Having dealt with huge loss in the pandemic for the last two years, everyone is looking for a fresh start in 2022. Meditation is one of the proven techniques to help keep your mind stable and cool. There has been lots of research on how meditation is good for mind control, depression, pain control and stress. Below are some tips based on recent research that can help you stay healthy.
Meditation for mind-control:
BCI is an apparatus that allows an individual to control a machine or computer directly from their brain. Non-invasive means of control like electroencephalogram (EEG) readings taken through the skull are safe and convenient compared to more risky invasive methods using a brain implant, but they take longer to learn and users ultimately vary in proficiency.
Bin He, professor and head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and collaborators conducted a large-scale human study enrolling subjects in a weekly eight-week course in simple, widely-practiced meditation techniques, to test their effect as a potential training tool for BCI control. A total of 76 people participated in this study, each being randomly assigned to the meditation group or the control group, which had no preparation during these 8 weeks. Up to 10 sessions of BCI study were conducted with each subject. He's work shows that humans with just eight lessons in mindfulness-based attention and training (MBAT) demonstrated significant advantages compared to those with no prior meditation training, both in their initial ability to control BCI's and in the time it took for them to achieve full proficiency.
After subjects in the MBAT group completed their training course they, along with a control group, were charged with learning to control a simple BCI system by navigating a cursor across a computer screen using their thought. This required them to concentrate their focus and visualize the movement of the cursor within their head. During the course of the process, He's team monitored their performance and brain activity via EEG.
As stated prior, team found that those with training in MBAT were more successful in controlling the BCI, both initially and over time. Interestingly, the researchers found that differences in brain activity between the two sample groups corresponded directly with their success. The meditation group showed significantly enhanced capability of modulating their alpha rhythm, the activity pattern monitored by the BCI system to mentally control the movement of a computer cursor.
Read More at: https://www.newswise.com/articles/meditation-for-mind-control
Brain Changes During A Unique Spiritual Practice Called Orgasmic Meditation
A unique spiritual practice that uses stimulation of a woman’s clitoris as its focus, has been found to produce a distinctive pattern of brain function, according to a study published in the journal.
The study found significant changes in brain function in areas associated with sexual stimulation and also more traditional meditation practices thus representing a true hybrid in terms of its effects. The brain changes were also correlated with alterations in the autonomic nervous system that regulates basic body functions and is implicated in both intense meditation effects as well as sexual stimulation. In addition, patients reported profound spiritual experiences including intense feelings of oneness, unity and connectedness.
Orgasmic meditation, or OM, is a specified practice that lasts 15 minutes and is a paired practice such that there is one participant who stimulates the clitoris (a male in this study), and one participant who receives that stimulation (always a female). This study of 20 pairs of meditators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the changes in functional connectivity between the OM practice and a comparable “neutral” state. Importantly, there were significant changes in both the males and females separately, as well as when combined. This implies that certain general aspects of the practice can affect both the male and female participants in similar and different ways. Specifically, there were changes in frontal lobes which has also been observed in other meditation practices that involve intense focus as well as a sense of release or flow. There were changes in the parietal lobe, an area of the brain involved in the spatial representation of the self, and associated with feelings of oneness and connectedness during spiritual practices. Parts of the temporal lobe were also affected, including the emotional centers of the limbic system, which have been observed to be affected during meditation practices as well as sexual stimulation.
Read more at https://www.newswise.com/articles/brain-changes-during-a-unique-spiritual-practice-called-orgasmic-meditation
Nurse, Heal Thyself – Spiritual Practices in the Midst of a Pandemic
For nurses on the frontline, the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially disparaging, challenging and even life altering. Nurses have worked extremely long hours faced not only with the excessive, increased number of deaths of their patients, who were dying alone, but also grieved the loss of coworkers. In a survey of 657 health care providers, of which more than half were nurses or nurse practitioners, 64 percent screened positive for acute stress, 40 percent had symptoms of anxiety, and 53 percent screened for depression.
For most individuals faced with a stressful life event, self-preservation becomes their goal. The concept of self-care within the nursing profession often has been misunderstood as being selfish, even though the American Nurses Code of Ethics, Provision 5, states that “each nurse has the same responsibility to care for self as he or she has to care for others.”
Self-care involves various strategies, including spirituality, to mitigate the stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms associated with the pandemic. Spiritual practices can assist people to make sense of their experiences of suffering, to instill hope, to provide comfort, to find inner strength, and to heal the spirit. Individuals may choose to use spiritual practices, either religious or nonreligious, to buffer the effects of stressful life events.
In addition to a very stressful and demanding working environment, another nurse had to care for three small children because her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him with some deficiencies. Meditation helped her to find her inner strength and a better sense of health both mentally and physically. Fasting twice a week and spending time in a designated room reading her Bible, singing and praying, allowed another nurse to disconnect from technology and everyone else but God.
