Do meditators and non-meditators have different HRV dynamics?

摘要

Purpose: The heart is a complex system and many researchers have been recently studying cardiac behavior using the theory of non-linear dynamical systems. One of the most appealing tools for analyzing heart function is the heart rate variability (HRV) signal. This study aimed to elucidate the HRV dynamics of six distinct states: spontaneous normal breathing (SNB) and metronomic breathing (MB), as non-meditator groups, before Chinese Chi meditation (CCM), during CCM, before Kundalini yoga meditation (KYM), and during KYM, as meditator groups.Methods: The HRV data were obtained from the Physionet database. Lagged Poincare indices, Lyapunov exponent (LE), Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ), and 4 types of entropy were calculated.Results: The results showed the greatest discrepancies in the lagged Poincare indices for KYM and CCM. In contrast, the least variations were achieved for MB. Compared to SNB, an enhancement in the log energy entropy and a reduction in the LZ and other entropies were concluded during KYM and CCM practices. In contrast, a reverse pattern was observed for MB. Using support vector machine, HRV dynamics were classified with average accuracies of 99.14 and 98.2% and average sensitivities of 99.87 and 99.57% for pre-KYM and during KYM, respectively.Conclusion: It was shown that the HRV dynamics were significantly different in meditators and non-meditators. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.