How Meditation Boosts Cognition

People employ various tricks to make their cognitive skills sharper, and have been doings so for at least a few millennia. One of the most widely-used one is consuming artificial or natural chemicals, such as for example coffee and other stimulants. But a new investigation seems to indicate that practicing meditation could have roughly the same effect on human cognition. An additional advantage, showed in a new study, is the fact that doing so does not necessarily require long years of practice, as hinted at in previous research, e! Science News reports.

In the past, scientists have shown that brain areas associated with concentration tend to get a boost as test subjects practice meditation. This was evidenced using advanced brain-imaging techniques, and the association was immediately obvious. With the new work, it is currently being proposed that this exact effect can be obtained without the amount of effort practicing meditation seriously implies. Many people are deterred from doing so by the amount of time they would need to invest in this, as well as by the financial costs of such an endeavor.

“Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training – are really surprising. It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation. "In the behavioral test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training,” explains Wake Forest University School of Medicine post-doctoral researcher Fadel Zeidan. He is also a former PhD student at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, where the initial work was carried out. Details of the work appear in the April 2 issue of the respected journal Consciousness and Cognition.

For the new experiments, two groups were set up, one that did mindfulness training, and another one that didn't. After a few days, they were made to participate in a number of evaluations, which sought to determine their cognitive skills. “The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed. In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better,” Zeidan concludes.