Meditation, Sleep, and Performance

Guerriero, Lauren E.; O’Hara, Bruce F.

doi:10.21926/obm.icm.1902031

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Students can change a physiological measure, psychomotor vigilance and attention, by a very simple and short meditation. We have previously described the impact of meditation on performance [38] and this material is a good starting point for additional lecture and lab material. The authors also had success using this activity in a Bio 300 level course for Neuroscience majors: Introduction to Neuroscience Techniques (mostly sophomores and juniors).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When discussing these data and your findings with your students, this can lead to discussions of the mechanism of action of meditation, which we and many others believe is increasing the neuronal coordination and inducing slower firing of the neurons [35][36][37]. This in turn leads to the performance enhancing effect (reviewed in [38]. Studies of longer durations of meditation with subsequent EEG recordings show that meditation can reduce attentional blink and allows for more effective brain resource allocations [39].…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Other performance measures have been found to benefit from longer meditation, but it's unknown if 5 minutes of meditation would change performance on these other measures. Longer-term meditation has been shown to improve information processing, memory, and other measures of attention (reviewed in [38,27] and these require follow up studies.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effectiveness of Short Meditation on Attentional Performance: A Quick Classroom Activity

2023

Curr Res Cmpl Alt Med

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Undergraduate students suffer from stress and attention problems throughout their academic career. This is a great time for students to learn a new skill; meditation practices have been shown to improve mental and physical health and our activity can introduce them to this beneficial practice. Utilizing the learning-cycle approach, we had students first engage with a problem, explore interpretations, conduct a meditation experiment, and then interpret and explain results. This short activity investigates the impact of focused-breathing meditation on the attention of students using the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT). The within subjects' design showed that a majority of students see reaction time improvements with just 5-minutes of meditation or 5-minutes of being sedentary. This has been repeated over many years and in both an introductory biology course and as well in a 300-level neuroscience techniques course. We also investigated if the amount of sleep the previous night would impact performance changes, but this was found to have no effect. Our 5-minute meditation activity taught with the learning-cycle approach can be quickly added to any neuroscience, biology, behavior, or psychology course. Further discussion focuses on the stress response, the neurophysiology of meditation, brain electrical activity, brain regions, and impact of behaviors on physiology.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

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The Effectiveness of Short Meditation on Attentional Performance: A Quick Classroom Activity

2023

Curr Res Cmpl Alt Med

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“…The results suggest that the practice of Zen meditation can potentially improve cardiorespiratory interaction and slow down the cardiopulmonary ageing. Guerriero and O'Hara [18] presented a narrative review of the impact of meditation on sleep and performance. Meditation appears to share several commonalities with the non-rapid eye movement sleep in physiology and may reduce the homeostatic pressures of sleep need and positively impact sleep architecture.…”

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confidence: 99%