Brief Meditative Exercise Shown to Improve Cognition | Hacker News Reader

Brief Meditative Exercise Shown to Improve Cognition

sciencedaily.com

50 pointsmahipal8 comments

"Participants were randomly assigned in approximately equivalent numbers to one of two groups, one of which received the meditation training while the other group listened for equivalent periods of time to a book (J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit) being read aloud."

So does this mean that meditation helps cognition, or listening to "The Hobbit" hurts cognition?

The meditation I do is being aware of one's awareness. Its the simplest. Notice the awareness that is reading this post. This is the "awareness of 'you'". Also, called the "I am".

Its impact is profound. After a while, you realize that thoughts and your identification with a person arises out of this simple silent awareness. Thus the constant stream of thoughts related to "I" arise from this silence.

I am thus this pure awareness, not the mind or personality that I thought i was. The identification with the mind-created story crumbles and with that a huge amount of suffering, longing, craving etc. The freedom experienced is immense.

Once starts freeing from the mental conditioning that has happened since birth, so relationships, decision-making etc improve.

One can put one's mind to one task without thoughts interrupting. Also, a lot of inessential tasks, time-wasters etc have also dropped off. One can focus on important activities.

Talk about synchronicity...I started meditating regularly for the past four weeks at multiple intervals for about 15-20 minutes per day (average about 1 hour total per day). The results have been astounding, especially when it comes to my perception of time: all of a sudden, I have more of it. A day seems like a day instead of a few hours, and all of a sudden, a week is a long period of time.

I believe this is due to increased levels of concentration (as indicated by the article).

"mindfulness meditation" = vipassana

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587032

Every religion has some form of meditative practice (though some are less advertised than others - I never did hear about Jewish meditative practices until I was deep into Buddhist practices). And for the non-religious, there are folks like John Kabat-Zinn (see link below) who take a more scientific approach.

http://www.mindfulnesstapes.com/ (I have not used these but it was a decent enough link to give an overview)

http://www.umassmed.edu/behavmed/faculty/Kabat-Zinn.cfm

"The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately 10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one."

I call bullshit. Normal untrained adults would do far better than this on adaptive n-back. If this is true, it means sitting and listening to Tolkien is more damaging to your working memory than having a screwdriver jammed into your prefrontal cortex.

There is something off; I'm not sure what the article is talking about.

The study is available from http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training

Reading it, I see significant advantage for the meditating group on the 'Computer Adaptive 2-back task', but not the 1 v 10 difference cited. Specifically, it seems that according to figure 1, before the intervention, the average 'extreme hit rate' on the n-back was ~2 for the meditating group and ~3.5 for the Tolkienists, but after 4 sessions, the meditating group was scoring >9 while the Tokienists were ~5.

The only significant discussion of the 2-back is on pg 6:

> "Fig. 1 shows the significant group by session interaction found in the analysis on the extended hit rate from the computer adapted n-back task, F(1, 47) = 6.76, p = .01, g2 = .12. The meditation group, in contrast to the control group, had more extended hit runs. There was also a significant session effect, F(1, 47) = 18.78, p < .001, g2 = .29. Follow-up analyses on the speed measure of the n-back task did not show any evidence of an interaction effect F < 1, or an effect of session or group, Fs < 1."

Another interesting experiment would be to have a group, instead of meditating, listen to, for example, a lecture about a topic that interests them.

I wonder if the control group had heard The Hobbit before.

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