Short-Term Meditation Changes Brain Activity
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 8, 2011
It apparently does not take years or even months of practicing meditation to fundamentally alter neural activity. Just a few weeks can make a difference — for the better.
The anecdotal evidence that led to the research occurred some two decades ago as co-author Jane Anderson was struggling with long Minnesota winters and seasonal affective disorder.
She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she said.
Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.
Previous studies touting the benefits of meditation have looked at chages in brain activity in Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating. But Anderson wanted to know if one could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.
At the beginning of the study, each participant had an EEG to measure the brain’s electrical activity.
They were told: “Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath.”
Then 11 people were invited to take part in meditation training, while the other 10 were told they would be trained later.
The 11 were offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practice as much as they could between sessions, but there wasn’t any particular requirement for how much they should practice.
After five weeks, the researchers did an EEG on each person again. Each person had done, on average, about seven hours of training and practice. But even with that little meditation practice, their brain activity was different from the 10 people who hadn’t had training yet.
People who had done the meditation training showed greater activity in the left frontal region of the brain in response to subsequent attempts to meditate. Other research has found that this pattern of brain activity is associated with positive moods.
The shift in brain activity “was clearly evident even with a small number of subjects,” said Christopher Moyer, Ph.D., one of Anderson’s coauthors at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
“If someone is thinking about trying meditation and they were thinking, ‘It’s too big of a commitment, it’s going to take too much rigorous training before it has an effect on my mind,’ this research suggests that’s not the case.” For those people, meditation might be worth a try, he said. “It can’t hurt and it might do you a lot of good.”
“I think this implies that meditation is likely to create a shift in outlook toward life,” Anderson said. “It has really worked for me.”
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Short-Term Meditation Changes Brain Activity
Excellent, even short periods of meditation can change the brain - reported by Psych Central.
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