Category: Mindfulness

Awe and wonder can help people feel more connected and reframe problems.

Astronauts who see the Earth from space could provide a clue as to how we can all feel more awe and wonder, new research suggests.

The view from so far away from the Earth provokes a special phenomenon called the overview effect.

Dr David Yaden, the study’s first author, said:

“We watch sunsets whenever we travel to beautiful places to get a little taste of this kind of experience.

These astronauts are having something more extreme.

By studying the more-extreme version of a general phenomenon, you can often learn more about it.”

The researchers analysed the reports of many astronauts from all over the world.

Each had documented their own experience of seeing the Earth from space for extended periods.

They frequently described it as a life-changing experience.

They mentioned ideas like connectedness, vastness, perception and unity.

Despite the religious or spiritual overtones, the experience was very secular for the astronauts, Dr Yaden explained:

“Space is so fascinating because it’s a highly scientific, highly secular environment, so it doesn’t have these connotations.

We think of people who do a lot of meditation or climb mountains, people who are awe junkies, having these experiences.

We don’t [often] think of these very strict scientists reporting these blissful moments.”

The astronauts’ experience is so fascinating — and potentially life-changing — that the researchers want to find out how we can all have more of it in our lives.

Mr Johannes Eichstaedt, one of the study’s co-authors, said:

“Behavior is extremely hard to change, so to stumble across something that has such a profound and reproducible effect, that should make psychologists sit up straight and say:

‘What’s going on here?

How can we have more of this?'”

The researchers are planning a follow-up experiment which will give people the opportunity to gaze at the Earth from space in virtual reality.

Perhaps it will be a life-changing experience — just as it is for the astronauts.

The study was published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness (Yaden et al., 2016).

Paying attention to what you are reading can be hard — especially in this age of endless distraction.

Practising meditation can help improve your focus while reading, a new study finds.

Maintaining attention when reading can be difficult, as the study’s authors write:

“It is challenging for individuals to maintain their attention on ongoing cognitive tasks without being distracted by task-unrelated thought.

The wandering mind is thus a considerable obstacle when attention must be maintained over time.

Mental training through meditation has been proposed as an effective method of attenuating the ebb and flow of attention to thoughts and feelings that distract from one’s foremost present goals.”

For the research, some people were sent on a one-month intensive vipassanā meditation training program.

They then took a reading test which had nonsensical sentences deliberately placed within it.

Compared with a control group, those who had been practising meditation were better able to detect the gibberish, suggesting they were paying more attention.

The study’s authors write:

“Meditation practitioners across both studies demonstrated greater levels of error monitoring following training, as measured by their ability to detect gross semantic violations in the text.

This suggests that training group participants were more attentive to the story content and ongoing text, allowing them to better detect these salient text discrepancies.”

The study was published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice (Zanesco et al., 2016).

Reading a Novel Boosts Brain Connectivity

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The “Crunch Effect” can help you eat less.

Being conscious of the sound your food makes in your mouth could help you eat less, a new study finds.

The researchers found that when people could not hear their own eating noises, they ate more.

A different study in the series found that even thinking about the sounds made while eating was enough to reduce consumption.

Dr Ryan Elder, one of the study’s authors, said:

“When you mask the sound of consumption, like when you watch TV while eating, you take away one of those senses and it may cause you to eat more than you would normally.

The effects many not seem huge–one less pretzel–but over the course of a week, month, or year, it could really add up.”

The study may help explain why mindfulness can help people eat less.

Mindfulness helps concentrate the mind on the sensory experience of eating.

https://www.spring.org.uk/2015/10/people-who-think-like-this-have-less-belly-fat.php

Dr Gina Mohr, the study’s co-author, said:

“For the most part, consumers and researchers have overlooked food sound as an important sensory cue in the eating experience.

Dr Elder agrees:

“Sound is typically labeled as the forgotten food sense.

But if people are more focused on the sound the food makes, it could reduce consumption.”

The study was published in the journal Food Quality and Preference. (Elder & Mohr, 2016).

Chewing image from Shutterstock

As little as four 20-minute daily sessions were enough to reduce pain.

Mindfulness meditation is better at reducing pain than a placebo, a new study finds.

This is more impressive than it sounds because even a placebo can reduce the experience of pain considerably.

Brain scans also showed that people who practised mindfulness meditation had very different patterns of activity.

Dr Fadel Zeidan, who led the  study, said:

“We were completely surprised by the findings.

