Meditation improves your focus, attention and ability to work under stress
A study led by Katherine MacLean of the University of California suggested that subjects were better at maintaining focus during and after meditation training, especially on repetitive and boring tasks.
Another study showed that even with just 20 minutes of practice per day, students were able to improve their performance on tests of cognitive skills, in some cases doing ten times better than the group that did not meditate. They also performed better on information processing tasks designed to induce deadline stress.
In fact it is proof
that meditators had a thicker prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula, and also with the effect that meditation could compensate for the loss of cognitive skills with age.
Sources: Time magazine
, NCBI
, Link Springer
Meditation improves information processing and decision-making
Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators experience greater amounts of gyrification (“folding” of the cortex, which allows the brain to process information more quickly) than people who don’t meditate. Scientists suspect that gyrification makes the brain better at processing information, making decisions, forming memories and improving attention.
Source: UCLA Newsroom
Meditation gives you mental strength, resilience and emotional intelligence
PhD psychotherapist Dr. Ron Alexander reports in his book Wise mind, open mind
that the process of controlling the mind, through meditation, increases mental strength, resilience and emotional intelligence.
Source: Dr. Ron Alexander
Meditation makes you stronger against pain
A research group from the University of Montreal exposed 13 Zen masters and 13 comparable non-practitioners to equal levels of painful heat while measuring their brain activity with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. What they found is that practitioners of Zen meditation (called zazen) reported less pain. They actually reported less pain than their neurological output from the fMRI indicated. So even though their brains may receive the same amount of pain input, in their minds there is actually less pain
.
Sources: Time magazine
, NCBI
, David Lynch Foundation
Meditation relieves pain better than morphine
In an experiment conducted by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
15 healthy volunteers, new to meditation, took four 20-minute classes to learn meditation, focusing on breathing. Both before and after the meditation training, the brain activity of the study participants was examined using ASL MRI, while pain was inflicted through the use of heat.
Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study, explains
This is the first study to show that just over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation. (…) We found a large effect: a reduction in pain intensity by approximately 40 percent and a reduction in pain unpleasantness by 57 percent. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other analgesic medications, which typically reduce pain scores by about 25 percent.”
Source: Huffington Post
Meditation helps manage ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
In a study of 50 adult ADHD patients, the group that underwent MBCT (Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) showed decreased hyperactivity, reduced impulsivity, and increased skills to act with awareness, which contributed to an overall improvement in inattention symptoms.
Sources: Clinical neurophysiology journal
, DoctorsOnTM
Meditation increases the ability to maintain focus despite distractions
A study of Emory University
Atlanta showed that participants with more meditation experience show greater connectivity within the brain networks that control attention. These neural relationships may be involved in the development of cognitive skills, such as sustaining attention and disengagement from distraction. In addition, the benefits of the practice were also observed during the day in a normal state of consciousness, which speaks of the transfer of cognitive skills ‘from the pillow’ to everyday life.
The meditation practice studied focused attention on breathing.
Source: Boundaries Journal
Meditation improves learning, memory and self-awareness
Long-term practice of meditation increases the density of gray matter in the brain areas associated with learning, memory,
self-awareness, compassion, introspection.
Source: NCBI
Mindfulness meditation improves rapid recall of memories
According to Catherine Kerr of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center, “mindfulness meditation has been reported to improve numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory retrieval.”
Source: PsychCentral
Meditation improves your mood and psychological well-being
Researchers from Nottingham Trent University
UK, found that when participants with problems of stress and low mood underwent meditation training, they experienced improvements in their psychological well-being.
Source: Link Springer
Meditation prevents you from falling into the trap of multitasking too often
Multitasking is not just one dangerous productivity myth
but it is also a source of stress. ‘Switching’ between activities is costly to the brain and causes feelings of distraction and dissatisfaction with the work being done.
In a study conducted by the University of Washington and the University of Arizona, human resources personnel received eight weeks of training in mindfulness meditation or body relaxation techniques, and were given a stressful multitasking test both before and after the training. The group of staff members who had practiced meditation reported lower levels of stress and showed better memory for the tasks they had completed; They also switched tasks less often and stayed focused on tasks longer.
Source: ACM Digital Library
Meditation helps us allocate limited brain resources
When the brain is given two targets to pay attention to, right behind each other (a difference of half a second), the second one is often not seen. This is called ‘attention blinking’.
In an experiment conducted by the University of California
, a stream of random letters were displayed on a computer screen in quick succession. In each session, one or two numbers or blank screens appeared in the center, and participants were later asked, immediately after the stream ended, to type the numbers they saw. They were also asked whether they thought a blank screen was shown or not.
Subjects who had undergone three months of intensive Vipassana meditation appeared to have better control over the distribution of attention and perceptual resources. They showed that less brain power was allocated for each letter shown, resulting in a reduction in the size of the ‘attentional blinks’.
Source: PLOS biology
Meditation improves visuospatial processing and working memory
Research has shown that even after that just four sessions of mindfulness meditation
training, participants had significantly improved visual-spatial processing, working memory and executive functioning.
Source: ScienceDirect
Meditation prepares you to deal with stressful events
A study of All India Institute of Medical Sciences
conducted on 32 adults who had never practiced meditation before, showed that if meditation is practiced before a stressful event, the adverse effects of stress were reduced.
Source: The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
Mindfulness meditation promotes creativity
An investigation of university of Leiden
(Netherlands) shows that the practice of ‘open monitoring’ meditation (the non-reactive monitoring of the content of experiences from moment to moment) has positive effects on creativity and divergent thinking. Participants who had followed the practice performed better in a task that asked them to creatively come up with new ideas.
Source : The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine