Even though meditation and mindfulness has moved from being purely in the realm of religions and has gained mainstream interest in recent decades, it still hasn’t been studied extensively using a scientific approach. A relatively small group of scientists, however, have started to take a neuro scientific approach in order to assess the psychological and physical effects of meditation.
Open monitoring meditation
One such study, published in Brain Sciences in November 2021 by researchers from Michigan State University, has found that meditation could help individuals become less error-prone. They arrived at their results by studying how open monitoring meditation alters brain activity.
Open monitoring meditation is different from some forms of meditation that stresses on focussing on a single object, such as our breath. This meditation instead focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts, and sensations as they unfold in the mind and body of the one practising it.
The researchers recruited 200 participants who had never meditated before and offered them a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise. Using electroencephalography, or EEG, the scientists measured the brain activity of the participants during the exercise following which the participants completed a computerised distraction test.
Stronger error recognition
Even though immediate improvements in task performance weren’t observed, the researcher’s findings suggested that sustained meditation could have potential. This is because the scientists observed that the strength of the signal that corresponded to error recognition increased in mediators when compared to a control group.
Considering that a 20-minute exercise enhances the brain’s ability to detect and pay increased attention to mistakes, the researchers are looking at a broader group of participants and testing different forms of meditations for the next phase of their research. A scientific understanding of how different forms of meditations work and their benefits could well translate to behavioural changes among individuals with more long-term practice.
Picture Credit : Google
