Orienting response and frontal midline theta activity: a somatosensory spectral perturbation study

The temporal stability and variability across frequency bands in neural synchrony between primary and secondary somatosensory areas following somatosensory stimulation

“…Our findings suggest that the phase synchrony in the theta band within somatosensory-related cortices may be disconnected in a shorter time compared with that in the alpha band. In accordance with our assumption, a similar reset of theta activity was reported under a repetitive somatosensory stimulation paradigm (Dietl et al, 1999). A phasic increase in the theta band activity coincident with the stimulus train onset was reset to the pre-stimulation level with a short time duration (0.9 Hz) (Dietl et al, 1999).…”

Changes in EEG and autonomic nervous activity during meditation and their association with personality traits

“…Previous studies have suggested that theta and alpha oscillations defined in narrow frequency bands play separate roles in various mental functions such as attention, memory and affective and cognitive processing (Aftanas et al, 1998;Aftanas and Golocheikine, 2001;Basar et al, 2001;Dietl et al, 1999;Klimesch, 1999;Klimesch et al, 1998). In this study, both slow alpha power and fast theta power on EEG significantly increased during meditation, but there was no significant association between their percent changes (Table 1).…”

“…This allows the paradoxical interpretation of the results of this study that the high external attention level characterized by the personality trait of NS is associated with high internal attention. Theta band power increases with the task demand and is related to orienting (Dietl et al, 1999), attention (Basar et al, 2001;Dietl et al, 1999), memory (Klimesch, 1999) and affective processing mechanisms (Aftanas et al, 1998). An increase in theta power during meditation has been frequently reported (Corby et al, 1978;Hebert and Lehmann, 1977;Kubota et al, 2001), and a significant correlation between subjective scores of mindfulness and theta power during meditation has been suggested (Aftanas and Golocheikine, 2001).…”

Manipulating attention via mindfulness induction improves P300-based brain–computer interface performance

“…For example, the spectral analysis results did not replicate those reported in the mindfulness literature [35, 41, 43–45]; however, this study utilized a much shorter (6-min) mindfulness induction technique than typically used and the P300 speller paradigm employs a task that is quite different from studies that conduct spectral analyses. Also, because we employed a between-groups design and used a MMI that entailed a single, short induction, we cannot draw conclusions about any long-term attentional benefits beyond the time necessary for completion of the BCI speller task we employed.…”