and awareness.Twenty one participants were recruited, eleven of whom were long-term meditators. The subjects were asked to rest for 4 minutes before and after open monitoring (OM) meditation (40 minutes).The two-way ANOVA revealed an interaction between the group and moment factors for the Fp1 (p<0.01), F7 (p = 0.01), F3 (p<0.01), Fz (p<0.01), F4 (p<0.01), F8 (p<0.01) electrodes.We found low power frontal beta activity for LTM during the task and this may be associated with the fact that OM is related to bottom-up pathways that are not present in FTM.We hypothesized that the frontal beta power pattern may be a biomarker for LTM. It may also be related to improving an attentive state and to the efficiency of cognitive functions, as well as to the long-term experience with meditation (i.e., life-time experience and frequency of practice).