Neuroimaging study suggests mindfulness meditation lowers sensory gating

People who regularly practice mindfulness meditation appear to experience bodily sensations more readily than others, but this heightened awareness may not actually make them more accurate. A new study published in Psychophysiology found that experienced meditators were more likely to report feeling a faint touch, even when no touch was delivered — a behavioral shift linked to changes in brain activity before the sensation. These results suggest that mindfulness may lower the brain’s threshold for perceiving stimuli.

Mindfulness meditation often involves focusing attention on internal bodily sensations. Past research has found that such practices can promote emotional regulation and reduce stress, depression, and anxiety. However, the mechanisms behind these benefits remain under debate.

One proposal is that mindfulness enhances interoception — the ability to detect internal bodily signals — and that this skill may help people manage their emotional and physical experiences. But it’s unclear whether long-term mindfulness practice actually improves objective sensory performance, or simply changes the way people interpret their bodily experiences.

“For years, my co-authors and I have been fascinated by how contemplative practice changes the way the brain perceives and regulates emotions. My own meditation practice has made me curious about the link between bodily attention and emotional tone,” said study author Maik Mylius, a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Computer Science & Campus Institute Data Science at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

“Much of the earlier work looked at vision or broad attention; we wanted to zoom in on the tactile domain because touch provides a direct window into body awareness and interoception, both central to many mindfulness traditions and also to emotion regulation. By combining a classic somatosensory signal-detection task with EEG we asked whether expert meditators detect faint tactile stimuli more accurately (i.e., show higher sensory sensitivity) or whether they simply adopt a different decision strategy when judging such stimuli. At the same time, we looked at whether the gating of attention is regulated when expecting the onset of the stimulus.”

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For their study, the researchers compared 31 experienced mindfulness meditators to 33 non-meditators who regularly read for at least five hours a week. This reading control group helped rule out general effects of sustained attention or inactivity. Both groups were matched in age, gender, handedness, and other characteristics, and all participants were free of neurological or psychiatric conditions.

Participants completed a somatosensory signal detection task in which faint electrical stimuli were delivered to the finger on some trials, while on other trials no stimulation occurred. Sometimes, a brief flash of light accompanied the touch or non-touch, although the light was uninformative. After each trial, participants indicated whether they believed they felt a touch.

Using this method, researchers measured two aspects of perception: sensitivity (how accurately participants could detect actual touch) and decision criterion (how readily they said “yes” to feeling a touch). Alongside this task, researchers recorded participants’ brain activity using electroencephalography, or EEG, focusing on alpha-band oscillations in the somatosensory cortex just before each trial — brain rhythms known to influence perception and attention. Participants also completed a battery of self-report questionnaires assessing mindfulness, emotional regulation, and interoceptive sensibility.

The findings contradicted some earlier assumptions. Meditators did not show better sensitivity in detecting the faint touches compared to non-meditators. In other words, they were not more accurate in distinguishing real from illusory stimuli. Instead, they had a lower decision threshold — they were more likely to report feeling something, regardless of whether it was present. This more liberal response style was evident even though both groups received the same intensity of electrical stimulation.

“We expected meditators to be more accurate, but accuracy was unchanged; only the bias moved,” Mylius told PsyPost. “That dissociation suggests the practice alters sensory gating or decision-making rather than raw perceptual acuity.”

EEG data revealed that this behavioral difference was tied to distinct patterns in brain activity. Meditators showed significantly lower levels of alpha-band power in the somatosensory cortex just before the stimulus was delivered, both in absolute terms and relative to a pre-trial baseline. Trial-by-trial analysis confirmed that lower prestimulus alpha activity predicted a higher likelihood of reporting a touch, regardless of whether one occurred. This pattern supports the idea that reduced alpha activity reflects a more “open” or excitable state in the sensory cortex, making it more likely that ambiguous internal sensations will be interpreted as external stimuli.

Interestingly, while this shift in brain state increased report rates, it did not enhance sensory precision. There was no evidence that lower alpha power improved sensitivity — the ability to correctly identify real touches. Instead, it appears to have increased both hits and false alarms, leading to more overall reports without better discrimination.

Beyond these perceptual changes, meditators also reported significantly higher interoceptive sensibility across most domains on the MAIA-2 questionnaire, including greater awareness of internal sensations, better attention regulation, and less tendency to ignore or worry about uncomfortable bodily feelings. They also reported lower levels of expressive suppression (an emotion regulation strategy that involves hiding one’s feelings) and less difficulty describing emotions. These findings are consistent with previous studies showing that mindfulness practice is associated with greater emotional and bodily awareness.

“Long-term meditation practice doesn’t necessarily make your senses sharper in this kind of lab test,” Mylius explained. “It seems to shift the decision threshold – or criterio n- you use when deciding ‘Did I just feel something?’ Expert meditators were more willing to say ‘yes’ to near-threshold tactile events, and this more liberal bias was preceded by lower prestimulus alpha power—an EEG signature of reduced sensory gating. In plain language: mindfulness may teach the brain to keep the gate a bit more open, letting weak bodily signals reach awareness that non-meditators might ignore.”

Like any study, there are caveats to consider. Because it used a cross-sectional design, the study cannot determine whether mindfulness practice caused the observed differences or whether people with certain perceptual traits are more drawn to meditation. The reading control group may also differ from the meditators in lifestyle factors not captured by the study.

The researchers also caution that although EEG alpha suppression is often interpreted as increased attentional readiness, it may also reflect reduced top-down filtering — a shift toward more bottom-up processing of sensory input. From a predictive processing perspective, this might mean that meditators rely less on prior expectations and more on incoming sensory data, potentially leading to a more present-centered experience of the body.

“Our design was cross-sectional, so we can’t prove meditation caused the bias shift—highly body-aware people might simply be drawn to intensive practice,” Mylius said. “The sample (31 experts, 33 controls) was relatively small, EEG scalp recordings limit spatial precision, and our ‘experts’ came from several traditions. Future longitudinal work with larger groups, within-tradition sampling, and source-localized neural measures is needed.”

The study, “Meditation expertise influences response bias and prestimulus alpha activity in the somatosensory signal detection task,” was authored by Maik Mylius, Simon Guendelman, Fivos Iliopoulos, Vittorio Gallese, and Laura Kaltwasser.