The Neuroscience of Meditation

At the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior in Wisconsin-Madison, an unusual scene unfolded: A Buddhist monk sat on the table of a brain scanner (MRI) and gathered up his orange-red robe. He allowed Richard J. Davidson and his team to use state-of-the-art equipment to observe what was happening in his brain as he practiced an ancient meditation technique. Meditation has long since emerged from the realm of esotericism. It is considered a legitimate subject of research not only within the fields of cognitive, affective, and social neuroscience. An increasing number of doctors and psychologists are also using meditation practices to treat a wide variety of conditions or to support their therapy, ranging from chronic pain to stress-induced inflammatory responses and Depression. ▸ Perceiving and Accepting – How Meditation Heals

“Through meditation, we ourselves have the opportunity to train the mind and promote our health,” says psychologist Britta Hölzel, who studies the neural correlates of meditation. According to her, the regulation of emotions, attention, and introspection – even compassion and attentiveness – are skills that can be trained, just like the long jump or cycling.

This is possible because the brain is not a rigidly wired machine. It changes with the experiences we have. For example, in musicians and even in people who send a lot of text messages, the area of the brain representing the heavily used fingers is enlarged. Researchers call this phenomenon neural plasticity.

The first EEG studies involving yoga masters in India and Zen Buddhists in Japan date back to the 1950s. In the 1970s, American researchers investigated the effects of Transcendental Meditation, which was all the rage in the U.S. at the time. Today, in addition to the EEG, researchers have access to magnetic resonance imaging, or the “brain scanner.” Since the turn of the millennium, the neuroscience of meditation has been experiencing a veritable boom. “It’s almost eerie to me,” admits Britta Hölzel.

The psychologist, who conducted research in Sara Lazar’s lab at Harvard Medical School – and now runs her own practice in Munich – was able to demonstrate with her research group that even an eight-week training program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) leaves clear traces in the brain. MBSR is a meditation program that incorporates elements from yoga and Buddhist meditation. It teaches participants to focus on the present moment and to approach it with an attitude of openness and non-judgment. After completing the training program, the participants showed an increase in Gray matter density in areas such as the Hippocampus. “This is part of the Limbic system and is important for Memory and the regulation of arousal in emotional situations,” explains Hölzel.

Using a game from the repertoire of game theory, Helen Y. Wang and colleagues from Richard J. Davidson’s lab were able to show that just two weeks of training in compassion for others led the participants to act more altruistically. The participants spent 30 minutes a day practicing compassion toward a close friend, a stranger, a difficult person, and themselves. Before and after the training program, their brain activity was measured using Functional magnetic resonance imaging They were compared to a control group that, instead of compassion training, underwent exercises to reframe personal stressful situations. Following the two-week training, participants in both groups were asked to play a distribution game that tested their willingness to use their own money to compensate when someone else distributed money unfairly. The results showed that participants in the compassion group spent significantly more money on others. This was accompanied by greater activity in the inferior parietal Cortex and the dorsolateral Prefrontal cortex compared to the period before the compassion training. Both brain regions are associated with social cognition and emotion regulation. Compassion and altruism, therefore, are not traits that a person either has or does not have; they can be cultivated, according to the study’s authors. In addition, the participants reported greater well-being, lower stress responses, and a better overall mood. Thus, compassion training benefits not only others.

The effects of meditation can also be detected in Neurotransmitter levels. Chris C. Streeter, Perry Renshaw, and colleagues had a group of experienced yoga meditators perform yoga exercises for one hour, while a control group was instructed to rest for one hour. After the exercises, they found a 27 percent increase in the concentration of the neurotransmitter GABA in the yoga group. GABA has a relaxing effect and reduces feelings of anxiety. They were unable to measure any change in the control group.

Antoine Lutz, who also worked in Richard J. Davidson’s lab – and is now at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center – is particularly interested in the neural correlates of the state of mental clarity reported by experienced meditators. He found that these meditation experts can exhibit strong oscillations in the gamma-wave range during meditation. These brain frequencies are related to learning and the synchronization of different brain regions. The researchers not only found that the oscillations in experts during meditation differed significantly from those of beginners, but also that baseline activity before the start of meditation was higher in experts than in beginners.

Meditation techniques aimed at achieving an open state of mind – one that observes without judgment – can also help manage pain. Paradoxically, they lead to a more vivid Perception of pain, yet the pain feels less intense. The research team led by Antoine Lutz and Richard J. Davidson administered painful heat stimuli to the arms of meditation experts while they meditated inside an MRI scanner. After the stimulus ended, the participants were asked to rate how painful it was on a scale. They rated the stimuli as less severe than a control group. At the same time, their brains showed increased activity in the anterior Insula and the Anterior cingulate cortex These regions form the “salience network,” which serves to identify the most important stimuli among those present. At the same time, the researchers measured lower baseline activity in these areas and in the Amygdala before the pain stimulus began. This effect was stronger the more experienced the participants were in meditation. At the same time, the brains of those accustomed to meditation showed faster neural Habituation: they became accustomed to the pain stimulus more quickly, and their response weakened. There are many ways to alleviate, if not the pain itself, then at least the sensation of pain. Meditation has the advantage that it is available anytime and anywhere to anyone who has learned it.

Beyond its medical benefits, some philosophers have also long expressed an interest in meditation. “I don’t understand how the philosophy of mind could have ignored this topic for decades,” says Mainz-based philosopher Thomas Metzinger. He emphasizes the ability of meditators to induce stable and reproducible mental states and to describe them clearly in order to better understand the phenomenon of consciousness. And he is convinced that meditation makes the mind more independent and free: “Meditation increases mental autonomy.”

But not everyone is enthusiastic about the current boom in the neuroscience of meditation. Britta Hölzel, for example, fears it’s a flash in the pan that could quickly fizzle out if unrealistic expectations are stoked now and then end in disappointment. Others ask why we even need a neuroscientific explanation for a phenomenon that has proven its effectiveness for centuries. But the meditation researcher does not accept this objection. “For one thing, it’s about selecting from the variety of meditation practices what is best suited for the desired application,” explains Hölzel. This is because the very different techniques – ranging from the whirling dervishes of the Sufis to tai chi and Buddhist meditation – likely also engage very different regions of the brain. Furthermore, these meditation techniques originated in Asian cultures and are closely interwoven with them. It isn’t necessarily sensible to transfer all of their elements to the Western world.

“On the other hand, our goal is to better understand the mind. Meditation can provide an important pathway to this,” says Hölzel. And it’s also partly about reputation: “Of course, people who consider meditation to be an esoteric practice find it easier to embrace it if there is a scientific explanation for how it works,” Hölzel notes from her experience. The researchers are currently working intensively on this explanation.

• Dr. Britta Hölzel, Certified Psychologist, “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain Gray matter density,” Psychiatry Res, 191(1):36–43, Jan. 30, 2011, to the article
• Dr. Britta Hölzel, licensed psychologist, “Neural mechanisms of symptom improvements in generalized anxiety disorder following mindfulness training,” Neuroimage: Clinical 2:448–458, 2013, text
• Britta Hölzel’s website with links to her work, URL: https://www.brittahoelzel.de/publikationen/wissenschaftliche-publikationen/ [As of: September 7, 2026].
• RJ Davidson, Antoine Lutz, “Buddha’s Brain, Neuroplasticity, and Meditation,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 25(1):176–174, January 1, 2008, to the text
• Meditation Research in Sara Lazar’s Lab, URL: http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/ [Accessed: September 8, 2026]

First published on April 29, 2014
Last updated on September 4, 2026