It is generally believed in the media that meditation can change consciousness, but empirical evidence has only appeared in these years. In the past decade, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of beginners and skilled meditators like ricard, and examined the effects of meditation on cognitive ability, behavior, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity. Scientifically depicts the real picture of meditation. Research shows that dreaming can obviously change a person's mental state, temperament and physical health in many ways. These studies have even begun to explore the internal mechanism of meditation.
Clifford, from the Center for Brain and Thinking at the University of California, Davis, said that it would certainly help to take time to seriously explore the nature of your own thinking? Sharon said. You don't need a Buddhist or idealistic worldview to benefit from meditation. One can become an empiricist (in meditation) as long as one follows one's own feelings. Sharon should be well aware of this. He is leading the Shemota project, which is one of the most comprehensive studies on meditation to date.
In 2007, Sharon and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists conducted intensive meditation for 60 skilled meditators in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for three months, and observed the changes of their psychological ability, mental health and physiological state. Participants meditated for at least five hours every day in a way called concentration, which focused on the feeling when breathing (see how to meditate). The first paper of this project was published in June 20 10 (psychological science, vol. 2 1, p. 829).
John wrote it in Baltimore? Katherine from Hopkins University School of Medicine? In a study led by McClane, they tested volunteers' ability to keep their attention when faced with a series of vertical lines flashing on a computer screen. When a line is shorter than other lines, volunteers need to click the mouse. As the meditation progressed, McClane and her colleagues noticed that these volunteers became more accurate and were able to stay focused for a long time more and more easily.
Other researchers have also found a link between meditation and greater attention. Last year, a team led by Anthony of the weismann Brain Imaging and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? The research team led by Lutz found that after three months of intensive meditation training, volunteers were able to find a series of similar tone differences more quickly, which indicated that their ability to maintain concentration was improved (Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, 134 18). In 2007, Lutz's colleague Hailing leggett published some studies, which combined focused meditation with open monitoring, also known as sensory meditation, including continuously grasping the feelings of every moment. After meditating 10 to 12 hours every day for three months, her subjects' attention blink (usually a cognitive processing delay lasting half a second) decreased, which made people unable to respond to a stimulus, such as a number appearing next to another number on the screen.
One possibility is that meditation is related to working memory, that is, the ability to remember short-term reasoning and understand needed information. Emic, a professor at the University of Miami at Kohler Gables, recently studied the relationship between working memory and meditation. Jia found out. She trained a group of American marines to concentrate through sensory meditation and found that it enhanced their working memory (Emotion, 10, page 54). McClane pointed out that part of meditation is to observe the changes of our own feelings all the time, which requires us to grasp fleeting sensory information in working memory.
Mcclane and other researchers also believe that meditation training strengthens some central cognitive functions, such as those we don't know yet, for all basic senses. It's a bit like a muscle that can be used in many places,' she said. After that, when perception is less laborious, the brain can devote more of its limited resources to attention. Slug also provides evidence for this view. She measured the electrical activity of the brain during the blink of an eye, and found that the longer the meditation training time, the less resources volunteers can use to deal with the first stimulus, which means they are less likely to get stuck and miss the second stimulus.
Feeling better In addition to enhancing cognitive ability, meditation seems to promote emotional health. A second study by Shemota project researchers was published in the journal Emotion. The conclusion of the study is that meditation can improve the overall social and emotional ability, and make participants less anxious, have a better understanding of their emotions and be easier to control. When volunteers encounter longer lines on the screen, they can better control their impulse to click the mouse, which provides some clues for the above improvement. This task is actually more difficult than it sounds, especially when short-term projects only appear occasionally. The first author, Barkind of the University of California, Davis? Sadra believes that meditation training teaches people to stop impulsive reactions when they encounter some internal stimuli, and some of these stimuli may produce intense emotions themselves. This ability to resist strong emotions seems to be the key to healthy emotional regulation.
Brain imaging results support the view that practicing meditation can make people less emotionally impulsive. Julie's team at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown? The team led by B- Lewis studied the meditators who were doing exercises with functional magnetic resonance imaging, and found that the amygdala of expert meditators is far less active than that of novices, and it plays a key role in dealing with emotions and emotional memory.
The ability to control your emotions may also be the key reason why meditation can improve your health. Some studies show that meditation is caused by eating disorders, drug abuse, psoriasis (! ! ! ! ! ), especially for recurrent depression and long-term pain. Last year, FadelZeidan, a psychologist at the Winston-Salem School of Medicine at Wake Forest University, reported that his volunteers noticed that after several immersion meditations, they became less and less sensitive to pain (Journal of Pain, vol. 65438 +0 1. 199 page). He believes that meditation can not alleviate the feeling of pain, but teach patients how to control their uncomfortable response to pain and reduce discomfort. He is now using functional magnetic resonance imaging to try to understand the principle of these effects. He said that knowing that you can relieve pain can make people more refreshed. After several meditations, volunteers found that they were insensitive to pain.
The positive effect of meditation on mental health can also explain some recent findings of Shemota project. For example, regular meditation can obviously increase the activity of telomerase, which can protect cells from aging and be inhibited when they are depressed. The findings will be published in Psychological neuroendocrinology. Another advantage of meditation is that emotions may still be the center. One of the hottest areas in meditation research is whether practicing meditation can enhance the mutual affection between people. Part of the reason for this concern is that Lutz and his team showed that brain circuits related to empathy and emotional sharing, such as insula and anterior cingulate gyrus, are more active among long-term meditators than novices (Neuroimaging, vol. 47, p. 1038).
Soul fitness center
In 2009, a research institution dedicated to studying the neurobiological basis of empathy and sympathy began to work at Stanford University in California. The Research and Education Center for Compassion and Altruism is sponsored by a series of interest groups, including neuroscientists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and D Harmony alai Lama. They have started some research. Their goal is to reveal why a special meditation training that practitioners focus on strengthening altruistic love can affect the brain, and to what extent this influence can cultivate empathy and sympathy and these behaviors.
The speculation that people become empathetic and sympathetic by practicing meditation inspired psychologist Paul? Ekman and Allen? Wallace was used by them to support the idea of a spiritual gym. He is a Buddhist teacher and the chairman of the Perception Institute in Santa Barbara. Just like the gym, just for the brain. This will allow people to step into it and learn how to improve their emotional balance, enhance their compassion and even measure them.