page_title: Mechanisms of mindfulness meditation
section_title: Attention regulation
hierarchical_section_title: Mechanisms of mindfulness meditation / Attention regulation
caption_attribution_description: English: Sagittal MRI slice with highlighting indicating location of the anterior cingulate cortex.
context_page_description: Mindfulness has been defined in modern psychological terms as "paying attention to relevant aspects of experience in a nonjudgmental manner", and maintaining attention on present moment experience with an attitude of openness and acceptance. Meditation is a platform used to achieve mindfulness. Both practices, mindfulness and meditation, have been "directly inspired from the Buddhist tradition" and have been widely promoted by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to have a positive impact on several psychiatric problems such as depression and therefore has formed the basis of mindfulness programs such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based pain management. The applications of mindfulness meditation are well established, however the mechanisms that underlie this practice are yet to be fully understood.
  Four components of mindfulness meditation have been proposed to describe much of the mechanism of action by which mindfulness meditation may work: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and change in perspective on the self. All of the components described above are connected to each other.
context_section_description: Attention regulation is the task of focusing attention on an object, acknowledging any distractions, and then returning your focus back to the object. Some evidence for mechanisms responsible for attention regulation during mindfulness meditation are shown below.
  Mindfulness meditators showed greater activation of rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This suggests that meditators have a stronger processing of conflict/distraction and are more engaged in emotional regulation. However, as the meditators become more efficient at focused attention, regulation becomes unnecessary and consequentially decreases activation of ACC in the long term.
  The cortical thickness in the dorsal ACC was also found to be greater in the gray matter of experienced meditators.
  There is an increased frontal midline theta rhythm, which is related to attention demanding tasks and is believed to be indicative of ACC activation. High midline theta rhythm has been associated with lowest anxiety score in the Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS), the highest score in the extrovertive scale of the Maudsley Personality Inventory (MPI) and the lowest score in the neurotic scale of MPI.
  The ACC detects conflicting information coming from distractions. When a person is presented with a conflicting stimulus, the brain initially processes the stimulus incorrectly. This is known as error-related negativity (ERN). Before the ERN reaches a threshold, the correct conflict  is detected by the frontocentral N2. After the correction, the rostral ACC is activated and allows for executive attention to the correct stimulus. Therefore, mindfulness meditation could potentially be a method for treating attention related disorders such as ADHD and bipolar disorder.
caption: Anterior cingulate cortex
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