Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Meditation has excellent value as a possible pain relief intervention, such as for patients living with chronic pain conditions. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a medical imaging technique that measures the amount of hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein in the blood. By doing so, NIRS can measure local tissue oxygen levels and blood volume, values used to monitor brain activity. I propose observing the effect of a 10-minute period of mindfulness meditation practice on short-term pain experienced during the cold pressor test, a method of using ice-cold water to safely administer controlled pain levels. Volunteers will perform a brief cold pressor test either with or without meditating beforehand. I will monitor each group for facial expression responses to pain during their respective task and record their levels of self-reported pain intensity and unpleasantness. Using NIRS during each task, I will also monitor brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, the front-most part of the brain involved in controlling decision-making, attention, and emotion. I am interested in examining how meditating before a painful experience affects the processing of painful sensations in the brain and how these potential changes relate to differences in other measures of pain perception. This study will contribute to our understanding of how meditation interacts with pain, and it will also indicate whether NIRS is effective for measuring this phenomenon. NIRS is a safe, affordable, easy-to-use imaging technique that has value in clinical settings. Thus, determining how well NIRS measures pain in this controlled setting compared to well-established pain measurements may support the possible use of NIRS in real-world settings, such as therapeutic interventions for chronic pain patients.