Although not strictly seen as meditation, hypnosis is every bit a form of meditation like any other. Empirically speaking hypnosis allows us to focus more acutely at both the conscious and subconscious levels. The outcome is observable behaviour change in line with the client's wishes, e.g. to stop smoking, lose weight, to experience calmer and relaxation (thus reducing or eliminating stress and anxiety).
The benefit of calmer states of mind!
Certain meditation techniques can promote behaviour to vary adaptively from moment to moment depending on current goals, rather than remaining rigid and inflexible. This is the outcome of a study by Lorenza Colzato and Iliana Samara from the Leiden Institute of Brain and Cognition at Leiden University, published in Consciousness and Cognition.
Different meditation types, different effects
Colzato and her fellow researchers were the first to investigate if meditation has an immediate effect on behaviour, even in people who have never meditated before. "There are two fundamental types of meditation that affect us differently," Colzato says, "open monitor meditation (which involves being receptive to every thought and sensation) and focused attention meditation (which entails focusing on a particular thought or object)."
Study design
36 people who had never meditated before participated in this experiment. Half of the people practised open monitor meditation while the other half practised focused-attention meditation for 20 minutes, respectively. After meditating, Samara asked participants to perform a task during which they were required to continuously adjust and adaptively discriminate irrelevant information from relevant information as quickly as possible.
Meditation optimizes adaptive behaviour
Compared to participants who performed OMM, people who performed FAM were significantly better at adapting and adjusting their behaviour from moment to moment. Colzato: "Even if preliminary, these results provide the first evidence that meditation instantly affects behaviour and that this impact does not require practice. As such, our findings shed an interesting new light on the potential of meditation for optimizing adaptive behaviour."
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychonomie (NVP). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
- Lorenza S. Colzato, Roberta Sellaro, Iliana Samara, Bernhard Hommel. Meditation-induced cognitive-control states regulate response-conflict adaptation: Evidence from trial-to-trial adjustments in the Simon task. Consciousness and Cognition, 2015; 35: 110 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.04.012
