JAN. 14, 2014 nytimes
Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama
traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree.
Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he
became the Buddha — the enlightened one.
More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train
United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to
achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone.
“We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day
helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is,
the added ability to pay attention over time — stable,” said Jha, director
of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience, Mindfulness
Research and Practice Initiative. “If they practiced less than 12 minutes
or not at all, they degraded in their functioning.”
Jha, whose program has received a $1.7 million, four-year grant from the
Department of Defense, described her results at a bastion of scientific
conservatism, the New York Academy of Sciences, during a meeting on
“The Science of Mindfulness.” Yet mindfulness hasn’t long been part of
serious scientific discourse. She first heard another scientist mention the
word “meditation” during a lecture in 2005. “I thought, I can’t believe he
just used that word in this audience, because it wasn’t something I had
ever heard someone utter in a scientific context,” Jha said.
Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness
meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but
a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been
published since 2005. And the most recent studies of mindfulness — the
simple, nonjudgmental observation of a person’s breath, body or just about
anything else — are taking the practice in directions that might have
shocked the Buddha. In addition to military fitness, scientists are now
testing brief stints of mindfulness training as a means to improve scores
on standardized tests and lay down new connections between brain cells.
Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas
Tech University, used functional M.R.I.’s before and after participants
spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness
meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and
efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and
protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of
particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful
problem-solving.
Perhaps that is why mindfulness has proved beneficial to prospective
graduate students. In May, the journal Psychological Science published the
results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to
spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness made
significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam
— a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their
working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple
items of attention.
That a practice once synonymous with Eastern mysticism could be put to the
service of Western rationalism may sound surprising, but consider: By
emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trains the mind to stay on task
and avoid distraction.
“Your ability to recognize what your mind is engaging with, and control
that, is really a core strength,” said Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and
neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “For some
people who begin mindfulness training, it’s the first time in their life
where they realize that a thought or emotion is not their only reality,
that they have the ability to stay focused on something else, for instance
their breathing, and let that emotion or thought just pass by.”
But one of the most surprising findings of recent mindfulness studies is
that it could have unwanted side effects. Raising roadblocks to the mind’s
peregrinations could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations
that lead to epiphanies. In 2012, Jonathan Schooler, who runs a lab
investigating mindfulness and creativity at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, published a study titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind
Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” In it, he found that having
participants spend a brief period of time on an undemanding task that
maximizes mind wandering improved their subsequent performance on a
test of creativity. In a follow-up study, he reported that physicists and
writers alike came up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out.
Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama
traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree.
Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he
became the Buddha — the enlightened one.
More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train
United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to
achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone.
“We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day
helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is,
the added ability to pay attention over time — stable,” said Jha, director
of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience, Mindfulness
Research and Practice Initiative. “If they practiced less than 12 minutes
or not at all, they degraded in their functioning.”
Jha, whose program has received a $1.7 million, four-year grant from the
Department of Defense, described her results at a bastion of scientific
conservatism, the New York Academy of Sciences, during a meeting on
“The Science of Mindfulness.” Yet mindfulness hasn’t long been part of
serious scientific discourse. She first heard another scientist mention the
word “meditation” during a lecture in 2005. “I thought, I can’t believe he
just used that word in this audience, because it wasn’t something I had
ever heard someone utter in a scientific context,” Jha said.
Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness
meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but
a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been
published since 2005. And the most recent studies of mindfulness — the
simple, nonjudgmental observation of a person’s breath, body or just about
anything else — are taking the practice in directions that might have
shocked the Buddha. In addition to military fitness, scientists are now
testing brief stints of mindfulness training as a means to improve scores
on standardized tests and lay down new connections between brain cells.
Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas
Tech University, used functional M.R.I.’s before and after participants
spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness
meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and
efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and
protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of
particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful
problem-solving.
Perhaps that is why mindfulness has proved beneficial to prospective
graduate students. In May, the journal Psychological Science published the
results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to
spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness made
significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam
— a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their
working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple
items of attention.
That a practice once synonymous with Eastern mysticism could be put to the
service of Western rationalism may sound surprising, but consider: By
emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trains the mind to stay on task
and avoid distraction.
“Your ability to recognize what your mind is engaging with, and control
that, is really a core strength,” said Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and
neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “For some
people who begin mindfulness training, it’s the first time in their life
where they realize that a thought or emotion is not their only reality,
that they have the ability to stay focused on something else, for instance
their breathing, and let that emotion or thought just pass by.”
But one of the most surprising findings of recent mindfulness studies is
that it could have unwanted side effects. Raising roadblocks to the mind’s
peregrinations could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations
that lead to epiphanies. In 2012, Jonathan Schooler, who runs a lab
investigating mindfulness and creativity at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, published a study titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind
Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” In it, he found that having
participants spend a brief period of time on an undemanding task that
maximizes mind wandering improved their subsequent performance on a
test of creativity. In a follow-up study, he reported that physicists and
writers alike came up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out.
No comments:
Post a Comment