What Can 55+ Labs Working Together Teach Us About the Brain in Meditation?
A simplified summary of the research
ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide Consortium for Neuroscientific Investigations of Meditation Practices
Ganesan, S., ..., Cain, J. A., ..., King, J.
- Meditation
- Consortium
- Neuroimaging
What's the Point?
Meditation research has generated inconsistent findings, partly because studies are small and use very different methods. Large-scale collaboration has transformed other areas of psychiatry (e.g., ENIGMA)—can it do the same for contemplative science?
A consortium paper launching ENIGMA-Meditation: a worldwide collaboration across 55+ sites, with shared data elements and analytic pipelines designed to make results directly comparable across labs.
Defines the common infrastructure—study designs, imaging protocols, and data-sharing framework—needed to pool neuroimaging data across sites at scale.
Sets the stage for identifying reproducible neural mechanisms of meditation's therapeutic effects and moving the field from small, siloed studies to population-scale discovery.
From the manuscript
ENIGMA-Meditation is a worldwide consortium spanning more than 55 sites that aggregates neuroimaging data to identify reproducible neural mechanisms of meditation. The paper defines shared common data elements, imaging protocols, and analytic pipelines to enable cross-site pooling and moves meditation neuroscience toward population-scale, reproducible discovery.
Ganesan, S., ..., Cain, J. A., ..., King, J. (2024). ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide Consortium for Neuroscientific Investigations of Meditation Practices. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.