As doctors increasingly prescribe meditation techniques to patients for stress-related disorders, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how different techniques from a wide variety of traditions, both modern and ancient, produce different results.
A new paper published this past summer in Consciousness and Cognition discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation:
1. Focused attention—concentrating on an object, idea, or emotion;
2. Open monitoring—being mindful of one’s breath, thoughts or feelings;
3. Automatic self-transcending—meditations that transcend their own activity
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, Ph.D., 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.
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”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, Ph.D., co-author, professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Dr. Shear is also the author of several books on meditation, including the well-known book, The Experience of Meditation which presents an introduction to the major meditation traditions of the world.
”Explicit differences between meditation techniques need to be respected when researching physiological patterns or clinical outcomes of meditation practices,” said Dr. Travis. ”If they are averaged together, then the resulting phenomenological, physiological, and clinical profiles cannot be meaningfully interpreted.”
Web references:
Talk by Dr. Travis, “Are all meditations the same?”
Transcendental Meditation Brain Research
