These preliminary results suggest that a cognitive training can induce structural plasticity modifications in brain regions specifically coding for the distal and proximal motor actions the trained verbs refer to.
We further hypothesized that such alterations in behavior, and the associated modifications in brain gene expression profiles, would be transmitted to the offspring, thereby suggestively prepare the offspring for the parental environment.
Then, we performed two ALE analyses to determine whether meditation produces consistent modifications in brain structure and function.
Nucleotides concentrations were measured as described (Akman et al, 2008) with minor modifications in brain, muscle, and liver.
Some neuroimaging studies using O-H2O-PET have confirmed these hypotheses by demonstrating modifications in brain activation associated with neuropsychological impairments following STN DBS.
Recent technologies that can discriminate between various cytosine modifications on a genome-wide scale [ 90- 94] as well as cell-sorting-based analysis [ 113- 115] will empower further characterization of cytosine modifications in brain samples of schizophrenia patients.
The environmental complexity (EC) paradigm has become classic for demonstrating the modifications in brain structure that occur in response to experience and thus provides a set of indices for plasticity in the healthy brain.
A growing amount of research demonstrates that OC use may lead to structural modifications in brain regions implicated in high-order cognitive function [ 35], including regional gray matter volumes in regions associated with the fear extinction network such as the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, cerebellum, and the hippocampus [ 36, 37].
The studies that investigated structural brain modifications in expert meditators (Table 2) focused on brain structural changes after meditation training and/or in expert meditators compared with control participants; they primarily assessed grey matter changes with whole-brain voxel-based morphometry or cortical thickness mapping of MRI data [ 24, 48– 548.
The main aim of the present study was to identify the neural network activated during meditation and to explore structural and functional brain modifications in expert meditators.
