For centuries, cultures and religions across the globe have practiced meditation as a form of worship. In more recent times, researchers have hypothesized that the practice brings health benefits along with it – reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, even alleviating the symptoms of epilepsy.
While more than 1,000 studies have been conducted on the benefits of meditation, several systematic reviews in recent years have all drawn the same conclusion: Scientific research on meditation practices lacks a common theoretical perspective and tends to suffer from poor research methods.
While there doesn’t seem to be any adverse effects to practicing meditation, more vigorous studies are needed to prove that it can actually improve health.
Across the globe, many researchers are doing just that – conducting new, methodically-sound studies on the benefits of meditation.
One new paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience this spring used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to demonstrate the meditation can reduce the experience of pain, as well as pain-related brain activation.
“This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, explained in an article published in ScienceDaily.
The study was small, with only 15 healthy volunteers participating. But they saw about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. (In contrast, pain-relieving drugs typically reduce pain levels by about 25 percent.)
More work is still needed. But these initial results are promising – not only for the health benefits they document, but also because they’re paving the way toward a higher-quality body of evidence on the benefits of meditation.