While we thought that there would be some overlap in brain regions between meditation and placebo, the findings from this study provide novel and objective evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain in a unique fashion.”

People in the study were initially pain-free, but were treated with a ‘thermal probe’ to get over this hurdle.

For the treatment, one group were given a placebo cream, which contained no active ingredient.

The other group had some brief training in mindfulness meditation.

Placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by 11% and the emotional aspect of the pain by 13%.

Mindfulness, however, reduced pain sensation by 27% and the emotional aspect by 44%.

Mindfulness also did better on other measures of pain compared to a placebo.

It reduced pain intensity and pain unpleasantness.

Dr Zeidan explained the results of the accompanying brain scans:

“The MRI scans showed for the first time that mindfulness meditation produced patterns of brain activity that are different than those produced by the placebo cream.”

The study’s results suggested that the mindfulness may have worked, at least partly, by slowing breathing.

Dr Zeidan said:

“This study is the first to show that mindfulness meditation is mechanistically distinct and produces pain relief above and beyond the analgesic effects seen with either placebo cream or sham meditation.

Based on our findings, we believe that as little as four 20-minute daily sessions of mindfulness meditation could enhance pain treatment in a clinical setting.

However, given that the present study examined healthy, pain-free volunteers, we cannot generalize our findings to chronic pain patients at this time.”

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Pain image from Shutterstock

Chronic pain is known to impair brain function, causing problems with memory and the emotions.

Yoga can be an effective way to reduce the effects of chronic pain on the brain.

So said Dr M. Catherine Bushnell, an expert on reducing pain without the use of drugs, at the American Pain Society’s recent annual meeting.

Chronic pain causes changes in gray matter volume, studies have shown.

These can lead to memory deficits, emotional problems and lowered cognitive functioning.

Dr Bushnell explained:

“Imaging studies in multiple types of chronic pain patients show their brains differ from healthy control subjects.

Studies of people with depression show they also have reduced gray matter, and this could contribute to the gray matter changes in pain patients who are depressed.

Our research shows that gray matter loss is directly related to the pain when we take depression into account.”

Techniques like yoga and meditation can counteract the negative effects of pain on the brain.

Studies from different labs suggest that yoga increases gray matter volume in critical areas of the brain.

That includes areas which can reduce the experience of pain.

Dr Bushnell said:

“Practicing yoga has the opposite effect on the brain as does chronic pain.

Some gray matter increases in yogis correspond to duration of yoga practice, which suggests there is a causative link between yoga and gray matter increases.

Insula gray matter size correlates with pain tolerance, and increases in insula gray matter can result from ongoing yoga practice.”

Mind-body practices can be beneficial to people experiencing pains in all sorts of ways, Dr Bushnell said:

“Brain anatomy changes may contribute to mood disorders and other affective and cognitive comorbidities of chronic pain.

The encouraging news for people with chronic pain is mind-body practices seem to exert a protective effect on brain gray matter that counteracts the neuroanatomical effects of chronic pain.”

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Learning how to sleep better can improve quality of life, depression and fatigue.

Mindfulness training could be more effective than modern techniques for how to sleep better, new research reveals.

The findings could point the way to community-based training for sleep problems — especially for vulnerable seniors.

Learning how to sleep better is particularly important as poor sleep is connected with so many psychological and physical problems.

Around 50% of people over 55 report some sort of sleep problems.

Learning how to sleep better

The study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, randomly assigned 49 people to two different groups (Black et al., 2015).

All the people in the study were older individuals who were having moderate problems sleeping.

One group took a six-week ‘sleep hygiene’ course, a relatively modern technique tested in many studies (more on this here: How To Fall Asleep Fast).

The other group received a six-week course in mindfulness training.

In the words of mindfulness expert, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn:

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

The results showed that those in the mindfulness group showed greater improvements in their sleep quality in comparison to those who had taken the sleep hygiene course.

The mindfulness group also had lower levels of depression and they felt less tired.

Dr Adam P. Spira, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writing about the study in the same journal, said:

“…effective nonpharmacological interventions that are both ‘scalable’ and ‘community accessible’ are needed to improve disturbed sleep and prevent clinical levels of insomnia.

This is imperative given links between insomnia and poor health outcomes, risks of sleep medication use and the limited availability of health care professionals trained in effective nondrug treatments such as behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

This context makes the positive results of this RCT [randomized clinical trial] compelling.” (Spira, 2015)

• Read on: Mindfulness Meditation: 8 Quick Exercises That Easily Fit into Your Day

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