What is meditation? What kind of experience is meditation?

Meditation is some comprehensive psychological and behavioral training, which helps individuals to establish a special attention mechanism and achieve an all-round psychological improvement. Meditation originated from the eastern religious and cultural traditions 5000 years ago. From the cognitive point of view, some researchers believe that "meditation is a series of exercises to establish a special attention mechanism through self-regulation of body and mind, and ultimately affect the individual's psychological process" (CAHN &; Polich, 2006). From the perspective of psychological experience, some scholars emphasize that meditation can "make individuals get calm, clear and focused through self-regulation exercises, and produce a kind of psychological happiness as a whole" (Walsh &; Shapiro, 2006). Meditation emphasizes not only physical relaxation, but also cognitive and psychological relaxation, so it is a comprehensive psychological and behavioral training.

The brain mechanism of meditation

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In recent years, psychological research has paid more and more attention to the brain mechanism of meditation, and various techniques have been used to provide unique evidence for the brain mechanism of meditation, such as electroencephalogram (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI).

It is found that the changes of θ wave in frontal lobe and γ wave in occipital lobe seem to be better EEG indexes to reflect meditation. Theta wave is a kind of brainwave with a frequency of 4~8Hzz, which usually appears in people's deep relaxation, shallow sleep, meditation and subconscious state. At this time, individuals are easily hinted, and their creativity, inspiration, intuition, learning and memory efficiency are all improved. The frequency of γ wave is above 35Hz, which is related to memory and overall thinking. A large number of studies have found that the higher the level of individual meditation experience, the greater the amplitude of θ wave and γ wave (Cahn, Delorme,&; Police, 20 10). The changes of θ wave and γ wave in meditation training show that meditation can regulate EEG activity and promote individual's attention, memory and learning ability.

By using event-related potentials, Polich et al. also found that the longer the meditation time, the more P3a amplitude decreased. P3a wave is mainly produced in frontal lobe area, which is a kind of EEG component related to stimulus-driven attention processing. In the meditation state, the amplitude of P3a induced by distracting stimuli decreases, which indicates that the individual's attention processing to distracting stimuli decreases in the meditation state. This shows that meditation enhances the individual's ability to resist distracting stimuli, that is, the individual's attention quality has been improved (Polich, 2007).

Another study shows that the midline cortical structures related to inner feelings in meditation, such as bilateral forebrain islands, ventral anterior cingulate cortex (VacC), right medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and bilateral anterior cuneiform cortex, are weakened, while the right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is enhanced (Ives-Deliperi et al, 20 1 1). In addition, studies related to pain show that meditation is related to the increase of activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, insula and the decrease of activity in the frontal lobe, that is, when an individual receives pain stimulation in meditation, the activity in the brain regions related to executive control, evaluation and emotion decreases, and the pain feeling he experiences decreases (Grant et al., 20 1 1).

The role of meditation

Meditation is a self-regulating technique originated from the East. In recent years, some branches of meditation, such as yoga and mindfulness, have attracted more and more attention from western psychologists and neuroscientists. Meditation can change the cognitive and behavioral characteristics that traditional psychology considers difficult to change, and can effectively intervene some serious psychological and mental diseases. Meditation can also cause corresponding plastic changes in brain function and morphology, further confirming the objectivity of its function.

1, meditation can balance the left and right brains.

Most of us use half of our brains more than the other half, which causes an imbalance in brain use. Meditation has been proved that it can synchronize the two hemispheres, make the brain communicate faster and deal with things better. When the logical left brain and the creative right brain start to work in parallel, it becomes easier to solve problems, creativity increases, deep thinking becomes the standard, and the ability to concentrate is amplified.

2. Meditation can increase brain volume.

Meditation can effectively increase the "gray matter thickness" of nerves in some brain regions. In other words, meditation can make your brain bigger, faster and smarter, just as physical exercise can make your muscles stronger, denser and more endurance.

3. Meditation can change long-term and short-term memory.

The hippocampus (editor's note: located under the cerebral cortex, it plays a role in short-term memory, long-term memory and spatial orientation) and the frontal lobe (the first half of the brain), which are two important areas responsible for brain memory, show obvious increase in activity during meditation. Stimulating these important areas through meditation will increase the long-term and short-term memory capacity, and make your work, study and daily life easier.

