The practice also reduces the expression of genes which cause inflammation.
Particular types of meditation can generate insight and new ideas, according to research.
Many of these altered states of consciousness are likely to have been unintentional, as relatively few people have ever practiced meditation.
The age at which people typically start to have problems remembering details.
The age at which people typically start to have problems remembering details.
People typically begin to have difficulties remembering details — like where they left the keys — in their 40s.
The cause, though, could be less about a decline in brain function, and more about a change in the way memories are formed and retrieved.
Research shows that older adults focus more on what is relevant to them, rather than paying attention to external details.
Focusing on external details could help promote healthy cognitive aging.
Dr Natasha Rajah, one of the study’s authors, said:
“This change in memory strategy with age may have detrimental effects on day-to-day functions that place emphasis on memory for details such as where you parked your car or when you took your prescriptions.”
People aged 19 to 76-years-old were shown a series of faces and had to recall where they appeared on the screen, while their brains were scanned.
The results showed that younger people really paid attention, with their visual cortices running on overdrive, Dr Rajah said:
“They are really paying attention to the perceptual details in order to make that decision.”
Older people, though, showed lower activation in the visual cortex.
Instead, their medial prefrontal cortices were more active.
This area is related to introspection and aspects of one’s own life.
Younger people performed better on the task — but the reason may be because of what older people choose to focus on.
Dr Rajah said:
“This may not be a ‘deficit’ in brain function per se, but reflects changes in what adults deem ‘important information’ as they age.”
Older people can learn to improve their memory by focusing on external details rather than internal information, Dr Rajah said:
“That may be why some research has suggested that mindfulness meditation is related to better cognitive aging.”
Hormonal influences are currently being tested as another explanation:
“At mid-life women are going through a lot of hormonal change.
So we’re wondering how much of these results is driven by post-menopausal women.”
The study was published in the journal NeuroImage (Ankudowich et al., 2016).
A natural way to reduce inflammation and boost your health.
Alpha waves hold the key to understanding how meditators can ‘turn-off’ consciousness.
People using this strategy find that it is easier to resist acting on their desires.
People using this strategy find that it is easier to resist acting on their desires.
Mindfulness is a proven strategy to reduce cravings for food, cigarettes and alcohol, a review concludes.
Multiple studies have found that mindfulness can instantly reduce cravings.
Mindfulness involves the acceptance of moment-by-moment experiences, such as the desire to eat, smoke or drink.
Acceptance involves seeing cravings as a normal result of stress or other problems in life.
Over time, people practising mindfulness find that it is easier to resist acting on their desires.
Mindfulness helps the mind simply acknowledge these cravings and then let them mentally flow away.
Being mindful occupies the part of the mind that generates cravings, studies suggest.
Mindfulness also emphasises the separation between thoughts and feelings and the self.
In other words, it is possible to think and feel, without acting on those thoughts and feelings.
Dr Katy Tapper, the study’s author, said:
“The research suggests that certain mindfulness-based strategies may help prevent or interrupt cravings by occupying a part of our mind that contributes to the development of cravings.
Whether mindfulness strategies are more effective than alternative strategies, such as engaging in visual imagery, has yet to be established.
However, there is also some evidence to suggest that engaging in regular mindfulness practice may reduce the extent to which people feel the need to react to their cravings, though further research is needed to confirm such an effect.”
Here are some mindfulness exercises to try.
The study was published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review (Tapper, 2018).
The surprisingly high amount of mind wandering that is perfectly normal.
How mindfulness reshapes the mind-body connection, making workouts more effective than ever before.
Facts about meditation include that it can change your personality, improve gut health and change the brain.
Facts about meditation include that it can change your personality, improve gut health and change the brain.
Below are some of the most popular facts about meditation studies published here on PsyBlog.
Click the link in each of the facts about meditation to learn more about the study.
Meditation is linked to higher levels of extraversion and openness to experience and lower levels of neuroticism, research finds.
Neuroticism is a personality trait that is strongly linked to anxiety, sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.
Extraversion, along with its well-known attribute of engaging with other people, is linked to higher levels of positive emotionality.
In other words, people who meditate probably experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions.
Openness to experience is the quality of being receptive and curious, as well as imaginative and sensitive to feelings.
Regular deep meditation could lower the risk of mental and physical health problems as well as improve gut health, a study of long-term meditators suggests.
