Zen meditators tap in to subliminal messages
* 07 June 2012 by Anil Ananthaswamy
MEDITATION increases our ability to
tap into the hidden recesses of our brain that are usually outside the
reach of our conscious awareness.
That's according to Madelijn Strick of Utrecht University in the Netherlands
and colleagues, who tested whether meditation has an effect on our ability to
pick up subliminal messages.
The brain registers subliminal
messages, but we are often unable to recall them consciously. To
investigate, the team recruited 34 experienced practitioners of Zen
meditation and randomly assigned them to either a meditation group or a
control group. The meditation group was asked to meditate for 20 minutes in a
session led by a professional Zen master. The control group was
asked to merely relax for 20 minutes.
The volunteers were then asked 20
questions, each with three or four correct answers - for instance: "Name one of
the four seasons". Just before the subjects saw the question on a computer
screen one potential answer - such as "spring" - flashed up
for a subliminal 16 milliseconds.
The meditation group gave 6.8 answers, on average, that matched the subliminal
words, whereas the control group gave just 4.9 (Consciousness and Cognition,
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.02.010).
Strick thinks that the explanation
lies in the difference between what the brain is paying attention to and what
we are conscious of. Meditators are potentially accessing more of
what the brain has paid attention to than non-meditators, she says.
"It is a truly exciting development
that the second wave of rigorous, scientific meditation research is now
yielding concrete results," says Thomas Metzinger, at Johannes Gutenberg
University in Mainz, Germany. "Meditation may be
best seen as a process that literally expands the space of conscious
experience."
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