2-3 Meditation and Mindfulness – What to Look for

We hear a lot nowadays about meditation and mindfulness. So inquiring minds often want to know what effect meditation can have on learning. First, let’s back up a step. What is meditation? It’s really just a way of bringing about different modes of consciousness using a variety of different techniques. For example, meditators may close their eyes and repeat a mantra, control their breathing, or deliberately cultivate a certain emotional state. Scientific research on meditation is still in it’s infancy. But researchers can sometimes classify meditation techniques into two different types that seem to be fundamentally different . Focused attention and open monitoring. Given what we’ve learned already, my guess that these two types of meditation relate to the two different types of basic modes of the brain uses to perceive the world, focused and diffuse. And you’d be right. Focused attention types of meditations such as mantra, sound or chakra meditation appear to help enhance focus mode type thinking, this kind of meditation sometimes seems to make people feel better. It can help reduce feelings of depression and anxiety, even while it builds concentration abilities. In contrast, open monitoring types of meditation such as, vipassana and mindfulness, appear to improve diffuse imaginative thinking. With open monitoring, we don’t just focus on one thing. Instead we keep our attention open to all aspects of experience without judging or becoming attached to our thoughts. Now we know that diffuse mode thinking is more wide ranging, your thoughts can bounce pretty much anywhere. Daydreaming happens in the diffuse mode, daydreaming not only gives rise to more random thoughts and connections that underpin creativity. It also helps you plan for the future, since your thoughts tend to wander towards what the future might bring, sounds great, right? Well, not entirely. The diffuse mode is also affiliated with anxiety and depression. Think about it this way. If your mind is bouncing all over the place, it can get drawn into worry about, whoa, things that might go wrong. Part of the reason that building your focusing abilities may help make you feel happier is that it appears to suppress the diffuse mode, while it builds the focusing mode. So what does all this mean? It means that meditation can have surprisingly different effects, depending on the type. It’s all very complex, and researchers are far from sorting everything out yet. In the end, practices that encourage focusing can be a great benefit for learning. But having some daily time where your mind relaxes and wanders freely is also very important, particularly if you want to encourage creativity. From a practical standpoint then if you are a meditator you might try to avoid feeling you should always be steering your thoughts back into focus if you catch your mind wandering outside meditation sessions. This might be why people find the pomodoro technique so useful for combining creativity with productivity. It’s a sort of working meditation. Up next, we’ll look at some of the deeper aspects of the pomodoro technique.