Many people think of meditation as a special kind of daydreaming, or as a convenient way to soothe a tense mind. My advice to them is, try it and you will know. Meditation is somewhat difficult, at least at first. On my first try, instead of concentrating on my breathing and chasing away any thoughts from my mind, as my cheerful Tibetan master had taught me, I was distracted by a stream of annoying thoughts and then Fell asleep. Obviously this is normal for first timers.
Claims that meditation can alter consciousness are common in the media, but empirical evidence has only emerged in recent years. Over the past decade, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of novice and skilled meditators like Ricard, and examined the cognitive, behavioral, physical and emotional effects of meditation. Health and effects of brain plasticity. A true picture of meditation has been scientifically painted. Research shows that meditation can indeed significantly change a person's mental state, temperament and physical health in many aspects. These studies have even begun to explore the underlying mechanisms of meditation.
It pays to take the time to seriously explore the nature of your thinking, says Clifford Salon of the Center for Brain and Mind at the University of California, Davis. And you don't need a Buddhist or spiritualist worldview to benefit from meditation. One can become an empiricist (in meditation) simply by following one's feelings. Saron should be well aware of this as he is leading the Samatha Project, one of the most comprehensive studies of meditation ever conducted.
In 2007, Salon and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists followed 60 skilled practitioners during an intensive three-month retreat in the Colorado Rockies. meditators, and changes in their mental abilities, mental health, and physiological states were observed. Participants meditated for at least five hours each day using a method called attentional focus, which involves focusing on the sensations of breathing (see How to Meditate). The first paper from this project was published in June 2010 (Psychological Science, vol. 21, p. 829).
In a study led by Katharine McLean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, they tested volunteers as they faced a series of vertical lines flashed on a computer screen. The ability to maintain attention at all times. Volunteers were asked to click when one line was shorter than the others. As the retreats progressed, McLean and her colleagues noticed that the volunteers became more accurate and able to stay focused for longer periods of time with increasing ease.
Other researchers have also found links between meditation and greater focus. Last year a team of researchers led by Antoine Lutz of the Weisman Brain Imaging and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that after three months of focused meditation training, volunteers were able to tune in to a range of similar tones. Differentiators are spotted more quickly, which means their ability to stay focused has improved (Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, p. 13418). In 2007, Lutz's colleague Helin Slegget, now at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, published studies that combined mindfulness meditation with open monitoring, also known as feeling meditation, which involves continuously mastering how you feel in each moment. . After meditating for 10 to 12 hours a day for three months, her subjects experienced fewer attentional blinks, a delay in cognitive processing that typically lasts half a second and prevents people from responding to a stimulus. Respond to a number that appears on the screen immediately following another number.
One possibility is that meditation is related to working memory, which is the ability to memorize information needed for short-term reasoning and understanding. The relationship between working memory and meditation was recently discovered by Amish Jia of the University of Miami in Coral Gables. She trained a group of U.S. Marines to focus through feeling meditation and found that it enhanced their working memory (Emotion, vol. 10, p. 54). McLean points out that part of meditation is observing the moment-to-moment changes in our own feelings, which requires us to capture fleeting sensory information in our working memory.
McLean and other researchers also believe that meditation training strengthens some of the central cognitive functions - such as those we don't yet understand - that are used for all basic perceptions. It's kind of like a muscle that can be used in many places, she said. Later, when perception becomes less effortful, the brain can devote more of its limited resources to attention. Slagter also provided evidence for this idea. She measured the brain's electrical activity during attentional blinks and found that the longer the meditation training, the less volunteers had to use to process the first stimulus. resources, meaning they are less likely to get stuck when the second stimulus arrives and miss it.
Feeling Better In addition to enhancing cognitive abilities, meditation appears to promote emotional well-being. A second study by Project Shematha researchers, published in the journal Emotion, concluded that meditation improved overall social and emotional abilities, making study participants less anxious and more aware of their emotions. It’s easier to understand and control.
In the task of clicking the mouse when the volunteers saw a longer line on the screen, they were better able to restrain their urge to click the mouse when they encountered a short line, which provides some clues to the reasons for the improvement above. This task is actually harder than it sounds, especially since short lines only occur occasionally. Lead author Barjinder Sadra of the University of California, Davis, believes that meditation training teaches people to stop impulsive reactions when encountering internal stimuli, some of which may themselves produce intense emotions. . , and this ability to resist intense emotions appears to be the key to healthy emotional regulation.
The idea that practicing meditation can make people less emotionally impulsive has been supported by brain imaging results. A team led by Julie B. Lewis of West Virginia University in Morgantown used functional MRI to study meditators during meditation and found that the amygdala of expert meditators was much less active than that of novices. , and the amygdala plays a key role in processing emotions and emotional memories.
The ability to control one's emotions may also be a key reason why meditation improves physical health. Some studies show meditation to be an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse, psoriasis (!!!!!), and especially recurrent depression and long-term pain. Last year, psychologist Fadel Zeidan of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem reported that his volunteers noticed themselves becoming increasingly desensitized to pain after several sessions of immersive meditation (Journal of Pain, vol. 11). Page 199). He believes that meditation does not relieve pain, but teaches people with pain how to control their discomfort responses to pain and reduce discomfort. He is now using functional NMR to try to understand how these effects work. Knowing that you can relieve pain yourself can be empowering, he says. The volunteers found that they were less sensitive to pain after just a few meditations.
The positive effects of meditation on mental health may also explain some of the recent findings from the Shematha Project, such as that regular meditation can significantly increase the activity of telomerase, an enzyme that protects cells from aging. , and inhibited during times of emotional distress. The findings will be published in Psychoneuroendocrinology. Emotions may also be central to another benefit of meditation. One of the hottest areas of meditation research is whether practicing it can enhance people's feelings for each other. The question has gained attention in part because Lutz and his team showed that brain circuits involved in empathy and emotional sharing - such as the insula and anterior cingulate gyrus - are more robust in long-term meditators than in novice meditators. Active (NeuroImage, vol. 47, p. 1038).
The Gym of the Mind
In 2009, a research institute dedicated to studying the neurobiological basis of empathy and compassion began work at Stanford University in California. The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education is sponsored by a range of interest groups, including neuroscientists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the Harmony Alai Lama. They've already started doing some research. Their goal was to uncover why a specific type of meditation training, in which practitioners focus on strengthening their altruistic love, has an effect on the brain, and to what extent this effect can foster empathy and compassion and these behaviors.
The hypothesis that people practice meditation to become more empathetic and compassionate inspired psychologists Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace, and was used by them to support the Mind Gym. Idea, who is a Buddhist teacher and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness. It's like a gym, only for the mind.
This will allow people to step in and learn how to improve their emotional balance, increase their empathy and even measure their