| According to a new study, not only does mindfulness meditation reduce pain more than a placebo, but it also uses different neural patterns when reducing pain, indicating that it is not acting through the placebo effect. Published in Biological Psychiatry, the study was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and conducted by researchers from the University of California San Diego and Dartmouth College. The placebo effect has been shown to engage brain mechanisms that modify beliefs, expectations, and conditioning to reduce a personâs experience of pain. Several clinical trials suggest that mindfulness meditation can lead to lasting improvements in chronic pain, and this effect has been thought to occur through activation of the placebo response. However, this new study, which paired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a type of supervised machine learning called multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), showed that mindfulness meditation in fact evokes pain neural patterns, or signatures, in a way that differs from the placebo effect. | 
