Mindfulness meditation (MM) has been growing increasingly popular over the last few years as an alternative, pill-free treatment for conditions such as stress and depression.
A post at the start of last year looked at possible side-effects of this powerful tool.
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This week, we’ll examine a 2021 paper in International Journal of Transpersonal Studies by Dutch researchers testing a hypothesis that EEG activity would be different in pairs meditating compared with individuals.
“Many of the studies on mindfulness and meditation are poorly designed, lacking a control group and compromised by inconsistent definitions of what mindfulness actually is,” they write, in an admirably blunt fashion.
Even the attempt to some to remediate this with neuroimaging studies – at least showing what’s going on – gets the chop. Most don’t calculate the “effect size”, which is a number representing the strength of a relationship between two variable, making it impossible to say how much MM works compared with other cognitive tools.
The Netherlands’ Vrije Universiteit to the rescue! Their trial on 20 female psychology undergrads – all meditation-naive – indicated, with some major caveats – that frontal alpha and theta power was significantly increased in pairs over individual meditation and a control condition.
(And what I like about this paper is its clear-headed explanations of what – if anything – can be drawn from this.)
They wanted to exclude social interaction as a possible factor in inducing specific mental states, so separated subjects – who were always in pairs – by what’s described as an “opaque blue wooden screen”. As opposed to a transparent wooden screen?
The researchers also wanted to test whether something called Theory of Mind (ToM) played a part. ToM is the process by which we ascribe mental states to others. In this case, participants were told whether their partner was meditating or not.
Each MM session lasted five minutes, two minutes for the text of a guided meditation called the Three Minutes Breathing Space to be read out, and three minutes for subjects to focus on everything they experienced within awareness without judgment.
An increase in alpha and theta activity was detected (see below for alpha results), but only when the pairs meditated together. “Our study seems to support the idea that MM is more than mere relaxation,” the authors wrote, cracking open the bubbles and kicking their clogs off.
So what is it, then, if “more than mere relaxation”?
First, the simple knowledge that another person was there might induce “social facilitation”, accounting for the raised activity.
Second, the shared goal of meditating might induce raised activity.
Third – this study being in a transpersonal journal, after all, immediately prior to two articles about past lives – the increased activity may be due to expanded consciousness beyond the body (or, indeed, any combination of the above). “Two meditating minds, being part of a universal quantum field, may be connected by electromagnetic waves, reflected by resonance and standing waves.”
The Witness Space has dabbled in this topic before – click through for a three-part look at biofields.
The authors suggest that a way to test for electromagnetic waves would be to have both subjects in different rooms – and unaware of the other’s presence.
As for implications, the main one is a suggestion that therapists practise MM with clients. “We can only speculate about clinical relevance of our findings,” they say, sadly packing the champagne flutes away. The EEG results “are not necessarily related to changes in behaviour, cognition or subjective experiences”.
They do allow themselves to find the results “interesting”, before noting other limitations, including the difficulty of generalising findings from a sample of educated women, aged 18-24, undertaking a five-minute task. “Much more data need to be collected to draw firmer conclusions,” they say.