Which way does your doctor recommend in helping your recovery? Does your doctor have any clue about meditation benefits?
Or as Amy puts it. Maybe these 3000 articles might give your doctor a clue about benefits. Here ya go. What you have there is over 3000 published research articles about the benefits of meditation.
This is your brain on meditation
Meditation is more than just a way to calm our thoughts and lower
stress levels: our brain processes more thoughts and feelings during
meditation than when you are simply relaxing, a coalition of researchers
from Norway and Australia has found.
Mindfulness. Zen. Acem. Meditation drumming. Chakra. Buddhist and
transcendental meditation. There are countless ways of meditating, but
the purpose behind them all remains basically the same: more peace, less
stress, better concentration, greater self-awareness and better
processing of thoughts and feelings.
But which of these techniques should a poor stressed-out wretch
choose? What does the research say? Very little – at least until now.
A team of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), the University of Oslo and the University of Sydney
is now working to determine how the brain works during different kinds
of meditation. Their most recent results were published in the journal
“Frontiers in Human Neuroscience”.
Different meditation
techniques can actually be divided into two main groups. One type is
concentrative meditation, where the meditating person focuses attention
on his or her breathing or on specific thoughts, and in doing so,
suppresses other thoughts.
The other type may be called
nondirective meditation, where the person who is meditating effortlessly
focuses on his or her breathing or on a meditation sound, but beyond
that the mind is allowed to wander as it pleases. Some modern meditation
methods are of this nondirective kind.
“No one knows how the
brain works when you meditate. That is why I’d like to study it,” says
Jian Xu, who is a physician at St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway
and a researcher at the Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging at
NTNU.
Fourteen people who had extensive experience with the
Norwegian technique Acem meditation were tested in an MRI machine. In
addition to simple resting, they undertook two different mental
meditation activities, nondirective meditation and a more concentrative
meditation task.
The research team wanted to test people who
were used to meditation because it meant fewer misunderstandings about
what the subjects should actually be doing while they lay in the MRI
machine.
Nondirective meditation led to higher activity than
during rest in the part of the brain dedicated to processing
self-related thoughts and feelings. When test subjects performed
concentrative meditation, the activity in this part of the brain was
almost the same as when they were just resting.
“I was
surprised that the activity of the brain was greatest when the person’s
thoughts wandered freely on their own, rather than when the brain worked
to be more strongly focused,” said Xu. “When the subjects stopped doing
a specific task and were not really doing anything special, there was
an increase in activity in the area of the brain where we process
thoughts and feelings. It is described as a kind of resting network. And
it was this area that was most active during nondirective meditation.”
“The study indicates that nondirective meditation allows for more room
to process memories and emotions than during concentrated meditation,”
says Svend Davanger, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, and
co-author of the study.
“This area of the brain has its highest
activity when we rest. It represents a kind of basic operating system, a
resting network that takes over when external tasks do not require our
attention. It is remarkable that a mental task like nondirective
meditation results in even higher activity in this network than regular
rest,” says Davanger.
Most of the research team behind the
study does not practice meditation, although three do: Professors Are
Holen and Øyvind Ellingsen from NTNU and Professor Svend Davanger from
the University of Oslo.
Acem meditation is a technique that
falls under the category of nondirective meditation. Davanger believes
that good research depends on having a team that can combine personal
experience with meditation with a critical attitude towards results.
“Meditation is an activity that is practiced by millions of people. It
is important that we find out how this really works. In recent years
there has been a sharp increase in international research on meditation.
Several prestigious universities in the US spend a great deal of money
to research in the field. So I think it is important that we are also
active,” says Davanger.
http://gemini.no/en/2014/05/how-your-brain-works-during-meditation/
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