Inward attention as a mental health tool

From an early age, people learn the importance of paying attention to their surroundings. The value of paying attention to their internal environment is less emphasized. Neuroscientists are increasingly studying how looking inward through mindfulness training can impact everything from depression and memory to stress levels and aging.

Researchers are working to understand the neural mechanisms underlying these brain changes, and hope to uncover best practices for people who want to incorporate mindfulness into their lives.

“Attention training is a mechanism for training the brain,” says Bowdoin College’s Erika Nijhas, who chaired a session on new research on mindfulness at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting in Toronto. “This work to understand the neural mechanisms at play in mindfulness training points to a potential pathway towards improving cognitive performance, but there are no shortcuts. It takes practice.”

Cognitive neuroscientists presenting their latest research findings at CNS 2024 are excited about the potential benefits of mindfulness training not only for individuals but also for researchers exploring the roots of brain cognition. There is. Together, their research suggests that individual differences in sensory and cognitive processing in our brains may predict mental health and may be amenable to training with new technological applications.

appeal to inner senses

Tuning interoception, how someone senses the internal state of their body, is a key component of mindfulness training that can help manage mood disorders such as depression.

Norman Favre from the University of Toronto Mississauga says, “Interoception is important in depression because our emotions are connected to our visceral physical sensations and to these systems that help us understand and put those emotions into context.” This is because it consists of both a cognitive evaluation of the sense of “For example, a pounding in the stomach may be interpreted as arousal or anxiety, depending on the situation and assessment habits.”

Farb and his colleagues are working to understand how the brain processes these interoceptive signals. They found that training that focuses on internal attention “draws resources away from deeply ingrained habits of appraisal, enhances the integration of new sensations and emotions, and helps people improve their relationships with themselves and others.” He has discovered that it is enough to get him out of a deadlock. the world around them,” he says.

A large-scale neuroimaging study of vulnerability to relapse in depression has revealed that Neuroimage clinicalFarb et al. found that one of the biggest indicators of past, present, and future depression is the extent to which an individual has impaired sensory and motor processing.

People who maintained this processing, rather than inhibiting it, had much lower rates of depression relapse, despite having a history of depression that indicates a higher risk of relapse. “This result is in contrast to other neural indicators of depression, which suggest that it is caused by overactivity in areas that support judgment and evaluation. And, as a sign of mental resilience, maintaining a sense of well-being during times of stress “It shows the importance of this,” Dr. Farb said.

In another series of studies published in Eneuro, Farb et al. focused specifically on paying attention to the breath, a central practice in mindfulness training. They found that attention to external sensations, such as vision, activated the corresponding visual cortex, whereas attention to breathing tended to reduce activity in the cerebral cortex, which includes areas where appraisal and cognitive control take place. did.

“This suggests that mindfulness practice may help people use their attention to avoid overusing their brains in the first place, freeing them from rumination and judgment,” Farb said. says.

“This also has interesting implications for how interoception differs from external sensation. Interoceptive processing is a process that is continuously expressed in the brain to regulate biological processes such as breathing and heartbeat. You just have to be quiet to detect it.”

As Farb’s team’s research continues to understand how paying attention to our breath changes brain processes, we’re also excited to begin applying what we’ve learned in technology-driven applications. There is. They hope to create “micro-interventions” such as daily self-reflection that allow individuals to tune into their interoception and manage their emotions.

“There is still much work to be done to make mindfulness communicable, relevant and useful to the current generation of humans on the planet,” he says.

Harness the power of technology

For the past decade, David Ziegler has been working on developing meditation-inspired digital games rooted in the fundamental concept of inner attention. His team at Neuroscape at the University of California, San Francisco has completed clinical trials and game testing with several groups to make meditation practice accessible to anyone, anywhere.

“Not everyone will resonate with this practice, but they should at least be given the opportunity to approach it in an effective way and decide for themselves whether they think they can benefit from it,” he says. To tell.

Their intermediary app, MediTrain, is rooted in fundamental research into neuroplasticity, specifically how the brain compensates for deficits in attentional control.

At CNS 2024, Ziegler will present data from recently published papers using the app in young adults, older adults, and neglected youth, as well as new research in healthy older adults. Across all studies, researchers found alertness benefits from digital training, and the latest study found that training also led to lower stress reactivity and lengthening of telomeres (blood biomarkers of cellular aging). did.

The app uses an adaptive algorithm that makes sessions harder when an individual is doing well and easier when they are struggling. “This is a personalized experience for each individual at every point in their training,” Ziegler explains.

In one of the studies published in nature human behaviorresearchers recruited healthy young people to participate in six weeks of meditation training via an app.

The researchers found that both sustained attention and working memory improved in this group, something that had previously proven difficult for researchers. These improvements were associated with positive changes in key neural signatures of attentional control. Thus, by focusing their attention inward, young people were able to improve their outward attention.

Ziegler said the biggest challenge in the study is determining who responds to meditation and what “dose” is needed to reap its benefits. “I truly believe that technology is the key to answering these questions,” he says.

“One of the biggest studies we’re going to do is a national dose-response study of MediTrain in thousands of seniors across the country, which is actually a completely mobile, digital form of meditation. can only be done.”

Researchers participating in the CNS 2024 Symposium on Mindfulness and Meditation are keen to spread the potential benefits of these practices to a wider population. Newhas, Farb, and Ziegler are all researchers and practitioners of mindfulness and meditation, but they may have had some initial hesitation or skepticism.

“As a scientist, I’m always a skeptic and ask, is it really worth all the hype?” Nyhas says her work in this field is part of an eight-week course in mindfulness-based stress reduction. He says it was inspired by. She will present the results of her research using principles from that course to study changes in episodic memory.

“I see mindfulness training everywhere, and I don’t know if it means anything, but I was shocked to see the results we got in the lab.” She hopes that by discovering the underlying mechanisms behind , she and others will be able to utilize mindfulness training as a tool for cognitive enhancement.