4. Meditation can improve emotional intelligence.

Regular meditation will improve your so-called "emotional intelligence" (EQ), that is, your ability to adjust and listen to your feelings, and then guide you to deal with these feelings in a calm and thoughtful way. Neuroscientists have found that if you often let your brain meditate, it will not only become good at meditation, but also improve your self-control, as well as your ability to concentrate, manage stress, resist impulses and know yourself.

5. Meditation can regulate individual negative emotions and promote individual positive emotions.

In 20 12, in an 8-week meditation research project, Desbold and others scanned the brain images of participants before and after their participation. During the scanning process, participants should look at some pictures, which will trigger positive, negative or neutral emotional reactions. It was found that after meditation practice, the amygdala (the emotional center of the brain) was less responsive to all photos. This shows that meditation can help us control our emotions for a long time, even when we are not meditating.

In addition, Barnhofer et al. (2007) trained suicide patients in mindfulness meditation, and studied the lateralization of EEG α wave in the resting state of prefrontal lobe. Twenty-two subjects with a history of suicidal depression were randomly divided into mindfulness-based cognitive therapy group and routine therapy group, and the resting EEG activity was measured 8 weeks before and after intervention. It was found that the activity of the left prefrontal lobe in the routine treatment group was weakened, indicating that the types of positive emotions were weakened. At the same time, with the deterioration of depressive symptoms, the depressive symptoms in mindfulness cognitive therapy group have not changed significantly, indicating that mindfulness meditation training can help high-risk suicidal depressed individuals learn to maintain a balanced pattern of brain activities related to positive emotions.

6. Meditation can cultivate compassion

In 20 13, Condon and others conducted a hidden sympathy test for those who practiced meditation. In this study, they were first arranged to sit in the waiting area with two actors. When another actor on crutches pretended to be in pain, the two actors sitting next to the meditator completely ignored them, and they sent an unconscious signal that they didn't want to care. But those who practice meditation are more than 50% likely to help people in pain. David, one of the researchers? "What is really surprising about this discovery is that even if others don't do it, meditation will make people willing to do good things-help those who suffer," Destero said.

7. Meditation can relieve pain.

The study by Way et al. (20 10) investigated whether there is a great difference in brain morphometry in the low-level pain sensitivity of long-term meditation practitioners. The results showed that the pain sensitivity of meditators was significantly lower than that of the control group. In all subjects, the low level of pain sensitivity is related to the increase of cortical thickness in brain regions related to emotion and pain, including anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral parahippocampal gyrus and forebrain insula cortex, while the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus and bilateral secondary sensory cortex of meditators become thicker, especially the change of gray matter structure of dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus cortex means that meditation training can adjust the emotional effect of pain perception.

8. Meditation can enhance creativity.

Proper meditation can help solve some problems that require creativity. Colzato and others conducted a study on 20 12, which asked participants to accept a classic creative task: think as much as possible about multiple uses of a brick. Those who use the "open monitoring" meditation method come up with the most methods. This meditation method liberates the mind by paying attention to breathing.

9. Meditation can reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Meditation is often recommended for those who are anxious. Zaidan et al. found in 20 13 that attending four meditation classes (20 minutes each time) is enough to reduce anxiety by as much as 39%. The core symptom of depression is the deep thought-the repeated occurrence of repressed thoughts. Unfortunately, it is useless if you just advise people with depression not to think about those depressing things. Because the treatment of depression is to control the patient's attention to some extent. An effective method is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness means living in the present, not focusing on past regrets and future worries.

Goldin and gross((20 10) based on social anxiety disorder SAD) assumed that there were emotional and attentional biases and distorted negative self-beliefs, and investigated the behavior and cranial nerve changes of clinical patients with SAD after mindfulness decompression treatment. The results show that mindfulness decompression therapy can improve anxiety, depression and self-esteem, while the attention task of paying attention to breathing can alleviate negative emotional experience, weaken amygdala activity and strengthen brain activity involved in attention distribution. It shows that mindfulness meditation training can improve the behavior and clinical symptoms of adult SAD patients and the automatic emotional response of negative self-belief by weakening the brain activity related to emotional response, enhancing the brain network activity related to attention. This further proves that mindfulness meditation training can change the specific direction of attention regulation, from explicit processing (intentional) to implicit processing (automation).

10, meditation can delay the cognitive decline of the elderly.

Cognitive dysfunction in the elderly is influenced by heredity, age, hypertension and low exercise. Meditation can actively regulate autonomic nervous system and immune system, enhance the ability of nerve protection and repair, and inhibit cell apoptosis. On the other hand, meditation can activate brain function and promote synaptic development, myelination and nerve regeneration.

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