The Royal Marine who has built a career advising businesses and the England football team; the New York scientist who is a world expert on women’s brains; and the dog owner looking to calm her pooches — all had one thing in common. They swore by the wonders of meditation.
Now science has caught up with what many of us already believed. A study of students in New York state has found that 10 to 15 minutes a day of meditation can boost the brain’s ability to concentrate on tasks.
Students at Binghamton University had brain scans after taking up meditation five times a week for eight weeks. These showed changed brain patterns that indicated that the students could switch faster between the state of consciousness in which the mind wanders and the state in which it is focused. Concentration was also better maintained.
“Tibetans have a term for that ease of switching between states — they call it mental pliancy, an ability that allows you to shape and regenerate your mind,” says George Weinschenk, one of the authors of the study. “They also consider the goal of concentration one of the fundamental principles of self-growth.” He adds that he now wants to study the effects of meditation on the elderly, those with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s.
For those of us whose fizzing student brains are decades in the past, but who still dream of being able to read Proust (or a study on the longitudinal effects of meditation) without being distracted before the end of the first page, his follow-up study will be eagerly awaited.
The Binghamton study is important, says Lisa Miller, a clinical scientist and professor at Columbia University, New York, and part of emerging data that show that synaptogenesis — the generation of new synapses between neurons — is achievable through the development of our inner lives. She cites a Harvard study that appeared to show that an eight-week mindfulness course made measurable changes in brain areas associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.
A few years ago I spent an afternoon with Will Williams, the founder of Beeja Meditation, a form of meditation inspired by the Vedic tradition. He says the feedback he receives indicates that his clients enjoy improved concentration after taking up meditation.
"Wow, my concentration has gone up so much!" That’s probably the most frequently heard sentiment we get,” he says. And that comes from all age groups. “It really is across the board.
What I would say with young people is the speed of adaption happens quicker. Literally within a couple of weeks for people under the age of 16, the impact on so many areas of their life — concentration, behaviour, creativity, all of these different things — it changes super quick. The school-age child’s brain is much more malleable. The difference isn’t so much the level of impact, it’s more the speed.”
“Our minds produce about 60,000-80,000 thoughts per day and around 60 per cent of these are deemed to be negative or fearful,” says Owen O’Kane, a psychotherapist and bestselling author, whose new book is called Ten Times Happier. “We know from research that even ten minutes’ practice [of meditation] per day can change how the brain functions: grey matter can increase, plasticity improves, and the brain’s threat centre [amygdala] reduces its volume of brain cells.
“What does this all mean? In simple terms, we function and feel better. Concentration and memory improve. Anxiety reduces and mood can improve.
“People report improved quality of life when they meditate. It’s a no-brainer, if you pardon the pun. Impressively, mindfulness meditation is proving helpful for all age groups including children and older people. This is likely to continue improving as we learn more about the powerful benefits of this simple technique.”
In 2008, Andy Puddicombe, the former Buddhist monk introduced me to his methods in a Canary Wharf hotel suite where he taught City titans to meditate. He helped me learn how to focus on my breathing to develop concentration and to try and let noises that intruded on our session come and go, without letting them bother me. I still, like millions of others, use his techniques to attempt to become “more present”. His familiar voice can be heard on his app and Unwind Your Mind, a Netflix series. He says Headspace’s guided meditation techniques have scientifically validated benefits in helping users focus, claiming four weeks of Headspace has been shown to increase focus and reduce mind-wandering by 14 per cent.
The Binghamton study suggested even 10 to 15 minutes a day of meditation could be helpful. Williams says that two 20-minute sessions a day is absolutely the ideal, but “if you do less than that, it’s still going to be very beneficial. You might not get the full spectrum of benefits and they might come a little bit more slowly, but there is still going to be a very significant shift, compared to just leaving your brain nakedly having to process this tsunami of information that 21st-century life is presenting.”
Miller says you get “a big bang for your buck” when you first start meditating in terms of improving your concentration. “If your goal is to go on a journey through which you deepen your awareness and have a look into the deeper nature of life and have a closer alignment with the true structure of life, you might want to give it a little more time.”