Lecture 6: Meditation

Question 1

Why is there a sudden scientific interest in meditation?

Answer 1

It has become clear that the adult brain is much more plastic than once thought possible; Plasticity is the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span

Question 2

What is meant by plasticity?

Answer 2

Neuroplasticity: The capacity of the nervous system to modify its organization changes in the structure and function of the brain as a result of experience and learning

Question 3

Give a classic example which demonstrates the neuroplasticity of the brain in adults

Answer 3

Taxi driver’s growing hippocampi after the learning demonstrates that the adult brain can change at the level of anatomy due to learning

Question 4

Describe a study examining the effects of much shorter learning

Answer 4

Researchers had participants move their fingers in a particular sequence for 2 days for 5 days and found that that part of the brain representing the fingers gradually increased. This demonstrates that even much shorter learning could lead to changes in brain organisation.

Question 5

Describe a study which examined plasticity in response to cognitive tasks

Answer 5

They had participants practice working memory tasks on a computer 25 days (90 trials a day) in a row lead to changes in brain activity- functional changes in areas associated with working memory.

Question 6

what other condition was there to the finger study?

Answer 6

Other participants spent 2 hours a day only thinking about the finger movements without moving them. This group displayed the exact same increase in the same brain area.

Question 7

How are these lines of research relevant to meditation?

Answer 7

These suggests that just mental training can lead to changes in the brain. Meditation is defined as systematic mental training of specific, well-defined cognitive and emotional skills

Question 8

What three claims are made by meditation experts?

Answer 8

1. Each practice induces a predictable and distinctive state (or set of states) (reproducible)
2. The ability to induce the intended state improves over time (training)
3. The cultivation of this state results in the development of traits (expertise)

Question 9

Comment on the specificity of learning

Answer 9

Plasticity./ learning is typically task or stimuli-specific with no transfer of learning to novel tasks or stimuli (one set of finger movements is not transferable to another, same with working memory)

Question 10

If working memory tasks do not improve cognitive functioning as a whole, what could and why? (6)

Answer 10

Meditation:

1. Stimulus task and variability
2. Types of processes trained
3. Complexity of training context
4. Optimal level of arousal
5. Motivation
6. duration of training

Question 11

How does stimulus and task variability help?

Answer 11

Bus drivers don’t have the enlarged hippocampus, taxi drivers do because of the variability.

Meditation naturally includes many stimuli of various type and domain (e.g., auditory/ somatosensory, cognitive/emotional, internal/external) that occur in different mental contexts. So it is not limited to one single task like many cognitive computer tasks.

Question 12

How do the types of processes trained help meditation improve cognitive processes?

Answer 12

Many meditation styles focus at enhancing higher-order cognitive functions (e.g. inhition of distractors) that play a role in performance on many tasks

Question 13

How does the complexity of the training context help meditation improve cognitive processes?

Answer 13

Multiple processes are trained in parallel

Question 14

How does motivation help meditation improve cognitive skills?

Answer 14

It is an inherent feature of many meditation practices; A formal meditation session will often begin and end with deliberately invocating some forms of soteriological or altruistic motivations. This can help induce learning

Question 15

How does the duration of meditation improve learning?

Answer 15

Computer tasks might take a half an hours a day over 25 days, this is only 12.5 hours of training. Meditation experts spend MANY hours of mental training, they are olympic athletes of the mind. This enhances their cognitive skills.

Question 16

What are the possible benefits of meditation research

Answer 16

• Could uncover the extent of which our brains and ‘minds’ are plastic
  >The boundaries of our cognitive abilities (how well can we train ourselves to remain focused, clinical relevance)
  > could lead to further exploration of cognitive-neural systems that are resilient to damage, amenable to reorganisation, and capable of improving efficiency of processing through training or pharmacological treatment.

-Help us better link cognitive functions to their underlying neural correlations.
>Rather than after brain injury, what it looks like at optimal performance

• Increase our understanding of the neural counterparts of (subjective) experience e.g consciousness

Question 17

Meditation plays a part in all world religions but which type of meditation does science typically focus on and why?

Answer 17

There is a focus on Buddhism in science. In Buddhism there is extensive, precisely descriptive and highly detailed theories about their practices in a manner that lends itself readily to appropriation into a neuroscientific context

Question 18

What problem is related to these different types of meditation and what happened in an attempt to solve it?

Answer 18

There are many deviations to buddhism meditation in different parts of asia, western derivatives, mindfulness etc. They were split into two main styles of meditation in an attempt to translate this into research.

Question 19

Name and describe these 2 main styles of meditation

Answer 19

1. Focused attention meditation (concentrative techniques):
   - Directing and sustaining attention on a selected object
   - Detecting mind wandering and distractors (e.g. thoughts, emotions)
   - Disengagement of attention from distractors and shifting of attention back to the selected object
   - With practice, more and more effortless, stable attention
2. Open monitoring meditation (insight meditation, mindfulness meditation, vipassana):
   - Initial use of focused attention meditation to calm the mind and reduce distractions
   - Consists of being attentive moment by moment to anything that occurs in experience, whether it be a sensation, thought, or feeling, without grasping to an explicit object
   - With practice, development of non-grasping state, reflexive awareness of usually implicit features of mental life (allows for transformation of habits)

Question 20

What other styles of meditation were observed?

