If you do martial arts for health then at some point you will come across the topic of meditation. There is a lot of hype out there, so here are three things today’s research in neuroscience has offer about contemplative practices:
1) It takes 10,000 hours. Meditation can produce profound and nearly permanent changes to the brain, but in research those difference were found in practitioners who had practiced 10,000 – 40,000 hours (that’s four zeroes), which at the low-end is about 1 hour a day for 27 years or as some of these dedicated practitioners do, one 3-year long retreat (that’s years) meditating for 8 hours a day. But don’t let that discourage you! The good news is that it only takes a few dozen hours of practice to see changes in your behavior and experiences like how …
2) Meditation will make you more sensitive, more accurate — and less reactive. Meditation has the effect of making you more aware of what you are feeling, whether it’s the temperature, exercise burn from leg day, or the ups and downs of new relationships — you will feel the nuances with increased intensity. And your perceptions will be more accurate. You’ll be able to discriminate between the nuances and while you won’t be perfect, your grasp of the world will match the reality more closely than it did yesterday. Now, feeling more intensely and more accurately could turn you into a heaving and self-righteous boor, but meditation has one more gift: it makes you less reactive. It increases the gap between the feeling and your response. It gives you room to breathe between you and the hurly-burly of the day.
3) Attention is designed to alternate between going in and going out. One of the most useful insights from neuroscience in meditation comes from the work on the Default Mode Network. These are brain areas that turn on when you turn-off — the DMN gets active when you are just waiting around and daydreaming. For people with anxiety and depression it goes into overdrive, but it’s a system that is meant to look inward for memories that may be relevant to the present moment or to chew on memories of how people treated us for clues that can help us predict their future behavior, like that weird thing my cousin said at the dinner party last month …Oh my God! She’s pregnant! That’s what she was trying to say…Anyway, the DMN has a job to do, and what’s more Nature has wired us so that the DMN alternates, like a changing of the guard, with the systems which help us pay attention back out in the real world. Mediation becomes much more productive when you understand your brain’s natural cycles.
Happy breathing!