14 DAY TRIAL // According to the results of a new scientific investigation, it would appear that practicing meditation for just a few weeks has discernible effects on neural activity. The work shows that people shouldn't be swayed from meditating by the fact that hardcore practitioners spend years mastering this technique.
All the effects that the research team identified in study participants were positive. The origins of this study span back more than two decades, when Jane Anderson was struggling with seasonal affective disorders that affected her during the long Minnesota winters.
Within a month after she began meditating, she noticed her overall condition improved. This represented the anecdotal evidence which the research team tried to validate or infirm in this study.
Recently, as a undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Anderson coauthored the new work, which tested this hypothesis rigorously. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she explains.
Together with UWS colleague Christopher Moyer, PhD, and other researchers, she conducted the new research on the effects of meditation on 11 people. Details of the work will appear in the upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal edited by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
Participants in the study were only asked to take part in a five-week course of meditation training. At first, all test subjects had their neural electrical activity measured via electroencephalography (EEG), PsychCentral reports.
All were then given a set of instructions that said: “Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath.”
A group of 10 control subjects was promised that they would be trained later. They were then used as a baseline for all measurements the team conducted. People in the test group took part in two, 30-minute sessions weekly for five weeks.
Brain activity change “was clearly evident even with a small number of subjects,” Moyer explains.
“If someone is thinking about trying meditation and they were thinking, ‘It’s too big of a commitment, it’s going to take too much rigorous training before it has an effect on my mind,’ this research suggests that’s not the case,” he adds.
“It can’t hurt and it might do you a lot of good,” Moyer explains. “I think this implies that meditation is likely to create a shift in outlook toward life. It has really worked for me,” Anderson concludes.