Answer 20

Loving kindness meditation:
- cultivating a sense of love and compassion towards all living things

Non-dual awareness (NDA) meditation

Question 21

Why is NDA meditation of particular interest to meditation research?

Answer 21

The idea is that non dual awareness meditation relies on accessing a level of awareness that is inherently free from a subject observing either object or its own mind, known as pure awareness or primordial awareness. This is not some novel awareness but one that ordinarily abides, albeit unrecognised, in the background of all conscious experiencing, and that precedes conceptualisation and intentionality (LSD)

Question 22

Describe two main theories of attentional blink

Answer 22

Limited‐capacity theories of the AB,e.g.,
>AB due to over‐allocation of limited processing resources to T1 within short‐term memory
>AB due to T1 occupying limited‐capacity stage necessary for consolidation in working memory,

Selection‐based theories of the AB, e.g.,
>Dysfunctional gating of information into working memory, rather than capacity limitation of working memor

Question 23

How are these theories relevant to meditation research conducted by this lecturer?

Answer 23

She hypothesised that after three months of OM meditation:

1. Attention would be captured less by T1, resulting in a smaller attentional blinkto T2
2. This reduction in T1 capture would be reflected in a smaller T1-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation

Question 24

Describe the participants involved in the study testing these hypotheses

Answer 24

Practitioner group(n=17): 
* Tested before and after a 3-month retreat during which they practiced meditation for 10-12 hours per day.

Novice group(n=23):

• Expressed interest in learning meditation.
• Also tested twice with a 3-month period in between sessions.
• Two one-hour meditation instruction classes.
• Asked to meditate for 20 min per day for 1 week prior to each session.

Question 25

What were the aims of this study?

Answer 25

1. To gain more insight into the psychological and neural mechanisms by which we can flexibly engage and then disengage attention from goal-relevant stimuli
2. To examine whether purely mental training of certain skills(engage/disengage) can improve performance on an external task (the AB task), that calls upon the trained skills, but does not require meditation (transfer).

Question 26

What were the predictions of this study?

Answer 26

Three months of intensive mental training will reduce attentional capture by T1, resulting in a smaller attentional blink to T2

This apparent reduction in T1 capture will be reflected in reduced brain resource allocation to T1 or a smaller T1-elicited P3b. The magnitude of decrease in T1-evoked P3b amplitude predicted the magnitude of decrease in attentional blink size.

Question 27

What were the results of the study?

Answer 27

Three months of intensive mental training reduced the size of the attentional blink, T2 accuracy increased in both groups with larger increases seen in the practitioner group

A selective decrease in T1-elicited P3b amplitude in no-blink vs. blink trials (trials in which an attentional blink occurred) over time was observed for the practitioners only. No other Group by Time by Trial-Type effects were observed. This was most prominently observed over the parietal electrodes

Question 28

What were the conclusions of this study? (3)

Answer 28

1. These findings confirm that OM meditation may:
   a. reduce the propensity to ‘get stuck’ on a target (< T1-P3b)
   b. increase one’s ability to attend to the content of experience from moment to moment (smaller AB)
2. These findings illustrate the usefulness of systematic mental training in the study of the human mind by revealing the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie the AB.
3. Purely mental training may change performance on an external task that calls upon the trained skills but does not require meditation.

Question 29

What limitations are there to this study? (4)

Answer 29

Participants in a meditation study: impossible to blind them with respect to the nature of the study (i.e., on meditation)
- differences in motivation, demand characteristics, outcome expectations, mood?

Confounds:
Placebo effect
Hawthorne effect: the alteration of behaviour by the subjects of a study due to their awareness
of being observed.

NO follow-up a few months after retreat ended- unclear how enduring observed changes are (trait effect?)

The control group - matched in age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, intelligence, but what about sleep or nutritional habits?

Question 30

What methodological consideration should be carried out by meditation studys that the researchers here did carry out?

Answer 30

Formulate in advance clear, theoretically-driven hypotheses about what task aspects will be affected by meditation and what task aspects will not be affected. E.g., in our study:

OM meditation will:

• only improve T2 accuracy (notT1 accuracy)
• only in short- (not long-) interval trials
• only affect resource allocation to T1 (not T1 sensory or motor processing)

Question 31

Controls are also very important, in what way did a meditation study apply a control in a novel way?

Answer 31

One study had long-term meditators perform the AB task
• During open monitoring (OM) meditation
• During focused attention (FA) meditation

This study used ‘meditator as its own control’ (??)

There was a big improvement with OM meditation but only in experienced meditators.

Question 32

Describe the procedure of NDA

Answer 32

Practitioners are instructed not to pursue the past, not to usher the future, but to rest evenly within present awareness, clear and non-conceptual. This is not accomplished in any effortful way or through some attentional strategy (e.g., by suppressing thoughts), but simply by letting go of all thinking and judgment and the sense of self. In initial stages, as in OM meditation, not grasping (taking mental content as object) is emphasised, as well as the notion that objects are not separate from experience, of which subjectivity is also just a facet. That is, object and perceiving subject are regarded as co-arising features in experience, and hence should not be experienced as separate (i.e. a separate I that perceives and interacts with something out there). In later stages, subjectivity is de-emphasised. Very few practitioners attain pure awareness.