Want to Boost Your Creativity? Research says Meditate with an Open Mind

breathmeditation.org

Meditation for Beginners
 Jack Kornfield
Four stars on Good Reads
I belong to a wonderful fiction critique and support group with a membership of perhaps 20 aspiring and published authors.  Between eight and ten show up at the typical weekly meeting to discuss whatever.  One constant theme is making time for writing - most members work full time. 

Another way to approach the problem of limited time is to use techniques that help you make the most of the time you have.  For example, a short period of meditation just prior to writing to help you clear the mundane and day-to-day out of your cerebral cortex while pumping up your creativity for your writing session.

Here's some of the latest research on using meditation to boost your creativity.


Meditation makes you more creative, study suggests

Certain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking, even if you have never meditated before. This is the outcome of a study by cognitive psychologist Lorenza Colzato and Dominique Lippelt at Leiden University published in the professional journal, Mindfulness.

Long-lasting influence
The study is a clear indication that you don't need to be an experienced meditator to profit from meditation. The findings support the belief that meditation can have a long-lasting influence on human cognition, including how we conceive new ideas, and that even novices may profit from meditation.

Setup of the study
A test group of 40 individuals, some with meditation experience and others with no experience, were asked to meditate for 25 minutes before performing "thinking tasks."  The study investigated the influences of different types of meditative techniques on the two main ingredients of creativity:
  • Divergent thinking Allows for many new ideas to be generated. It is measured using the so-called Alternate Uses Task method where participants are required to think up as many uses as possible for a particular object, such as a pen.
    • Test subjects performed better in divergent thinking, i.e., thinking up as many possible solutions for a given problem) after Open Monitoring meditation  defined as being receptive to every thought and sensation.
  • Convergent thinking Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is a process whereby one possible solution for a particular problem is generated. This is measured using the Remote Associates Task method, where three unrelated words are presented to the participants, words such as 'time', 'hair' and 'stretch'. The participants are then asked to identify the common link: in this case, 'long'.
    • The researchers did not see as much effect on divergent thinking after Focused Attention meditation which is defined as focusing on a particular thought or object.
As a practical application, the results of the study demonstrate that anyone practicing meditation as a stimulus to their creative process will achieve greater results if they make themselves open to every thought and sensation during their meditation session.

Related stories:
*  *  *  *  *
Story Source: Materials provided by Leiden University.  Lorenza S. Colzato, Ayca Szapora, Dominique Lippelt, Bernhard Hommel. Prior Meditation Practice Modulates Performance and Strategy Use in Convergent- and Divergent-Thinking Problems. Mindfulness, 2014

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought

Image
Source: www.shef.ac.uk The charred remains of Assiros Toumba in Greece. Writing historical fiction set in the Greek Bronze Age?  Or simply enjoy reading this genre'?  Here's a study you may find interesting. C onventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. www.weather-forecast.com Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. Researcher Dr Ken Wardle says, 'These new results tell a story that is totall
Read more

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Image
Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.   So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.   I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement. Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain. Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to t
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more

Remember faces but not names? You got it wrong.

Image
Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f
Read more

Poor Mental Health, Casual Sex Reinforce Each Other

Image
Self-loathing and disgust are all too often the result of a one night stand - for both men and women. Now study suggests that poor mental health and casual sex actually feed off each other in teens and young adults, with each one contributing to the other over time. Researchers found that teens who showed depressive symptoms were more likely than others to engage in casual sex as young adults. In addition, those who engaged in casual sex were more likely to later seriously consider suicide. “Several studies have found a link between poor mental health and casual sex, but the nature of that association has been unclear,” said Sara Sandberg-Thoma, lead author of the study at The Ohio State University. “There’s always been a question about which one is the cause and which is the effect. This study provides evidence that poor mental health can lead to casual sex, but also that casual sex leads to additional declines in mental health.” Poor mental health and casual sex  linked
Read more