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Psychology› Clinical Psychology› Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions

Contemplative neuroscience — Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and brain structure

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Psychology › Clinical PsychologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: contemplative neuroscienceTarget: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and brain structureStage: randomized trial

Hypothesis

Eight weeks of MBSR would change grey matter volume, density or cortical thickness, as widely cited earlier studies reported.

What failed

Pooling two three-arm randomised trials (218 meditation-naive participants: 75 MBSR, 73 matched active control, 70 waitlist), MRI showed no MBSR-specific structural change against either control, at the whole-brain level or in regions taken from prior MBSR studies.

Broken assumption

A short mindfulness course produces measurable structural brain change beyond what an equivalent active program does.

Why

The authors point to major methodological limitations in the earlier studies; with a larger sample and an active control, the reported neuroplastic effects did not appear.

From the published paper: Kral et al. Science Advances, 2022. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.