How Meditation Works

Source: PNAS Early Edition 2007.

Only 20 minutes!

EUGENE, Ore. -- (Oct. 8, 2007) -- A team of researchers from China and the University of Oregon have developed an approach for neuroscientists to study how meditation might provide improvements in a person's attention and response to stress.

The study, done in China, randomly assigned college undergraduate studentsto 40-person experimental or control groups. The experimental group received five days of meditationtraining using a technique called the integrative body-mind training (IBMt). The control group got five days of relaxation training. Before and after training both groups took tests involving attention and reaction to mental stress. The findings appear online this week ahead of publication by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experimental group showed greater improvement than the control in an attention test designed to measure the subjects' abilities to resolve conflict among stimuli. Stress was induced by mental arithmetic. Both groups initially showed elevated release ofthe stress hormone cortisol following the math task, but after training the experimental group showed less cortisol release, indicating a greater improvement stress regulation. The experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatiguethan wasthe case inthe control group.

---