Short-term meditation increases blood flow in anterior cingulate cortex and insula

If this is true then the ER doctors should immediately have you meditating to get as much blood flowing to your brain as possible. What are they waiting for?
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00212/full?

Yi-Yuan Tang^1,2*, Qilin Lu³, Hongbo Feng^3,4, Rongxiang Tang⁵ and Michael I. Posner²

• ¹Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
• ²Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
• ³Institute of Neuroinformatics and Lab for Body and Mind, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
• ⁴First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
• ⁵Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Asymmetry in frontal electrical activity has been reported to be associated with positive mood. One form of mindfulness meditation, integrative body-mind training (IBMT) improves positive mood and neuroplasticity. The purpose of this study is to determine whether short-term IBMT improves mood and induces frontal asymmetry. This study showed that 5-days (30-min per day) IBMT significantly enhanced cerebral blood flow (CBF) in subgenual/adjacent ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex and insula. The results showed that both IBMT and relaxation training increased left laterality of CBF, but only IBMT improved CBF in left ACC and insula, critical brain areas in self-regulation.

Introduction

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to produce positive effects on psychological wellbeing (Hölzel et al., 2011). As an important benefit of meditation practice, changes in self-reported positive mood or emotion are often observed (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1992; Tang et al., 2007). In particular, one form of meditation, the integrative body-mind training (IBMT) that originates from traditional Chinese medicine, improves attention, self-regulation, and mood after only few hours of training in comparison with relaxation training in a random assignment design (Tang et al., 2007; Ding et al., 2014).

Since late 1970s, frontal EEG asymmetry has had widespread use in measuring individual differences in emotional state. In general, it is believed a left-sided frontal activation indicates a positive emotion, although the evidence is not always consistent with this view (Allen and Kline, 2004; Allen et al., 2004; Cacioppo, 2004; Travis and Arenander, 2004, 2006).

A number of EEG studies have examined the relationship between meditation and frontal asymmetry (Davidson et al., 2003; Moyer et al., 2011). For example, 8-weeks mindfulness-based stress reduction, in comparison to a wait-list control, increased left-sided lateralization of alpha power and decreased negative affect (Davidson et al., 2003). Another study suggested 5-weeks of meditation shifts EEG asymmetry toward a pattern associated with positive emotion compared to a waiting-list control although there was no significant difference between the two groups (Moyer et al., 2011).

However, previous studies have used EEG with low spatial resolution and have not involved an active control group. To our knowledge, only one single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging study reported a marginal significant left frontal asymmetry of cerebral blood flow (CBF) but this study involved a sample of 12 long-term meditators compared to normal controls (Newberg et al., 2010) and was not a randomized test with an active control. Thus, we set out to apply brain imaging to investigate the CBF asymmetry induced by short-term training in a relatively large sample of 40 undergraduates with a random assignment to IBMT or relaxation training groups. We hypothesize that IBMT could improve left frontal CBF at resting state, which may underlie the promotion of positive emotion.