Focus on the breath: Brain decoding reveals internal states of attention during meditation

Abstract

Meditation practices are used to cultivate internally-oriented attention to bodily sensations, which may improve health via cognitive and emotion regulation of bodily signals. However, it remains unclear how meditation impacts internal attention states due to lack of measurement tools that can objectively assess mental states during meditation practice itself, and produce time estimates of internal focus at individual or group levels. To address these measurement gaps, we tested the feasibility of applying multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to single-subject fMRI data to (1) learn and recognize internal attentional (IA) states relevant for meditation during a directed IA task, and (2) decode or estimate the presence of those IA states during an independent meditation session. Within a mixed sample of experienced meditators and novice controls (N=16), we first used MVPA to develop single-subject brain classifiers for 5 modes of attention during an IA task in which subjects were specifically instructed to engage in one of five states (i.e., meditation-related states: breath attention, mind wandering, and self-referential processing, and control states: attention to feet and sounds). Using standard cross-validation procedures, MVPA classifiers were trained in five of six IA blocks for each subject, and predictive accuracy was tested on the independent sixth block (iterated until all block volumes were tested, N=2160). Across participants, all five IA states were significantly recognized well above chance (>41% vs. 20% chance). At the individual level, IA states were recognized in most participants (87.5%), suggesting that recognition of IA neural patterns may be generalizable for most participants, particularly experienced meditators. Next, for those who showed accurate IA neural patterns, the originally trained classifiers were then applied to a separate meditation run (10-min) to make an inference about the percentage time engaged in each IA state (breath attention, mind wandering, or self-referential processing). Preliminary group-level analyses demonstrated that during meditation practice, participants spent more time attending to breath compared to mind wandering or self-referential processing. This paradigm established the feasibility of using MVPA classifiers to objectively assess mental states during meditation at the participant level, which holds promise for improved measurement of internal attention states cultivated by meditation.