March 2024
It is well established that meditation has an auspicious effect on the way the brain functions, but a study published 7 March indicates that increasing one’s meditation skill level “could shape the way individuals’ brains work in a stable and consistent way”.
A group of Italian researchers investigated the difference in effect between expert and non-expert meditators. The “expert” group consisted of adults who had meditated every day for at least seven years. The control group were healthy adults with limited experience of meditation.
The chosen method was the tantric Ngalso, a self-healing meditation “to induce transitions from normal consciousness to inner mindful attention states”. It involves various techniques.
The study showed that the experienced meditators enhanced their brain activity, thus their cognitive effort, markedly compared to the control group. They had “significantly higher power spectra on alpha, theta and beta, and a higher sympathetic tone with lower parasympathetic tone after meditation”. A novel finding was a unique theta wave pattern, which is associated with enhanced self-awareness and attention.
On the other hand, in the control group “meditation emerged to be soothing and restorative for the mind and body, mainly activating the parasympathetic nervous system”.
The researchers, led by Francesca Borghesi, also noted that ECG (heart rate) results showed that the expert meditators put significantly more effort into the meditation than the control group, “thus suggesting that a higher effort is required for this meditation, in line with the principle ‘no pain, no gain’ in body and mind”.
Anders Bolling
Frontier Journalists' Network 