Adam Cole, NPR: Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.
Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.
Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.
In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended…
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This thing that strikes me about this article is the control group. The article states,
“subjects who paid attention to their breathing to mimic meditation saw no significant change in pain. And, in a previous study, subjects given fake training failed to see meditation’s effects, even though they believed they were actually performing mindfulness meditation.”
Well, I for one always try to pay attention to my breathing when meditating. Does this mean I’m doing it wrong? What exactly is “fake training” and what did it tech the people that made them a control group?
I spent a long time when I started meditating that I wasn’t “doing it right” only to learn that, at least as far as mindfulness is concerned, paying attention to the present moment is the whole point. I don’t understand how “paying attention to [one’s] breathing” is mimicking meditation. That IS meditation.
Unfortunately the full article is only available to Journal of Neuroscience subscribers, so it’s not clear what’s meant by this. This could be a mis-interpretation by the journalist, of course. Similarly to you, I’d find it hard to imagine how paying attention to the breath wouldn’t involve at least a component of meditative activity.
Good. I thought I was losing it. :) Thank you for your thoughts. It’s just this sort of thing that confuses people about meditation, I’ve found. I don’t doubt the study’s validity, just the control group.
I’ve been trying to think of ways that paying attention to the breath might not constitute meditation. I can imagine controlling the breath. Or perhaps noticing the breath but allowing the mind to drift aimlessly at the same time. I’d love to read the full journal article!