

Brief Meditative Exercise Shown to Improve Cognition - mahipal
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.htm

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gnosis
_"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?

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crazydiamond
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.

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fiaz
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).

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sandGorgon
"mindfulness meditation" = vipassana

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

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locopati
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>

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goodside
"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.

~~~
gwern
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."

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mhb
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.

