Meditation visibly changes your brainwaves
Intensive bouts of meditation have an immediate and visible impact on practitioners' sleeping brainwaves, researchers have confirmed, in results that help enlarge the picture of how exactly the mind-training practices can change our brains.
Over the past fifty years, practices such as yoga and meditation have jumped from the counterculture to the mainstream, with many people praising their stress-relieving and wellbeing effects. They've also attracted the attention of neuroscientists who are busy studying how exactly these activities affect our brains and the impact on our behaviour.
In a recent experiment, researchers studied the brainwaves of expert meditators while they slept after two sessions of intensive meditation training, and compared them with recordings from the same people before training. They found that after the sessions they showed an increase in slow brainwaves and so-called sleep spindles, brief periods of waxing and waning faster oscillations, early in the night.
Similar patterns have been observed during sleep after other kinds of training, and are thought to reflect processes the brain uses to strengthen new memories and learning during sleep.
'Sleep spindles and slow waves are both considered markers of plastic changes (changes in structure) induced by activities performed during wakefulness,' said Dr Daniela Dentico of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US, who co-authored the study.
The research was part of a collaboration between US researchers and a team led by Dr Antoine Lutz at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, France, who received funding from the EU's European Research Council (ERC) for the BRAINandMINDFULNESS project to look at the impact of mental training on the brain.
Their work builds on results from earlier studies in which they showed that long-term meditators with thousands of hours of training had more gamma wave activity in their sleeping brains than non-meditators. While there is no agreement on the exact function of gamma waves, some scientists believe they are associated with focus and concentration.
These results were surprising because gamma activity is more characteristic of waking brain activity.
'Sleep is a privileged window to look at the neural traces of waking experience,' said Dr Dentico. 'It was very exciting to find a signature of meditation practice while you're asleep, not meditating; that really means meditation changes the defaults of the way your brain works.'
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