Mindfulness meditation has long been associated with subjective quality of life improvements, however, an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms contributing to these improvements has partly prevented widespread acceptance of mindfulness meditation among healthcare practitioners. Recently, it has been suggested that neurofluid (e.g., cerebrospinal fluid and interstitial fluid) circulation is upregulated during sleep and this upregulation contributes to efficient removal of metabolic and other waste products from the brain. Here, this emerging field will be presented, after which we will provide findings from studies whereby relatively novel magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral assessments are applied in sequence during mindfulness meditation to test fundamental hypotheses regarding whether meditation mimics a mild sleep state, thereby increasing neurofluid circulation, clearance of cerebral waste products, and conferring associated health benefits.

Manus J. Donahue, MBA, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology within the Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology at Vanderbilt Medical Center and serves as Assistant Vice Chair for Research. Dr. Donahue trained at Duke University (BS: Physics; BA: Philosophy), The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (PhD: Biophysics), and the University of Oxford (post-doc: Neurology). His work is focused on using new imaging and computational approaches to characterize tissue function in health and disease and he has led NIH-funded trials whereby these approaches are applied to understand the influence of different behavioral states on brain function, and also applied in patients with atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease, moyamoya disease and syndrome, sickle cell disease, neurodegeneration to evaluate emerging therapies.