ArticleCurrent research in neurobiology2022
Nonlinear EEG signatures of mind wandering during breath focus meditation.
Article in Current research in neurobiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Relative Accuracy of Different Methods for Measuring Mind Wandering Subtypes: A Systematic Review.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Electroencephalographic changes during hyperbaric oxygen therapy in patients with chronic disorders of consciousness.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Cognitive Processing and EEG Complexity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Revisiting alpha-theta cross-frequency dynamics during working memory.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Rapid eye movement sleep displays distinct fractal dynamics between phasic and tonic states.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Meditation and complexity: a review and synthesis of evidence.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Review
- Neurophysiological mechanisms of focused attention meditation: A scoping systematic review.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Meditation induces shifts in neural oscillations, brain complexity, and critical dynamics: novel insights from MEG.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- EEG complexity measures for detecting mind wandering during video-based learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Mindfulness meditation styles differently modulate source-level MEG microstate dynamics and complexity.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Heart-brain Rhythmic Synchronization during Meditation: A Nonlinear Signal Analysis.International journal of yogaArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In meditation practices that involve focused attention to a specific object, novice practitioners often experience moments of distraction (i.e., mind wandering). Previous studies have investigated the neural correlates of mind wandering during meditation practice through Electroencephalography (EEG) using linear metrics (e.g., oscillatory power). However, their results are not fully consistent. Since the brain is known to be a chaotic/nonlinear system, it is possible that linear metrics cannot fully capture complex dynamics present in the EEG signal. In this study, we assess whether nonlinear EEG signatures can be used to characterize mind wandering during breath focus meditation in novice practitioners. For that purpose, we adopted an experience sampling paradigm in which 25 participants were iteratively interrupted during meditation practice to report whether they were focusing on the breath or thinking about something else. We compared the complexity of EEG signals during mind wandering and breath focus states using three different algorithms: Higuchi's fractal dimension (HFD), Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC), and Sample entropy (SampEn). Our results showed that EEG complexity was generally reduced during mind wandering relative to breath focus states. We conclude that EEG complexity metrics are appropriate to disentangle mind wandering from breath focus states in novice meditation practitioners, and therefore, they could be used in future EEG neurofeedback protocols to facilitate meditation practice.
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