Changes in Perception and Cognition During a Meditation Retreat

Summary

This study aims at assessing neuro-behavioral changes occuring during an intensive ten days meditation retreat. The investigator will study changes in tactile, auditory and pain perceptions as well as changes in cognitive and affective mental contents and their neural markers, as measured by self-reports, EEG event-related potentials, and functional connectivity of resting state fMRI. He will recruit healthy participants with a prior meditation experience. They will be randomly assigned to two groups, one active group who will undergo measurements just before, during and 3 weeks after the retreat. The other group will serve of control for task habituation, control participants will undergo the same measurements, equally spaced in time, but before the retreat. The main hypothesis is that meditation training strengthens meta-awareness, attention capacities resulting in enhanced bodily- and self-awareness during sensory perception and emotion regulation during pain.

Conditions

• Healthy Volunteers

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

10 days intensive meditation retreat

The intervention consists in a 10 days contemplative retreat, with 6 to 8 hours of sitting and walking meditation per day, and 1 or 2 hours of meditation teachings. The meditation practice will mainly train in mindfulness practice. Mindfulness meditation intends to train attention to detect and regulate afflictive cognitive and emotional patterns. Mindfulness practice requires skills involved in openness to experience, in monitoring the focus of attention and in detecting distraction, disengaging attention from the source of distraction, and flexibly (re)directing and engaging attention to the intended object. A brief introduction to loving-kindness and compassion meditation will also be present throughout the retreat.

BEHAVIORAL

Waiting for a 10 days intensive meditation retreat

At the time of measure, participants in this group are waiting to participate to the same meditation retreat as the active group. They may perform their own daily meditation practices as usual.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Hospices Civils de Lyon

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Antoine LUTZ, PhD · Centre de recherche de Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL)

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

67 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-10-02

Primary Completion

2021-04-10

Completion

2021-04-10

Countries

• France

Study Locations