Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from traditional Chinese medicine and incorporates aspects of other meditation and mindfulness training. Compared with the control group, the experimental group of 40 undergraduate Chinese students given 5 days of 20-min integrative training showed greater improvement in conflict scores on the Attention Network Test, lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, a significant decrease in stress-related cortisol, and an increase in
immunoreactivity. These results provide a convenient method for studying the influence of meditation training by using experimental and control methods similar to those used to test drugs or other interventions.
PNAS October 23rd 2007
4 comments:
Michael,
I was just wondering
(i) What kind of incentives does a week-long meditation require for successful take-up?!
(ii) And on a more serious note, could the reduced stress from a week's meditation be more fundamentally caused by the removal of the individual from their usual (perhaps stressful) weekly schedule, as opposed to the benefits of meditation?
The training was just 20 minutes a day for five days so I think this was the startling point of the paper. It is amazing to think there are such effects from such a brief intervention especially considering the control group engaged in relaxation therapy. The meditation involved multiple components (e.g. breathing techniques, developing attention and mindfulness, body relaxation, mental imagery) so it's hard to know the contribution of each factor. Seeing if the changes were maintained, or the level of daily practice needed to sustain or enhance the changes would be interesting to see. I'd also like to see the effect of 20 minutes of exercise for five days on attention, stress, and emotion.
I see the difference now between 5 days of training and 5 days at 20 mins a go.
I was wondering how anyone could be convinced to meditate for a week!
Actually, a second recent paper demonstrated the effect of something way more extreme than a 5 day meditation situation through examining the effect of going on aa 1-month intensive mindfulness retreat where you engage in meditation for a minimum of 10 hours a day! People are mad for this stuff though selection bias is clearly an issue in this study-
Mindfulness training modifies
subsystems of attention
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