Meditation

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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Meditation in Different Cultures (left) Like this group in Hanoi, Vietnam, many people throughout Asia begin their day with tai chi, often meeting in parks and other public places. Tai chi is a form of meditation that involves a structured series of slow, smooth movements. Sometimes described as “meditation in motion,” tai chi has been practiced for over 2,000 years.

(Right) These young Americans are practicing zazen, or “just sitting,” a form of open monitoring meditation (Austin, 2009). Originating in China, Zen is found in many Asian countries, especially Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Over the past few decades, Zen Buddhism has become increasingly popular in the United States and other Western countries.

Dean Mitchell/Getty Images

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.

MYTH SCIENCE

Is it true that meditation is a drowsy, trancelike state that is no different than simple relaxation?

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).

Scientific Studies of the Effects of Meditation

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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Studying the Well-Trained Mind Neuroscientist and psychologist Richard Davidson confers with Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard during an EEG study that monitored brain waves during different meditative practices (Lutz & others, 2004). Ricard, a former molecular biologist, helped design the studies, held under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute (www.mindandlife.org). The 14th Dalai Lama has been instrumental in encouraging such collaborations between Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhist practitioners (Ekman & others, 2005; Ricard & others, 2014). As the Dalai Lama wrote, “Buddhists have a 2,500-year history of investigating the workings of the mind” (Gyatso, 2003). Using imaging devices that show what occurs in the brain during meditation, Dr. Davidson has been able to study the effects of Buddhist practice for cultivating compassion, equanimity, or mindfulness.
Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison

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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FOCUS ON NEUROSCIENCE

Meditation and the Brain

Research on neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change with experience—has conclusively shown that learning a new skill, such as juggling, changes the physical structure of the brain (Draganski & others, 2004, 2006). So, it turns out, does acquiring new mental skills or even just new information. For example, after just two hours of training, adults who learned new color names showed measurable brain changes (Kwok & others, 2011). These changes involved increases in gray matter—that is, increases in the size and density of cell bodies and dendrites of neurons in the cortex.

Does meditation, like other forms of mental practice or training, also affect brain structure? One of the earliest findings that meditation was associated with changes in the brain came from the lab of Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar. Lazar and her colleagues (2005) recruited a group of 20 experienced insight meditation practitioners. Insight meditation is an advanced form of mindfulness meditation, combining traditional mindfulness practice with focused attention on internal experience. The meditation practitioners had an average of nine years of meditation experience, but all were typical Western practitioners, incorporating their daily practice into a busy schedule of family and work responsibilities.

MRI scans showed that several cortical areas were thicker in the meditators’ brains than in the brains of a control group of non-meditators who were matched for gender and age. More specifically, the meditators had more gray matter in regions associated with attention, emotion, and sensory processing.

Interestingly, in two regions, thickness was correlated with years of meditation experience—the longer the participants had been meditating, the thicker the cortical regions. And, the differences were most pronounced among the older participants. Some cortical areas in the meditators were as thick as corresponding areas in control participants who were 20 years younger. Normally, the cortex gradually shrinks with age, so one intriguing implication of this study was that meditation might help prevent or even reverse the normal age-related thinning of the cortex.

Because this study was correlational, however, it was not possible to attribute the cortical differences to meditation alone. Some other factor could have contributed to the differences between the experienced meditators and the nonmeditating controls. A recent experimental study, however, overcame that limitation (Hölzel & others, 2011). MRI scans were taken of participants two weeks before and two weeks after they learned to meditate in an eight-week stress-reduction course. These scans were compared against scans of control group participants who did not meditate. The new meditators, but not the controls, showed gray-matter-density increases in several cortical areas, including the hippocampus, cerebellum, and other areas associated with memory, emotion, and awareness.

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Meditation Matters A study by Sara Lazar and her colleagues (2005) found that cortical areas shown in red and yellow were significantly thicker in meditators than in a matched control group. The somatosensory cortex and insula are both associated with sensory awareness, with the insula specifically linked to awareness of internal body sensations and signals. According to the researchers, the particular region of the prefrontal cortex that was thicker in the meditators than the controls is thought to be associated with the integration of thoughts and feelings.
Courtesy Dr. Sara Lazar

As researchers continue to investigate the beneficial effects of meditation, neuroscientists hope to uncover some of the neural changes that might underlie changes in behavior, emotion, and cognition. Meditation techniques are also increasingly used as a scientific tool to study neuroplasticity in the adult brain (Tang & others, 2015; Zeidan, 2015). So far, no single pattern of brain changes has been found to be associated with meditation, but that is not surprising given the diversity of techniques and meditation experience among participants in different research studies. As neuroscientist Richard Davidson (2011) notes, the term “meditation” is like the term “sports”—it includes a vast range of different activities, skills, and varying levels of individual expertise and behavior.

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.

If you would like to try a simple meditation technique, turn to page 529 in Chapter 12.

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