BE SMART: MEDITATE

​WEIRDO MEDITATOR
 
Back in the day when I started as a meditator, meditation was still regarded as a slightly suspicious navel-gazing endeavour.

You needed to be brave to persevere amid the raised eyebrows. Eyebrows that were raised even higher at the amount of time you were carving out for practice. The early nights you were having.
 
Dangerous!
 
God forbid, she even missed the fancy-dress party! Unheard of.
 
KEEP GOING 
 
But I didn’t care. I was feeling tooo damn good.
 
Not just healthy, but strangely more intelligent as well.
 
Smarter.
 
Could it have something to do with the meditation?
 
(Or more to do with the drugs and hectic lifestyle of late teens and early-20s wearing off??)
 
 
RESPECTABLE AT LAST
 
It’s edifying, some decades later, that meditation is now mainstream. It’s legit. Above-board. Respectable.
 
And eyebrows have changed too: they’ve gotten thicker and are professionally shaped these days.
 
But eyebrows aren’t the only things to thicken. Word has it (“studies show”) that the brains of longterm meditators thicken in the grey matter of the prefrontal cortex. The brainy part of the brain.
 
So there. 
 
Maybe I really was getting smarter.
 
MEDITATION MAKES YOU SMARTER
 
A main factor in leveraging the status of meditation from delinquent to desirable is the scientific scrutiny to which it has been subject over the last 10-15 years.
 
A 2009 study conducted by Sara van Leeuwen and colleagues of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany, put cognitive performance to the test.
 
They tested the visual attention of three groups of volunteer participants.
 
Group 1 comprised long-term meditators: 17 adults (around 50 years old) with up to 29 years of meditation practice.
 
Group 2 comprised 17 people of the same age and gender who were not long-time meditators.
 
Groups 3 comprised 17 young adults who had never meditated at all.
 
In the test, a series of random letters were flashed on a computer screen.
 
FLASH FLASH
 
Two numbers were concealed in their midst.
 
The participants had to identify both the numbers, amid the zoomingly flashing letters.
 
If they did not glimpse one in time, they had to say so (recognizing the second number was often difficult because the earlier images masked it.)
 
RAVE RESULTS
 
Guess what.
 
The expert meditators outscored both their peers and the younger participants.
 
That’s pretty good, because performance on such tests usually declines with age.
 
Go, us oldies.
 
Many more studies have confirmed the findings of Sara van Leeuwen and co. I will be bringing you the exciting results in future blog posts.
 
So there we have it.
 
Meditation makes us smarter.
 
Coulda told you that, but I’d sound like a smartarse.
 

Copyright Shakti Burke 2018
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