Clear your mind

Distracted girl
© Cheryl Casey

We already know how important it is to quiet our minds. It allows us to be, to be aware, or not to lose ourselves in our thoughts.

In this post we’ll see how meditation can further help us to dramatically improve our learning ability. In a Stanford University experiment with a group of four year olds, it was found that those who showed better emotional control, later on scored 200 points higher in their SAT tests.

As we’ve seen, our attention is extremely limited, holding only seven to nine items at a time in our working memory. If stressed, we leave very little room for any additional cognitive activity. We’ve all felt that we cannot perform well when troubled.

In this video, professor Daniel Goleman shows us that emotions surface from the primitive base of the brain to the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). The amygdala is ever alert to report threats, sending depression, anxiety or anger impulses to the PFC. After the PFC scans other parts of the brain for additional information, the executive brain, or PFC, decides to flee, freeze or fight.

Depression and anxiety light up the right side of the PFC, while an active left side characterize subjects who are happy and for whom problems seem not to affect them easily.

The left PFC has a switch capable of suppressing the amygdala’s negative emotions. Those who lack control of this switch are forever handicapped in their learning by being easily distracted.

Too little anxiety and we are bored. Too much, and we are distracted. To perform optimally, or “in the flow”, we need just enough tension and interest, while our mind is still clear.

Guess what? Eight weeks of meditation has shown to improve the control of this switch.

To sum up, meditation not only improves learning, but also, performance in general.