Heartbeat Evoked Potentials Increase With Meditative Depth: Implications for Personalized, Multimodal Neurofeedback
Mihir Nath & Nicco Reggente
Quick Summary
This study examined Heartbeat Evoked Potentials (HEPs) during meditation in expert Vipassana practitioners, revealing progressive amplitude increases tracking self-reported meditative depth in real-time. While traditional EEG markers often reflect non-specific states like relaxation or drowsiness, HEPs capture the heart’s direct influence on brain activity—a neurophysiological marker inherently personalized to each practitioner’s embodied experience. This heart-brain coupling, robust over the C3 region, serves as a precise indicator of interoceptive processing, addressing a core dysfunction across mental health conditions that meditation ameliorates. The specificity of HEPs as a marker of meditative depth, combined with their accessibility via single-channel EEG, makes them ideal for neurofeedback interventions fostering heightened embodied awareness. By quantifying the heart’s causal influence on neural signatures during meditation, this approach offers a tractable pathway toward personalized meditation training, illuminating mechanisms underlying its broad therapeutic effects.