Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., &Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity.
Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that “living in the moment” increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive controls as they performed several different meditations (Concentration, Loving-Kindness, Choiceless Awareness). We found ...