The Effects of Meditation on Your Brain and Your Life. Part 1 of 3.
Since ancient times, people have practised meditation, drawn by the desire for spiritual enlightenment, heightened states of mind and mood, the health and longevity that seasoned practitioners frequently experience, and, for some, a fascination with exploring the unknown simply because it exists!
As far as we know, our forefathers were sufficiently inspired by the personal accounts of their instructors and the meditators. They came before them to never seek to evaluate meditation's benefits empirically. In addition, the goal was never to quantify the practice but to personally experience its consequences. However, as meditation has become more popular in the West, it has drawn the attention of academics anxious to support (or refute) its myriad claimed advantages. Before entering academia, several of these scholars learned how to meditate. They carried a personal and professional desire to explore how meditation fared when subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Their outcomes, widely reported in magazines, newspapers, and blogs and acknowledged in esteemed academic and professional publications, have been largely favourable, furthering meditation's rise to fame. This post serves as a tour guide through the history of meditation research, from the earliest excursions in the first half of the 20th century to the most recent developments in brain research. The study has gotten more interesting and illuminating as the methodologies have become more precise and complex. Did you know that meditation can help you rewire your brain? For more information, keep reading!
Years before meditation became widely practised in the West, a few forward-thinking academics tracked down Zen and Indian yogis in their natural habitats to conduct spontaneous experiments on the effects of meditation on essential physiological functions. The popularity of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and its offshoots, such as Herbert Benson's relaxation response, sparked a fresh wave of study that produced persuasive proof of meditation's extensive health advantages. Soon after, the scientific community began to take note, which prompted more study and ultimately ushered in a new age of publicly financed research and ground-breaking investigations. The earliest research on meditation was conducted in the 1930s by an Indian PhD student at Yale who acquired funding to examine the physiological benefits of his own yogic breathing. He discovered a 25% reduction in oxygen usage. His work was quickly duplicated by others, who went to India to observe seasoned yogic meditators and carried out the initial studies using simple scientific apparatus, including electrocardiograms (EKGs) and blood pressure monitors. The Eastern marvels they studied, yogis who could stop their hearts and reach deep levels of concentration, were like exotic creatures to these Westerners who had been trained in the scientific method; they were certainly worthy of study but had little application to everyday people.
Electroencephalographs (EEGs) were used to measure brain waves as part of a ground-breaking study of Zen teachers and their students that was carried out at the University of Tokyo in the 1960s. Researchers also monitored pulse rates, respiration, the galvanic skin response, and responses to sensory stimuli. They discovered that the brain wave alterations in the meditators occurred in ordered succession, starting with a rise in alpha rhythms (brainwaves linked to relaxed concentration) and ending with an increase in theta rhythms as the meditation progressed (associated with deep relaxation, spiritual experience, and enhanced creativity). As it turns out, later investigations have shown that the preponderance of alpha and theta in more experienced meditators is a constant hallmark of meditation requiring conscious attention.
Meditation practices vary, sometimes greatly, and these variations lead to inconsistent research findings. Early studies, for instance, discovered that although some approaches were relaxing and reduced stress, others were excitatory and appeared to raise emotional arousal and, in some circumstances, even the symptoms of stress. Similarly, proponents of mindfulness assert that present-moment awareness has unique abilities to alter the brain and heal the body that other approaches lack. In contrast, Transcendental Meditation (TM) researchers assert that their technique confers specific special benefits and induces a singularly coherent brainwave pattern that other methods do not. Because of this, it is advisable to use caution when drawing conclusions about meditation from the research of a single technique alone. Even while using the same strategy, different meditators may have different degrees of skill and experience and use somewhat different techniques. For instance, MBSR may be used in one research on mindfulness. In contrast, vipassana or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy may be used in another (MBCT).
Are they comparable enough to evaluate side by side? And how does a researcher distinguish between experienced, intermediate, and novice meditators? According to some experts, research on current meditators neglects to consider the potential that persons who meditate already have specific health traits or brainwave patterns that lure them to the practice rather than acquiring those traits or brainwaves via the practice itself. These opponents assert that the only way to obtain really accurate and impartial findings is to choose a group of individuals at random, educate half of them to meditate, and leave the other half as non-meditating controls. These limitations, however, are minor concerns that have no bearing on the fundamental conclusions of the thorough research, which are that meditation is advantageous to your health on all levels, mind, body, and spirit, in a wide range of important ways. What's more intriguing is that the researchers discovered that Zen masters didn't develop a habit of repeating sounds like normal controls did in their study. Instead, they showed consistent EEG patterns in response to the sound. In other words, no matter how often they were aroused, they constantly maintained a calm, awake awareness of both internal and exterior experiences. TM and the relaxation response research Researchers no longer had to go to India or Japan to examine the benefits of meditation because there was a small but committed following in the West by the 1970s. Instead, they could focus on the expanding community of Western practitioners. In particular, Transcendental Meditation, which was popularised by the Beatles and introduced in the late 1960s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, funded a thorough investigation into the effectiveness of the practice and produced a large number of scientific papers, many of which were written under the direction of the organisation's own Maharishi International University. According to TM experts, repeating a mantra that has been carefully chosen generates a unique fourth level of consciousness that is separate from the three more common stages of wakefulness, dream sleep, and deep sleep. According to early TM researcher David Orme-Johnson, this fourth state's exceptional brain coherence is its main hallmark. The degree of correlation or synchronicity between various areas of the brain is known as coherence and may be assessed by EEG. It sounds more like the mellow music a conductor creates than the raucous cacophony an orchestra makes when it warms up. "All the benefits of TM may be explained by the improved EEG coherence it causes," claims Orme-Johnson.
Come back tomorrow for part 2.
Be well.
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