Researchers looked at how meditation influences brain activity.
Meditation types can be divided into two groups; concentrative meditation and nondirective meditation, a Gemini news release reported.
Concentrative meditation is when the person focuses on one thought or their breathing to suppress other thoughts while in nondirective meditation the individual focuses on their breathing or a sound but allows their mind to wander.
"No one knows how the brain works when you meditate. That is why I'd like to study it," Jian Xu , a physician at St. Olavs Hospital and a researcher at the Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging at NTNU, said in the news release.
The researchers performed MRIs on 14 people who had experience in Acem meditation. The participants performed both nondirective meditation and a "more concentrative meditation task," the news release reported.
The team found that Nondirective meditation spurred higher activity in the part of the brain dedicated to "self-related thoughts and feelings."
"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," Xu said. "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."
The findings indicate that nondirective meditation is more effective at clearing the mind and allowing one to process emotions and memories.
"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," Svend Davanger, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, and co-author of the study, said in the news release.
