The Neuroscience of Meditation

The Neuroscience of Meditation: Understanding Individual Differences explores the individual differences in learning and practicing meditation, while also providing insights on how to learn and practice effectively. The book comprehensively covers the research in brain areas and networks that mediate the positive effects of meditation upon physical and mental health. Though it examines how people differ in how they learn and practice meditation, it underscores how underlying mechanisms differ in learning and practicing meditation and how they remain unclear to researchers. This book addresses the research gap and explores the brain science behind meditation.

• Examines the biological mechanisms that give rise to individual differences
• Incorporates brain imaging and physiological recordings for further measurement of individual differences
• Covers the genetic association between meditation learning and practice
• Explores how meditation changes over the lifespan-from children to seniors

Dr. Tang has an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural background, experience, and expertise in the areas of human neuroscience (e.g., cognitive, affective, social, cultural, and behavioral), health psychology, health science, prevention, and intervention science.

His research mainly focuses on how environment or experience (stress, learning, training, culture) affects self-control, emotion regulation, stress resilience, and decision-making and their interaction with genes to influence health and well-being. Additionally, he investigates both conscious and unconscious changes in healthy behavior, habits, and lifestyles. His translational research focuses on the development and implementation of evidence-based interventions to prevent and ameliorate behavioral problems and mental disorders such as ADHD, learning disabilities, substance use, mood disorders, and stress-related disorders over the lifespan. Dr. Tang’s interdisciplinary research has received support from NIH, the Office of Naval Research/Department of Defense, and private foundations including the John Templeton Foundation and James Bower Foundation. He has published 9 books and over 360 peer-reviewed articles in different academic journals, including Nature Reviews Neuroscience (NRN), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Trends in Cognitive Sciences (TiCS), Neuroimage, and Human Brain Mapping.

Dr. Tang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, and the Center for Behavior Genetics of Aging at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied the neural mechanisms of cognitive control and how psychological interventions improve cognitive, psychological, and mental health using neuroimaging techniques, genetic and psychosocial methods. She also received an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award and NIH’s Mentored Research Scientist Development Award for this work. Dr. Tang’s research encompasses topics from cognitive, clinical, and health neuroscience. In particular, her research focuses on 1) understanding the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive, psychological, and mental health in young and older adulthood, 2) examining individual difference factors (e.g., personality, genetics, and environment) contributing to inter-individual variability in cognitive, psychological, and mental health, as well as trajectories of brain and cognitive aging, 3) investigating and developing psychological interventions to improve health and ameliorate aging-related decline in health and brain functions. Dr. Tang has published over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles on cognitive, clinical, and health neuroscience and co-authored the Elsevier book The Neuroscience of Meditation: Understanding Individual Differences.