Meditation Popularity
In the United States it has now been estimated that elp alleviate a variety of health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Scientists are saying that not only can meditation help alleviate a variety of health conditions but it is also, from the result of brain scans they have done, rewiring and even reshaping the brains of the meditators.
Buddhist Meditation Brain Study
Researchers, signed up 30 people with an average age of 49 to go on a three-month meditation retreat in Colorado. Another 30 people in a comparison group went on a similar meditation retreat.
The participants studied meditation techniques, such as concentrating on breathing, with Buddhist scholar and researcher B. Alan Wallace, PhD, of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.
All participants were aficionados of meditation and had been on meditation retreats before, but this time they were taught how to concentrate and asked to complete various tests. Also, volunteers attended group sessions twice daily and engaged in individual meditative practice for about six hours.
At three points during the meditation retreat, the participants took a 30-minute computer test, during which they watched the screen as lines of various lengths flashed randomly in front of them. Most lines were the same length, but sometimes a shorter one would appear.
Participants were instructed to respond by clicking the computer mouse when a shorter line appeared in a test to measure their visual attention span and their ability to make distinctions.
Researchers say that as meditation training progressed, the volunteers who received meditation training got better at spotting the short lines compared to those who didn't receive the training, suggesting it became easier to sustain attention.
The comparison group of volunteers went through identical training later and also improved concentration skills and the ability to differentiate the size of lines.
Buddhist Meditation Boosts Concentration
Buddhist Meditation Boosts Concentration. The concentration improvement lasted for five months after the end of the meditation retreat. Follow-up assessments were conducted five months after each meditation retreat using laptop computers sent to the homes of meditation retreat participants.
The tasks the volunteers performed lasted 30 minutes and were very demanding, according to MacLean.
"Because the task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it's kind of a perfect index of meditation training," according co-researcher Psychologist Katherine A. MacLean, PhD, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis.
Meditation Improves Well-Being
"People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation and you get to be at peace with yourself,"says MacLean, now of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. "That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."
SOURCES:News release, Association for Psychological Science.
Maclean, K. Psychological Science, July 2010.