Note From Jim:
Learn from Columbia Doctoral student Maria Konnikova, how "Mindfulness" can enhance personal and professional emotional states as well as human performance - now and in your senior years.
Best Always - Jim
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Excerpts:
Published: December 15, 2012
... the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say
mindfulness.
... when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.
... meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
As little as five minutes a day of intense Holmes-like inactivity, and a happier outlook is yours for the taking
mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking.
The only participants to show improvement were those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. While the overall time they devoted to the assignment didn’t differ much from that of other groups, they spent it more efficiently
The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would.
... how well we can monitor our own feelings and thoughts and that is considered a key waypoint between our two major attention networks, the default and the executive.
...the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention.
That’s the thing about mindfulness. It seems to slow you down, but it actually gives you the resources you need to speed up your thinking.
... new evidence suggests that not only can we learn into old age, but the structure of our brains can continue to change and develop. In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.
Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity).
The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.
The implications are tantalizing. Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline
Maria Konnikova is the author of “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes” and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia.
Access Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?smid=pl-share
