Meditating on problems

Meditation wasn’t created to give Buddhists something to do when they sit down, nor was it designed so that modern finance executives could assuage their guilt. Meditation is a honed and crafted tool to enhance the mind and a new study has proven, yet again, that it does exactly that.

The new study involved people being asked to meditate for 25 minutes before completing thinking tasks. Some of the people in the study were experienced meditators while others had never meditated before. The subjects either engaged in “open monitoring meditation” (being receptive to every thought and sensation) or “focussed attention meditation” (focussing on a particular thought or object). The tasks allocated to people involved one of two types of thinking. Some tasks involved divergent thinking while others involved convergent thinking.

Divergent thinking allows for many new ideas to be generated and involves subjects in tasks like thinking up as many uses as possible for a particular object, like a pen.

Convergent thinking on the other hand asks for one possible solution to a particular problem being discovered. Tests of this might include for instance finding one particular word that would link apparently disparate words such as “hair”, “time”, and “stretch”. In this instance, “long” might be a convergent answer to the problem.

The results showed that varying effects. It was found that open monitoring meditation led to an improvement in divergent thinking but focussed attention meditation did not. Perhaps the most interesting thing here was that this effect occurred for both people who had never meditated as well as those who meditate regularly.

So open monitoring meditation can foster creativity and as this study shows, it can do it in the short term even if you have not done it before. Now that sounds like a mind management tool that you don’t need to pay $3,000 dollars for a weekend seminar to attain.