Neuroimaging evaluation of the long term impact of a novel paired meditation practice on brain function

Abstract

Background: A growing number of advanced neuroimaging studies have compared brain structure and function in long term meditators to non-meditators. The goal is to determine if there may be long term effects on the brain from practicing meditation. In this paper, we present new data on the long term effects of a novel meditation practice in which the focus is on clitoral stimulation. The findings from such a study have implications for potential therapeutic uses with regard to various neurological or psychiatric conditions.

Methods: We evaluated the cerebral glucose metabolism in 40 subjects with an extended history (>1 year of practice, 2-3 times per week) performing the meditation practice called Orgasmic Meditation (OM) and compared their brains to a group of non-meditating healthy controls (N = 19). Both meditation and non-meditation subjects underwent brain PET after injection with 148 to 296 MBq of FDG using a standard imaging protocol. Resting FDG PET scans of the OM group were compared to the resting scans of healthy, non-meditating, controls using statistical parametric mapping.

Results: The OM group showed significant differences in metabolic activity at rest compared to the controls. Specifically, there was significantly lower metabolism in select areas of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes, as well as the anterior cingulate, insula, and thalamus, in the OM group compared to the controls. In addition, there were notable distinctions between the males and females with the females demonstrating significantly lower metabolism in the thalamus and insula.

Conclusions: Overall, these findings suggest that the long term meditation practitioners of OM have different patterns of resting brain metabolism. Since these areas of the brain in which OM practitioners differ from controls are involved in cognition, attention, and emotional regulation, such findings have implications for understanding how this meditation practice might affect practitioners over long periods of time.

Keywords: brain imaging; cerebral metabolism; meditation; positron emission tomography (PET); sexual.

Figure 1

Brain regions with significant differences between the OM and control groups for the total subjects. Two-sample t-test with results presented for GRF-corrected p < 0.01 and a cluster size > 25 voxels.

Figure 2

Brain regions with significant differences between the OM and control groups among male subjects. Two-sample t-test with results presented for GRF-corrected p < 0.01 and a cluster size > 25 voxels.

Figure 3

Brain regions with significant differences between the OM and control groups among female subjects. Two-sample t-test with results presented for GRF-corrected p < 0.01 and a cluster size > 25 voxels.