Schedule of Events | Symposia

Dynamics of neural recruitment surrounding thought reports during breath-focused meditation

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Andre Zamani¹ (azamani@psych.ubc.ca), Douglas Forrest¹, Jennifer Burrell¹, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Spontaneous thoughts are pervasive in conscious experience; however, it remains difficult to study the neural mechanisms supporting their initial generation given the challenge of self-reporting their conscious onset. Past research has shown that mindfulness meditation experience can enhance detection for subtle mental events, suggesting a potential synergy with neuroimaging to investigate neural activations in the time leading up to spontaneous thought self-reports (i.e., putatively during preconscious thought generation). Here, we performed fMRI scanning on experienced mindfulness meditators (n = 17) reporting on the conscious arising of spontaneous thoughts during breath-focused meditation. Whole-brain task-evoked brain networks extracted using finite impulse response models with principal component analysis reveal Default Network BOLD signal increases prior to spontaneous thought reports that is not exhibited by other functional networks. To better understand the temporal order of BOLD increases within the Default Network, individual finite impulse responses models were extracted from native space grey matter ROIs throughout the network. These findings illustrate how the Default Network crucially underlies spontaneous thought generation. Future work will adapt the paradigm to precision fMRI to measure BOLD signal changes at the level of person-specific network parcellations.

Topic Area: THINKING: Other