How long-term mindfulness meditation practice affects the brain mechanisms of attention?

Abstract

In the last few decades, the beneficial effects of meditation and mindfulness have been broadly researched. Because attention plays a key role in mindfulness, it has been assumed that long-term practice of mindfulness meditation also has an impact on attention on neurophysiological level.In the current study, we explored how the long-term practice of mindfulness meditation affects the brain mechanisms of attention. We compared two groups, long-term meditation practisers and meditation novices. EEGscanning was conducted during an attention task of dichotic listening, where two stories were listened simultaneously, and participants were asked to concentrate in only one of the stories at a time. We did not find a difference between meditators and novices in their neural correlations of attention or inhibition. We, however, found out that the long-term meditation practitioners differ from the meditation novices in the hemispheric ditribution of activation during the listening task.