KEY THEME

Meditation involves using a mental or physical technique to induce a state of focused attention and heightened awareness.

KEY QUESTIONS

Meditation refers to a group of techniques that induce an altered state of focused attention and heightened awareness. Taking many forms, meditation has been an important part of religious practices throughout the world for thousands of years (Nelson, 2001; Wallace, 2009). However, meditation can also be practiced as a secular technique, independent of any religious tradition or spiritual context (Carmody, 2015).

Common to all forms of meditation is the goal of controlling or training attention (Davis & Thompson, 2015; Tang & Posner, 2015). There are literally hundreds of different meditation techniques, but they can be divided into two general categories (Slagter & others, 2011). Focused attention techniques involve focusing awareness on a visual image or an object; the sensation of breathing; or a sound, word, or phrase. Sometimes a short word or religious phrase, called a mantra, is repeated mentally.

Focused attention techniques involve monitoring and regulating the quality of attention. It may sound simple, but try it: Sit quietly and try to focus your attention on a simple stimulus in your own environment—perhaps a pebble or even a blank Post-it note. You’ll quickly realize how hard it is to maintain focus on the object, to notice when your attention is distracted by thoughts or other environmental stimuli, and to return your focus to the chosen object.

In contrast, open monitoring techniques involve monitoring the content of experience from moment to moment (Slagter & others, 2011). Rather than concentrating on an object, sound, or activity, the meditator engages in present-centered awareness of the “here and now.” When distracting thoughts arise—as they surely will—the practitioner notes the thought and returns to a state of open, nonreflective awareness. Mindfulness, a meditation technique that has become increasingly popular in psychological research and clinical practice, is a form of open monitoring meditation. Definitions vary, but in simple terms, mindfulness mediation involves focusing attention on the present experience with nonjudgmental acceptance (Kabat-Zinn, 2013; Quaglia & others, 2015).

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In practice, focused attention and open monitoring techniques often overlap, especially when people are just learning to meditate. For example, beginning mindfulness meditation often starts with focused attention on your breath to calm or “settle” the mind and reduce distractions (Shapiro & Carlson, 2009). Only gradually do practitioners transition to a more open attentiveness to whatever occurs in awareness, whether it be a sensation, thought, or feeling.

Many people assume that meditation involves entering a sort of trancelike state that resembles drowsiness or hypnosis. In fact, mindfulness meditators report the opposite effect—a state of heightened awareness and sensitivity to thoughts, internal sensations, and external stimuli such as sounds and smells (Davis & Thompson, 2015; Ricard, 2010).

Much of the early research on meditation investigated its use as a relaxation technique that relieved stress and improved cardiovascular health. The meditation technique that was most widely used in this early research was transcendental meditation, or TM, a focused attention technique that involved mentally repeating a mantra given to the practitioner by a teacher. Many studies showed that even beginning meditators practicing TM experienced a state of lowered physical arousal, including a decrease in heart rate, lower blood pressure, and changes in brain waves associated with relaxation (Alexander & others, 1994; Benson, 2010).

Contemporary research on meditation is more wide-ranging. Much of this research has been sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute and the 14th Dalai Lama (see photo on page 162). Since the late 1980s, the Mind and Life Institute has fostered a unique scientific collaboration among meditation practitioners, psychologists, and other scientists (Engle, 2011; Ricard & others, 2014). Today, researchers hope to learn more about the nature of conscious experience as well as meditation’s effects on attention, emotional control, health, and the brain (van Vugt, 2015; Tang & others, 2015).

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One difficulty in studying meditation is that there are literally hundreds of different meditation techniques (Sedlmeier & others, 2012). Many of today’s research studies involve mindfulness techniques, partly because they can be easily taught in a secular context (Davidson, 2010). But even mindfulness-based practices can vary a great deal (Chiesa & Malinowski, 2011). And, study participants may range from novice meditators to people who have practiced meditation for decades. These qualifications need to be kept in mind. However, carefully controlled studies have found that meditation can:

Are years of disciplined practice needed to experience the benefits of meditation practice? No. In one study, college students with no prior meditation experience learned mindfulness meditation and practiced it for just 20 minutes a day for four days (Zeidan & others, 2010). As compared to a matched control group of students who listened to an audiobook recording of The Hobbit, the meditation group significantly improved on several cognitive tasks, such as a memory test. But the most striking result was on a task that required concentration and sustained attention. The meditators, but not the Hobbit listeners, sharply improved their ability to focus and sustain attention.

In a similar study, just four days of practice allowed new meditators to reduce their ratings of a painful stimulus’s intensity by 40% and unpleasantness by 57%. The pain relief produced by meditation was greater than that produced by morphine or other powerful painkillers, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25% (Zeidan & others, 2011). Functional MRI scans of the meditators’ brains showed a steep reduction of activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, which processes sensations of pain, touch, and pressure.

Scientific interest in meditation has dramatically increased in recent years (Jha, 2013). Some psychologists are using meditation to study how intensive mental training affects basic psychological processes, such as attention and memory (Slagter & others, 2011; Ricard & others, 2014). Brain-imaging technology has allowed neuroscientists to document brain changes during meditation and brain changes that seem to result as an effect of meditation (Tang & others, 2015; Zeidan, 2015). As described in the Focus on Neuroscience box “Meditation and the Brain,” meditation has also been used to study neuroplasticity—how mental training affects the brain’s structure.

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Increasingly, meditative practice is also incorporated into psychotherapy (Davis & Hayes, 2011). Today, many psychologists are studying the use of meditation techniques to help tackle psychological problems ranging from eating disorders and substance abuse to major depressive disorder, anxiety, and even more serious disorders (see Bown & others, 2015; Didonna, 2009; Williams & others, 2014). We return to the topic of meditation in Chapter 12 on stress and health, and discuss mindfulness-based therapies in Chapter 14.