Meditation - Articles - Zimbio

Why Meditation Works

Thu, 25 Jul 2008 03:13:00 GMT

posted by barbarany_9
Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works
Melinda Wenner

Special to LiveScience.com

If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearful”—or two possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they saw.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes—indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

“These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health,” said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.

The 1 CD That Attracted Wealth To My Life - Mind Aerobics...

Fri, 26 Jul 2008 10:37:17 GMT

posted by michael15
Mind Aerobics is an audio program developed to help you train your brain to do many things:

Decrease and manage stress
Think out of the box
Attract good luck
Clear your mind
Develop good ideas

I was first introduced to the program 5 years ago by a friend and was very skeptical in the beginning. However, out of pure curiosity I decided to give it a try.

The program is about 20 minutes long and I just did it before I went to bed. I grabbed a CD player (or grab your MP3 player now), got some headphones and listened to it right before going to bed.

I thought it was extremely weird with all these funky sounds going back and forth, but at the same time, I DID feel that it was very relaxing. Simply to REALLY test it, I started listening to it every night and after a week I really didn't know what was different?

All of a sudden, after having struggled with my internet business for over a year, I started making over $200 a day. How? I got some great ideas that seemed to just "pop" in mind!

What had really happened was that my mind had become much more clear and I was finally able to think outside the box and recognize good ideas when I saw them.

After listening to it for a few weeks, I got lazy and quit. Surely enough, I started to see declines again in my business and I quickly recognized that it may be because of the CD. I started listening again and immediately saw results!

Mind Aerobics has an amazing impact on your mind. The #1 thing it does is makes your mind much more capable of handling stress while not panicking. Just this alone can really help you immensely.

I highly recommend Mind Aerobics over any other self-help product.
To read my entire story about how Mind Aerobics helped me go from $100 to running a multi-million dollar business, visit:

http://www.IwillFIGHT.com

Meditation

Sun, 21 Jul 2008 19:09:00 GMT

posted by kharvee
The unfortunate thing about meditation is that it seems to be taken in a religious context far too often. Maybe it is lack of religion in my life that allows me to be open-minded yet skeptical about all religions, but I believe meditation is just intense concentration. I have meditated for three years now, and I must say it does work to calm the mind, body and soul. This is a scientific certainty that it calms you. To me, there is something supernatural about the mind and its relationship to the surrounding environment.

My friend Brittany photoshopped this picture of me meditating

"Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, recorded the brain waves of stressed-out employees of a high-tech firm in Madison, Wisconsin. The subjects were split randomly into two groups, 25 people were asked to learn meditation over eight weeks, and the remaining 16 were left alone as a control group.

All participants had their brain waves scanned three times during the study: at the beginning of the experiment, when meditation lessons were completed eight weeks later and four months after that. The researchers found that the meditators showed a pronounced shift in activity to the left frontal lobe. In other words, they were calmer and happier than before. The study will be published in the next issue of Psychosomatic Medicine."

Source: Psychology Today

This is just after two months of meditation. Imagine what long-term meditation can do for you. In fact, there's a great article about a study scientists performed on Buddhist Monks at BBC. Apparently, meditation draws brain activity to the front of the brain, which often creates mystical/supernatural experiences. Having had these experiences myself, I think there is definitely something significant about them.

Most religions have some sort of meditation, and meditation can take many forms. Prayer is meditation. Staring at an object. Taking deep breaths and focusing on your body's feelings. Focusing on a body part with your mind, or focusing on your whole body. Just existing is meditation. Sitting on a bench observing your world is meditation. You can sit like a Buddhist or lay down and stare at the ceiling. I like to focus on the spot in between my eyes, and when I take deep breaths, I imagine there is some kind of energy moving to and from there. Just a little bit everyday is very relaxing and destressing for you.

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Mindfulness Meditation for ADHD

Sun, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00 GMT

posted by crimlawdoc
Image via WikipediaMindfulness meditation for ADHD: I am heading back to the hospital to deal with my mother and her situation, but meantime I want to put out something about ADHD and mindfulness meditation. I often tell students and patients that mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a process of training the attention. And that, accordingly, there is really good reason to believe that it might be an effective way to help people with attentional problems, including full-scale ADHD. Recently, two studies have supported this hypothesis. The work we did in the fall semester of 2007 at Avila University (Mindfulness-Based Wellness) included training in mindfulness meditation, and our pre- and post-measures of attentional problems showed that there was a significant reduction in attentional problems among those who completed the training. (Unfortunately, this same type of training was not offered in the spring semester.) I presented research results about the fall semester program at the Association for Psychological Science in May of 2008.

Also, my friend, Dr. Lidia Zylowska (at UCLA) has published her study about mindfulness meditation as an intervention for attentional problems. The study is described very well at Sharpbrains (click here).

Here's an excerpt from the Sharpbrains summary:

Seventy-eight percent of participants reported a reduction in total ADHD symptoms, with 30% reporting at least a 30% symptom reduction (a 30% reduction in symptoms is often used to identify clinically significant improvement in ADHD medication trials). Because the majority of participants were receiving medication treatment, for many these declines represent improvement above and beyond what benefits were already being provided by medication.

