ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide Consortium for Neuroscientific Investigations of Meditation Practices

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 manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past decade, neuroimaging has been used to examine the neuroscientific basis of meditation practices, effects, states, and outcomes for clinical and nonclinical populations. However, the generalizability and replicability of current neuroscientific models of meditation have not yet been established, because 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 magnetic resonance imaging). These limitations have precluded a nuanced and rigorous neuroscientific phenotyping of meditation practices and their potential benefits. Here, we present ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta Analysis)-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 that account for multidomain heterogeneity. ENIGMA-Meditation will inform neuroscientific mechanisms that underlie therapeutic action of meditation practices on psychological and cognitive attributes, thereby advancing the field of meditation and contemplative neuroscience.

Keywords: Consortium; ENIGMA; Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); Meditation; Mindfulness; Neuroimaging.

Figure 1:

Comparison of the traditional meta-analytic approaches with ENIGMA-driven approaches, which can offer greater power to control for, or model, heterogeneity across multiple domains.

Figure 2:

Geographical distribution of the current ENIGMA-Meditation membership (as of April 2024).