Integrating Magnetic Imaging With Rich Phenotypes

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.

Inclusion criteria

• Must be 21 years of age or older
• Must speak English
• Must be a registered attendee of the advanced week-long meditation retreat
• Must be in generally good health
• Must agree to provide blood and buccal samples before and after the retreat
• Must be willing to wear a Garmin device for the entire retreat
• Must agree to fMRI scans before and after the retreat
• Must agree to qEEG measurements before, during, and after the retreat
• Must complete the research consent in its entirety
• Must be willing to complete self-report surveys for physical and emotional well-being

Exclusion criteria

• Younger than 21 years of age
• Non-English speaking
• Not a registered attendee of the advanced week-long meditation retreat
• Not willing to complete the research consent
• Has a serious health condition
• Not willing to provide blood or buccal samples
• Does not agree to fMRI scans
• Not willing to wear a Garmin watch
• Does not agree to qEEG measurements
• Not willing or able to complete all self-report surveys