Latest News in Meditation Research
Meditation on buddha forms improves visual spatial processing
Especially in Vajrayana (Engl.: Diamond Way) Buddhism, which was primarily transmitted in Tibet and Himalayan countries like Bhutan, meditation on various buddha forms, often confusingly referred to as 'deities', plays an important role in formal meditation practice.
In a recent study carried out by researchers in the US, it was shown that meditating on buddha forms as the one seen on the right, enhances visuospatial processing efficiency. Compared to a group of meditators who engaged in a meditation of 'open presence', where high levels of distributed attention are maintained without a particular object of attention, meditators who focused on an internally generated visual image of a buddha form, demonstrated a dramatic performance increase in a computerised mental imagery task they completed prior and directly after a meditation session.
Even brief engagement with mindfulness meditation reduces pain
A few days ago the Journal of Pain published a study carried out by scientists at the University of North Carolina. In this studies participants took part in a 3-day mindfulness meditation practice of 20 minutes per day and evaluated the pain experienced in response to electrical stimulation. Participants rated the pain much lower after the meditation training than before. Several control manipulations were tested to confirm that the observed effect was due to the mindfulness meditation. However, the authors point out that in this study, due to the very short mindfulness training, the full potential of this approach has not been reached, and a longer mindfulness training may have had a more pronounced effect.
As such, the study mainly shows that pain reduction through mindfulness meditation is possible.