April 22, 2005 – The practice of meditation could increase alertness and decrease the use of automatisms and conditioned reflexes.
Heidi Sormaz, holder of a doctorate in psychology and professor of meditation, yoga, Tai Ji Quan and Qi Gong, has just published the results of two trials with control groups that she conducted with 210 subjects in whom we measured the influence of transcendental meditation on certain aspects of cognitive functions1.
The results of the trials, which took place at the universities of Yale and California (United States), indicate that the practice of transcendental meditation has the effect of reducing the use of automatisms and conditioned reflexes during various cognitive tests. The subjects who practiced meditation had a much easier time than those in the control groups to emerge from acquired psychic models.
The researcher writes in her article that the subjects did not lose the ability to use acquired automatisms when necessary. They were just more able to intentionally get rid of it. This supposes that, while allowing to acquire and use the desirable conditioned reflexes (reading, writing, making music, etc.) meditation would allow one to detach oneself at will from undesirable automatisms (bad habits, received ideas, etc.) frozen designs, etc.). This can be useful when looking for original solutions to a problem or when unforeseen events arise, for example.
These data tend to confirm a hypothesis put forward by the psychiatrist and researcher Arthur J. Deikman during the 1960s: in addition to the fact that meditation can induce experiences of a mystical order and contribute to vigilance, it would allow a certain “deautomatization” of people. structures of the psyche which act on the organization and interpretation of perceptual stimuli.
In the tests conducted by Ms. Sormaz, the effect of “disautomatization” was noticeable from the moment the subjects began to practice meditation. She would like to conduct further trials to find out if the phenomenon differs in people who have been practicing meditation for a long time.
Pierre Lefrançois – PasseportSanté.net
1. Wenk-Sormaz H. Meditation can reduce habitual responding.Altern Ther Health Med. 2005 Mar-Apr; 11 (2): 42-58.