meditate with sailing holiday
Paying attention may be one of the most fundamental and important cognitive abilities we have. It’s too bad, then, that many of us are so bad at it. It’s not only our outer distractions that get the better of us – email, texts, Twitter – but even worse can be the internal ones: Mind-wandering is a major problem for a lot of people, and there are few effective solutions for it. A wandering mind can lead to a host of negative effects, from reduced productivity to rumination to cycles of negative thoughts. And like a wandering mind at work, a wandering mind at school – or, worse, during major tests like the GREs – can be a particular problem. Luckily, as a new study has just reported, taking a short class on mindfulness do a lot to focus the mind and boost one’s scores.
Mindfulness, which has been around for millennia, is one of the few methods that seems to be an antidote of sorts for mind-wandering and its unwanted effects; and the connection has been fairly well illustrated both in and out of the lab. The authors of a new study wanted to determine whether short-term mindfulness training might help improve the working memory, focus, and ultimately, the GRE scores, of kids who took a two-week class on mindfulness. They write in their new paper that although standardized tests like the GREs should, in theory, be “minimally coachable, their role in gating access to competitive schools has generated a multibillion-dollar test-prep industry.”
meditation on sailing holiday
People can, of course, improve their performance on these tests with these (costly) coaching methods, but it’s unclear whether we’re actually changing our cognitive abilities in meaningful ways – or if we’re just getting more familiar with taking the tests. To this end, Michael Mrazek, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, wanted to see whether mindfulness training could improve test scores, not by focusing on the test, but by focusing on the mind – helping it stay attentive and wander less.
So Mrazek and his colleagues randomly assigned 48 undergrads to take a course in either mindfulness or nutrition for two weeks. Each group met with experts in the respective areas four times a week for 45 minute sessions. The students in the mindfulness group were taught how to pay attention to their sensory processes, like tasting food and breathing. They were also taught how to address their thoughts in new ways – in particular, how to differentiate between “naturally arising thoughts” (like, “hmm, I have a paper due tomorrow) and “elaborating” trains of thoughts (like, “hmm, what if I screw up the paper, fail the class, don’t graduate, and can’t get a job?!”), which we all do from time to time. Learning how to acknowledge our thoughts nonjudgmentally and then let them go, rather than reacting to them, is a central goal of mindfulness.
The students’ short term memory was tested a week before and after the training periods. Their verbal abilities were also tested by completing the verbal-reasoning section of the GRE. Mind-wandering was measured by randomly “probing” (surveying) the students while taking the tests and by querying them after.
Interestingly, the kids who had had mindfulness training improved considerably more on the GRE tests and the working memory tasks compared to the kids who’d had nutrition training. Their minds also wandered less during these tasks, which the authors believe may explain their improved performance. The improvement was the equivalent, they say, to a 16 percentile point increase in GRE score.
They authors are pretty excited about their results, which they say are robust. “Even with a rigorous design and effective training program, it wouldn’t be unusual to find mixed results,” Mrazek says. “But we found reduced mind-wandering in every way we measured it and improved performance on both reading comprehension and working memory capacity.”
The results aren’t terribly surprising, but they are good to hear. Yoga and meditation are being taught more and more in schools, hospitals, and jails, and it’s likely, especially with the ever-increasing scientific evidence to the effectiveness of the practices, that this trend will continue. Previous imaging work has shown thatmindfulness can reduce activity in the brain’s default mode network, the areas that are “on” when we’re not doing anything in particular, but just allowing our brains to roam from thought to thought. The authors suspect that their results are further evidence for this phenomenon. While more work is being done in this area, the new study is good news for all of us who have trouble with our wandering minds – and if you or your kid is gearing up for the GREs, signing up for a mindfulness class rather than a GRE tutor might be something to think about.
Article from Alice Walton
Article from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/03/27/the-new-benefits-of-mindfulness-improved-memory-focus-and-gre-scores/?ss=forbeswoman