Spotlight on: Neurofeedback-guided Meditation for Mental Wellbeing
Dr Saampras Ganesan recently completed his PhD in the Department of Psychiatry, under the supervision of Andrew Zalesky, Brad Moffatt (UoM, Department of Radiology) and Valentina Lorenzetti (Australian Catholic University).
Dr Ganesan is interested in using meditation to improve mental health and wellbeing. As part of his doctoral work, he developed advanced neurofeedback technology that addresses the challenges novice meditators face in learning meditation techniques effectively.
Dr Ganesan is an experienced meditator and has guided many beginners in developing their practice. He led numerous meditation training sessions for staff and students in the Department of Psychiatry. From his experience, many beginners struggle to learn correct meditation techniques and often discontinue before experiencing its benefits. To address this challenge, his PhD research established novel technology to enable beginners to effectively learn to meditate.
The novel approach uses real-time MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scanning to provide brain feedback (neurofeedback) to beginners as they meditate. Proper meditation technique is indicated by increased neural activity in certain brain regions. Dr Ganesan established a system to measure neural activity in these key meditation-related brain regions while a person meditates in the MRI brain scanner. The person is given real-time feedback on their neural activity via a thermometer-like visual display, allowing them to monitor whether they are engaging the right brain regions.
Dr Ganesan evaluated his neurofeedback-guided meditation system in 40 beginner meditators based in Melbourne. Twenty of the novices were provided sham neurofeedback and they served as a control group. The other twenty were provided feedback measured from their brain, while they meditated. Dr Ganesan found that the experimental group showed significantly greater improvements in emotional wellbeing and mindful awareness, compared to the control group. Further details about Dr Ganesan’s findings can be found in a recent publication in the journal Mindfulness.
In the future, Dr Ganesan hopes to develop a more portable version of his technology to enable neurofeedback-guided meditation to happen in the comfort of a person’s home. At present, training can only be conducted within an MRI facility, which entails high costs and restricted accessibility.
To this end, Dr Ganesan travelled to the US in August 2025 to take up a postdoctoral position at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Dr Ganesan’s PhD research in Melbourne was supported by the Centre for Contemplative Studies and the Melbourne Research Scholarship scheme.