Brain processes more thoughts, feelings during meditation

Your brain processes more thoughts and feelings during meditation than when you are simply relaxing, according to a new study.

A team of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of Oslo and the University of Sydney are working to determine how the brain works during different kinds of meditation.

Different meditation techniques can be divided into two main groups. One type is concentrative meditation, where the meditating person focuses attention on his or her breathing or on specific thoughts, and in doing so, suppresses other thoughts, researchers said.

The other type may be called nondirective meditation, where the person who is meditating effortlessly focuses on his or her breathing or on a meditation sound, but beyond that the mind is allowed to wander as it pleases.

"No one knows how the brain works when you meditate. That is why I'd like to study it," said Jian Xu, a physician at St Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway and a researcher at the Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging at NTNU.

Fourteen people who had extensive experience with the Norwegian technique Acem meditation were tested in an MRI machine.

In addition to simple resting, they undertook two different mental meditation activities, nondirective meditation and a more concentrative meditation task.

Nondirective meditation led to higher activity than during rest in the part of the brain dedicated to processing self-related thoughts and feelings. When test subjects performed concentrative meditation, the activity in this part of the brain was almost the same as when they were just resting.

"I was surprised that the activity of the brain was greatest when the person's thoughts wandered freely on their own, rather than when the brain worked to be more strongly focused," said Xu.

"When the subjects stopped doing a specific task and were not really doing anything special, there was an increase in activity in the area of the brain where we process thoughts and feelings.

"It is described as a kind of resting network. And it was this area that was most active during nondirective meditation," Xu said.

"The study indicates that nondirective meditation allows for more room to process memories and emotions than during concentrated meditation," said Svend Davanger, co-author of the study at the University of Oslo.

"This area of the brain has its highest activity when we rest. It represents a kind of basic operating system, a resting network that takes over when external tasks do not require our attention.

"It is remarkable that a mental task like nondirective meditation results in even higher activity in this network than regular rest," said Davanger. The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.