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July 21, 2010 | Meditation practices differ in their ingredients, effects |
Washington:The Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions of meditations are different both in their ingredients and their effects,
according to researchers. A new paper published in Consciousness and Cognition
discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation: 1. Focused
attention-concentrating on an object or emotion; 2. Open monitoring-being mindful
of one's breath or thoughts; 3. Automatic self-transcending-meditations that transcend
their own activity-a new category introduced by the authors. Each category was
assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and
meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. "The idea is that meditation
is, in a sense, a 'cognitive task,' and EEG frequencies are known for different
tasks," said Fred Travis, co-author, and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness,
and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management. Focused attention, characterized
by beta/gamma activity, included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist (loving kindness
and compassion), Buddhist (Zen and Diamond Way), and Chinese (Qigong) traditions.
Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist
(Mindfulness, and ZaZen), Chinese (Qigong), and Vedic (Sahaja Yoga) traditions.
Automatic self-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations
from Vedic (Transcendental Meditation) and Chinese (Qigong) traditions. Between
categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation,
and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations
together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. "Meditations differ in both
their ingredients and their effects, just as medicines do. Lumping them all together
as "essentially the same" is simply a mistake," said Jonathan Shear, co-author,
professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the
author of several books and publications on meditation. Dr. Travis said: "Explicit
differences between meditation techniques need to be respected when researching
physiological patterns or clinical outcomes of meditation practices. If they are
averaged together, then the resulting phenomenological, physiological, and clinical
profiles cannot be meaningfully interpreted." |
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