Meditation can increase telomerase activity, which is associated with decreased health risks and diseases. This study found that participants in a three-month intensive meditation retreat showed increased telomerase activity, along with improvements in purpose in life, perceived control, and decreased neuroticism. The changes in telomerase activity were correlated with changes in psychological measures, suggesting that meditation can influence telomere length through psychological factors.

Expert meditators experience less unpleasantness from pain than novices, despite similar intensity ratings. This difference is linked to enhanced activity in the brain's salience network during pain, suggesting that meditation can modify the emotional response to pain and facilitate quicker habituation to repeated pain stimuli.

This paper investigates the emotional impact of mind wandering, utilizing a phone app to collect real-time data from thousands of participants worldwide, revealing that mind-wandering occurs frequently across various activities and is associated with decreased happiness. The findings suggest that the content of one's thoughts has a more significant influence on happiness than the nature of the activity being performed, highlighting the cognitive and emotional costs of not living in the moment.

This study compares activity in the default mode network (DMN) between meditation and an active task, for both meditators and non-meditators. The paper finds evidence that suppression of DMN processing may represent a central neural process in long-term meditation, and suggest that meditation leads to relatively reduced DMN processing beyond that observed during active cognitive tasks.

This paper measures the propensity for people to mind wander in both laboratory settings and every day life. The authors find that the propensity to mind wander is a stable cognitive characteristic, representing an individual dif- ference that is reliable across time, activities, and contexts, consistent with the idea that mind wandering represents a failure of executive control.

This study takes a group of untrained meditators and puts them through an 8-week course in Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The study finds that the meditation group have brain activity implying a more positive emotional frame. Furthermore, the meditation group had a significantly stronger immune response to a flu vaccine than the non-meditators. The authors conclude that a short training program in mindfulness meditation has demonstrable effects on both brain and immune function.

This study compares the brain wave activity of a group of seasoned meditators to that of meditation novices, both at rest and during meditation. It finds that experienced meditators generate extremely high amounts of gamma brain waves, associated with enhanced perception, consciouness, attention and memory. These gamma waves are elevated both in- and out- side of meditation. More meditation experience is correlated with stronger gamma waves.

This study presents the first fMRI and EEG evidence of the neural effects of jhana meditation. The results show that jhana meditation quiets the brain, while simultaneously increasing activity in the brain's pleasure centers and areas associated with attention and self-control.