The essence of the technique is a calming effect on the areas of the brain responsible for pain, and, at the same time, the activation of areas that help to cope with pain.
"This is the first study of its kind designed to show that one-hour meditation can significantly reduce both direct pain and activation of areas of the brain responsible for pain," says Fadel Zeidan, an author of the study from the Forest Baprist Medical Center in North America. Carolina (USA).
During the experiment, 15 absolutely healthy volunteers who had never practiced meditation before attended four 20-minute classes to learn one of the meditation techniques – concentration of attention.
This technique allows a person to fully concentrate their attention on the breathing process, distracting themselves from destructive thoughts and emotions.
The brain activity of the volunteers was recorded using a special tomograph twice: before and after the meditation session. The source of pain, the reaction to which the scientists intended to evaluate, was a small heating device that was applied to the right leg of the participants in the experiment during the removal of the tomogram.
A scan performed after a meditation session showed that all the volunteers had decreased pain. And for some of them, the decrease reached 93%, Zidane notes.
At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, a part of the brain that plays a key role in determining the source and intensity of pain.
Interestingly, the scan results of this area prior to the meditation session showed very high activity. And when the participants in the experiment meditated during the scanning process, no activity was observed in this area of the cortex.
Another effect of meditation was increased activity in the areas of the brain responsible for the memory of pain and the mechanisms that allow them to cope.
According to Zidan, the research results suggest that meditation is a more effective painkiller than morphine and other similar drugs, since, on average, their effectiveness does not exceed 25%, and the effectiveness of meditation techniques reaches about 40%. https://livepositively.com/how-data-analytics-is-transforming-cs2-performance-and-igaming-strategies