Effects of Meditation on Human Well Being

Mind-body interventions including meditation, reconceptualization, and placebo have been shown to improve a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes in both healthy and patient populations. How and what humans think about their health has a significant and quantifiable impact.

Placebo effects, another mind-body technique that creates health improvements, have been shown to impact every major organ system. More recently, open-label placebos, placebos administered without concealment such that the subject is aware of the placebo, have been shown to be effective for a host of health conditions. Open-label placebo effects demonstrate that placebo responses are surprisingly not dependent on deception, positive expectation, or conditioning.

Meditation, yet another mind-body intervention, has been shown to reduce pain, inflammation, stress, anxiety, depression, and to improve immune function, and emotional regulation. Different meditation techniques can produce mystical-type experiences-non-ordinary perceptual, cognitive, and affective states in which the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived is transcended. The specific pathways through which meditation promotes physical and mental health are not yet well understood, but meditation-induced changes in neural activity and on the immune and autonomic nervous systems, as well as meditation-induced molecular changes in gene expression and on the proteome and metabolome suggest that these are both broad and profound.

While each of these mind-body interventions has been studied individually, the combination of meditation, reconceptualization, and open label placebo and their combined effect on health, neural activity, and molecular physiology have never been jointly studied. This exploratory observational study will employ psychometric health questionnaires; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG); and blood plasma-based real time cell metabolic analysis, quantitative assessment of neurite outgrowth, and high-throughput transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to investigate the joint neural and biological effects of these three mind-body interventions in a 7-day retreat setting.