I am SERENER THAN YOU!

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A new study shows that meditation lets you close popup ads faster (via Boing Boing):

The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond… meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

“Every single subject showed improvement… Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice. [Link]

Not to mention bigger head muscle:

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”. [Link]

9 thoughts on “I am SERENER THAN YOU!”

  1. There’s a problem with the study – it actually shows something different than it advertises:

    The only way to say that meditation can alter the structure of the brain would be to do a longitudinal study following people who hadn’t chosen to meditate prior to the study. Otherwise you run into the same problem as you did with the London cabbie study. Correlation is not causation. People born with bigger hippocampi might self-select as cab-drivers. People with bigger ‘attention centers’ might be more predisposed to get into meditation. [Link]

  4. What kind of meditation are they talking about, anyway? “Meditation” can mean many things. Are the subjects silently reciting a single mantra over and over? Or what?

  5. The study in Massachusetts involved people from the Insight Meditation center.

    That’s mostly concerned with Vipassana meditation, which consists of simply focusing on the breath and briefly noting thoughts, sounds, sensations that arise.

    ie, if you catch yourself starting to think about something, you mentally note ‘thinking’ and go back to focusing on the breath. In the best case, after noting the thought’s arising, it kinda fades away.

    The reason for focusing on the breath is that it’s always there.

  6. “People with bigger ‘attention centers’ might be more predisposed to get into meditation.”

    It might be that people with bigger attention centers might be more disposed to stick with it.

    But, yeah, bigger, longer (uncut?) studies are needed.