The research found that Tibetan Buddhist monks had substantially different gut microbiomes from their secular neighbours.
The gut microbiome has been strongly linked to mood and behaviour.
It affects the stress response, hormonal signalling and the vagus nerve, which are all part of the parasympathetic nervous system.
Mindfulness-based meditation is often thought to have no problematic side-effects — but that is not one of the true facts about meditation.
When asked the right questions, some admit it makes them hypersensitive, others that it causes nightmares and that they continue to re-experience traumatic events, research reveals.
The most common side-effect from meditation is ‘dysregulated arousal’, which means either people feel too agitated or too flat.
In other words, some experience anxiety and others feel emotionally disconnected after meditating.
Emotional disconnection might be a positive for some people, although it depends on the situation.
While meditation is often thought of as a purely beneficial experience, a study finds otherwise.
People with negative patterns of thinking, such as anxiety or depression, are more likely to have bad experiences while meditating.
The research found, people who practised deconstructive forms of meditation were at an increased risk of unpleasant experiences compared with those using other types.
‘Deconstructive’ practices of meditation include Vipassana (insight) and Koan practice (used in Zen Buddhism).
In comparison, the risk was lower for attentional and constructive types of meditation.
In other words, if you are anxious or depressed it may be better to stick to mindfulness, breathing and loving-kindness meditation.
The uplifting emotions that many feel when practising meditation are accompanied by specific changes in the brain, research finds.
Meditation does not just lift depression and anxiety, neuroscientists now think it acts on the brain in a similar way to therapy and antidepressants.
The method of meditation used in the study was Transcendental Meditation.
Transcendental Meditation involves repeating a ‘mantra’ to oneself for around 15 to 20 minutes per day.
Transcendental Meditation is thought to be one of the most widely used types of meditation around the world.
Just 10 minutes meditation by a total novice is enough to improve thinking skills, research finds.
People who listened to a 10-minute meditation tape were more accurate and performed faster on a cognitive test afterwards.
All the people in the study had never meditated before in their lives.
Longer meditation sessions, or multiple sessions meditation might provide greater improvements to people’s cognitive abilities.
A single one-hour session of meditation using a ‘body scan’ can reduce anxiety and improve heart health, research finds.
It is well-known that repeated meditation is beneficial, but this study shows how even a relatively small amount can help.
Even one week after a single session of meditation, people still had lower anxiety levels than before.
The type of meditation used in the study was a ‘body scan’.
A body scan involves focusing intensely on one part of the body at a time over a thirty-minute period.
This was done after first spending twenty minutes doing a meditation induction and was followed by ten minutes self-guided meditation.
Meditation conserves the brain’s gray matter — used for processing thoughts — against age-related degeneration, a study finds.
From around the late twenties, people’s brains start to reduce in size and weight.
With these changes come worse memory, slower processing and the other cognitive changes associated with age.
The research shows that older people who meditated had preserved more gray matter.
So, not only can meditation preserve the brain’s white matter — used for communication between different areas — it can also preserve the brain’s gray matter, which is where cognition ‘happens’.
Meditation and yoga are more effective than memory games or crosswords for fighting memory problems linked to Alzheimer’s, according to a study.
Researchers compared two groups of people aged over 55 who reported memory problems like losing things, forgetting names and appointments.
One group were given crosswords and memory training to do over 12 weeks.
The other group did both yoga and meditation for an equivalent amount of time.
People in the yoga group practiced 20 minutes of Kirtan Kriya meditation, which is a part of Kundalini yoga.
Kundalini yoga involves focusing on breathing, chanting as well as the visualisation of light.
People who did yoga and meditation had better visuo-spatial memory: the type used for navigating and recalling locations.
Yoga and meditation also had better results in reducing depression and anxiety.
It helped people develop higher levels of resilience and increased their ability to cope.
It one of the facts about meditation that it can reduce feelings of loneliness and the expression of genes which cause inflammation, a study suggests.
After the eight-week study, participants who had been meditating felt significantly less lonely.
But the benefits did not end there, the researchers also found that meditation altered the genes related to inflammation.
After meditating, participants showed lower levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein and there were beneficial alterations in a genetic transcription factor (NK-kB) which has been found to be important in heart disease.
While inflammation is one of the body’s natural reactions to disease and other attacks, when it becomes long-lasting it can cause other diseases and depression.
→ Read on: Mindfulness Meditation: Guide And Research On Attention
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