Twenty adults who attended a seven-day residential retreat combining meditation, cognitive reconceptualization, and open-label placebo healing rituals showed measurable differences in brain connectivity and blood-based biological markers when researchers compared imaging and plasma taken before and after.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of California San Diego and published in Communications Biology, is unusually broad in what it measured. It is also small, uncontrolled, and limited in what it can conclude, and the researchers describe it as an exploratory observational study. The work was circulated again this month through science news outlets.
