For example, a recent fMRI study showed that a form of mantra meditation led to greater BOLD signal in the bilateral IFG than a concentration meditation task (Davanger et al. 2010). It is possible that novices practice loving kindness with a greater reliance on inner speech (“may X be happy”), whereas meditators rest more in an embodied feeling of loving kindness. As noted above, loving kindness practice initially relies on the silent repetition of phrases to generate the feeling of loving kindness, and as practice develops, the phrases may be dropped to rest in the feeling itself. This may be reflected in the group differences found in the IFG in this study, but should be tested

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical across loving kindness training, and would be bolstered by self-report of this change in cognitive strategy. On the basis of the current findings and our previous work, we then measured seed-based connectivity with the PCC/PCu, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to investigate functional connectivity with this brain region implicated in self-related processing. Although our prior study (Brewer et al. 2011)

used a PCC seed derived from the AZD0530 literature, this study used a data-driven approach, by seeding a sphere around the peak voxel in the PCC/PCu that differed in ICD between meditators and novices during loving kindness meditation. In this way, we first identified the group difference in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical ICD in this a priori region of interest during loving kindness, and we then determined which specific Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical connections with this brain region differed between groups. We found that meditators showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness than novices between the PCC/PCu and the left IFG. One interpretation of this finding is that when the mind wanders, meditators return to reliance on the silent

repetition of phrases, or to emotional processing or empathy, to reground themselves in the feeling of loving Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical kindness, hence increased coincident activity between the PCC/PCu and the left IFG. This interpretation would be bolstered by a neuroimaging study with self-report in which meditators’ report that they indeed use the phrases to reground their Methisazone practice in this way. In contrast, novices showed greater functional connectivity than meditators between the PCC/PCu and other cortical midline structures including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); and the bilateral parahippocampus/hippocampus. The PCC/PCu and MPFC are hubs of the DMN with functional connections to all other DMN regions (Buckner et al. 2008), and taken together with the ACC are the regions most consistently implicated in self-related processing (Northoff et al. 2006; Qin and Northoff 2011). The parahippocampal cortex and hippocampal formation are also considered components of the DMN (Andrews-Hanna et al. 2010). Many studies have shown meditation effects in the hippocampus, most studies reporting structural changes such as increased gray matter volume (Holzel et al. 2008; Luders et al.