I thought it was important to highlight Dr. Zylowsa's work (and my work at Avila), because a recent NYT special article about alternatives to medication for ADHD did not mention mindfulness meditation practice. Results for this type of intervention are far from "proven" at this point, but it seems to be a promising direction that ought to receive more attention (and a lot more research).

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Ellen Langer's "Mindfulness"

Tue, 11 Jun 2008 19:35:00 GMT

posted by crimlawdoc
Image via WikipediaRecently Dr. Kalea Chapman, whose very good blog (Pasadena Therapist) is here, published an entry in which he provides 11 definitions of the term "mindfulness," which will certainly be a useful thing for those of us who are frequently being asked what it is we are talking about, when we talk about "mindfulness." Interestingly, his list of definitions does not include Ellen Langer's definition, nor any that explain the way that Ellen Langer uses the term. I find this significant because, not long ago, I was involved in a discussion with an individual who believes that she can use Ellen Langer's ideas about mindfulness (instead of training in mindfulness meditation) in a program to enhance wellness. I am not so sure that this will work out as well as she hopes; and, since there are in fact excellent programs, with proven effectiveness, based on training in mindfulness meditation, I wonder why anyone would attempt to go in this other direction.

I hasten to add that Ellen Langer is a very well-respected social psychologist at Harvard University. But she is not a clinical or counseling psychologist, and does not work in a setting within which she attempts to develop programs that treat problems or enhance wellness. She has done very intriguing experiments in nursing homes and in with hotel maids, in which she manipulated certain conditions that altered the subjects' concepts, ideas, and/or sense of control, with positive results. And, in a different direction, she also developed a concept called "mindful learning," originally for use within educational settings. She uses her concepts about what she calls "mindfulness" within the area of creativity, as well. Basically, she has an entirely different concept, but she uses the same term ("mindfulness"). It has caused confusion in some quarters.

Here is a description of Langer's "mindfulness" concept, from a website maintained by Liz MacDonald and Dennis Shirley (at Boston College):

"Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has written two books... entitled Mindfulness (1989) and The Power of Mindful Learning (1997). In those books, Langer offered a three-fold definition of mindfulness, entailing �the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.� She contrasted mindfulness with �mindlessness,� which she characterized as �entrapment in old categories; by automatic behavior that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective... "

The distinction between Langer's model, and the approach that is used by those who teach and practice mindfulness-based interventions in mental health, is discussed in an article written by scientists who work within the traditions of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, etc. In the article (click here for the online version), the authors explain where Langer's work is situated within the larger array of different approaches that use the term "mindful" or "mindfulness." They acknowledge that there may be some overlap between and among these different approaches, but that there are very significant differences, as well:

"There are a number of constructs that may be within the same general domain as mindfulness as elicited by mindfulness meditation techniques. Most notably is Ellen Langer’s work in social psychology on mindfulness as a creative cognitive process. While both constructs involve attentional engagement, we agree with Langer that her construct is quite different from mindfulness as described in the context of the mindfulness meditation techniques [emphasis added] (see Langer, 1989). Langer’s mindfulness involves the active construction of new categories and meanings when one pays attention to the stimulus properties of primarily external situations, while our own definition emphasizes the inhibition of such elaborative processes as one pays attention to primarily internal stimuli (thoughts, feelings and sensations). Other similar constructs that might fall within the same general domain of mindfulness include flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) and absorption (Tellegan & Atkinson, 1974).

We also see mindfulness within the general domain of constructs that describe the ability to observe the temporal stream of thoughts and feelings including introspection (James, 1890), observing self (Deikman, 1982), presence (Bugental, 1987), reflective functioning (Fonagy & Target, 1996; 1997) and deautomatization/decentering (Safran and Segal, 1990)."

from: "Mindfulness, a proposed operational definition," by Bishop, Lau, Shapiro, et al.

In other words, Langer encourages us to actively engage in cognitive processes related to thinking about what we perceive; to deliberately notice that there are differences and distinctions in the array of things we observe; and to identify (or name) the differences. This (as Langer herself points out) is very different from the practice of mindfulness meditation, and the related practices involving mindfulness in everyday life, in which we observe all that is presented to our mind and our senses, but without deliberately engaging in a lot of thinking about what we are observing. We do notice what our thoughts are, and what our sensations are... but we do not deliberately think about whether this one thing that we are seeing is in a different category than this other thing that we are seeing, or have seen before.

It appears that Langer has found that learning is enhanced when the learner engages in "the active construction of new categories," or when s/he endeavors to "notice differences." However, it is difficult for me to see how this type of cognitive process (although it may be valuable and helpful in educational settings) could be taught within a psychotherapy, wellness, or stress-reduction program; and there is no research whatsoever to support the idea that such a procedure will result in any sort of enhancement in health or wellness-related variables. I agree with Dr. Chapman (and many others!) that Ellen Langer's definition(s) of "mindfulness" are not really useful within the context of mindfulness-based interventions in mental health.

It will be interesting to see what the research outcomes and results might be into any wellness programs that use Langer's "mindfulness model."

p.s. The picture at the top of this post is "Ignatius Wounded" in battle at Pamplona. Those readers among you who know me will understand why this picture seemed particularly apt to me, on this topic... For others of you, it must regrettably remain a Deep Mystery...

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