Read more at: https://www.newswise.com/coronavirus/nurse-heal-thyself-spiritual-practices-in-the-midst-of-a-pandemic/
Mindful breathing for pain control
To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan compared two types of meditative breathing––traditional mindful breathing and virtual reality, 3D-guided mindful breathing to reduce pain. They found that each lessened pain by modulating the somatosensory cortex, a region of the brain responsible for processing pain, but each used different mechanisms, said Alexandre DaSilva, associate professor at the School of Dentistry.
With the traditional breathing group, the functional connection with the brain's frontal regions increased, because this region was focused on the body's internal sensory details, called interoception, DaSilva said. This competed with the external pain signals and inhibited the ability of the somatosensory cortex to process pain. This follows the common assumption that mindful breathing exerts its painkilling effect by interoception, which means the conscious refocusing of the mind's attention to the physical sensation of an internal organ function.
In virtual reality group, subjects wore special glasses and watched a pair of virtual reality 3D lungs, while breathing mindfully. The technology was developed in-house and the lungs synchronized with the subjects' breathing cycles in real time. This provided an immersive visual and audio external stimulus. Pain decreased when the sensory regions of the brain (visual, auditory) engaged with the immersive virtual reality sound and image stimulations. This is called exteroception, and it weakened the pain processing function of the somatosensory cortex.
DaSilva's research group, which focuses heavily on migraine and pain, is working on options to deliver this virtual reality breathing experience via a mobile application and extending its clinical benefit to multiple chronic pain disorders beyond the lab space.
Read more at : https://www.newswise.com/articles/mindful-breathing-for-pain-control-like-yin-and-yang
8 weeks of meditation studies can make your brain quicker
Millions of people around the world seek mental clarity through meditation, most of them following or inspired by the centuries-old practices of Buddhism.
Anecdotally, those who meditate say it helps to calm their minds, recenter their thoughts and cut through the “noise” to show what really matters. Scientifically, though, showing the effects of meditation on the human brain have proved to be tricky.
A new study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science tracked how practicing meditation for just a couple of months changed the brain patterns of 10 students in the University’s Scholars Program.
The seed for the research came from a casual chat between Assistant Professor Weiying Dai and lecturer George Weinschenk, MA ‘01, PhD ‘07, both from the Department of Computer Science.
Weinschenk is a longtime meditation practitioner whose wife worked as an administrator at the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, which is the North American seat of the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery.
“I developed very close friendships with several of the monks,” he said. “We would hang out together, and I even received instruction from some of the Dalai Lama’s teachers. I took classes there, I read a lot and I earned a three-year certificate in Buddhist studies.”
Dai has studied brain mapping and biomedical image processing, and while earning her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, she tracked Alzheimer’s disease patients using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
“I’m interested in brain research to see how our brains are really functioning and how all different kinds of disease affect our brain,” she said. “I really have zero medical training, but I pick up all this knowledge or background from reading the literature and talking with the experts.”
The two faculty members had neighboring offices and shared a conversation one day about their backgrounds. Weinschenk mentioned that he had been asked to teach a semester-long class for the Scholars Program on meditation.
“I told Weiying, ‘Yeah, meditation really can have a transformative effect on the brain,’” Weinschenk said. “She was a little skeptical, especially about whether such a short amount of time spent learning how to meditate, whether that would make any difference. She suggested we might be able to quantify such a thing with modern technology.”
Read more at : https://www.newswise.com/articles/8-weeks-of-meditation-studies-can-make-your-brain-quicker
How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes
If you are forgetful or make mistakes when in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University – the largest of its kind to-date – found that meditation could help you to become less error-prone.
The research, published in Brain Sciences, tested how open-monitoring meditation – or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as they unfold in one's mind and body – altered brain activity in a way that suggests increased error recognition.
“People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,” said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author. “But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.”
The findings suggest that different forms of meditation can have different neurocognitive effects and Lin explained that there is little research about how open-monitoring meditation impacts error recognition.
“Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open-monitoring meditation is a bit different,” Lin said. “It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.”
Lin and his MSU co-authors – William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser – recruited more than 200 participants to test how open-monitoring meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.
The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open-monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography, or EEG. Then, they completed a computerized distraction test.
“The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses,” Lin said. “A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.”
While the meditators didn’t have immediate improvements to actual task performance, the researchers’ findings offer a promising window into the potential of sustained meditation.
“These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes,” Moser said. “It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there in the moment.”
While meditation and mindfulness have gained mainstream interest in recent years, Lin is among a relatively small group of researchers that take a neuroscientific approach to assessing their psychological and performance effects.
Looking ahead, Lin said that the next phase of research will be to include a broader group of participants, test different forms of meditation and determine whether changes in brain activity can translate to behavioral changes with more long-term practice.
“It’s great to see the public’s enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there’s still plenty of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works,” Lin said. “It’s time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens.”
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