Meditation for children

I recently wrote about coping with hyperactive disorders in children. In the past I have also looked at the benefits of meditation. New research has revealed that meditation may be a useful therapy for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

New research has revealed that meditation may be useful therapy for ADHD

For years, practitioners of transcendental meditation (TM), the technique first introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the West in the 1960s, have claimed that meditation can improve brain power.

Science is finally beginning to prove these claims, with new evidence that regular practice of TM can alter the brains of children with ADHD, improving focus and verbal ability (Mind & Brain: J. Psychiatry, 2011).

In this study, which took place in Washington, DC, neuroscientists monitored children aged 11 to 14. The children had language-based learning disabilities and the study used regular EEG tests of brain functioning, while performing a complex computer-based, visual-motor task that required keen attention, memory and focus. In addition, they took a verbal-fluency test, examining vocabulary, spelling and attention.

The tests and monitoring of the children were carried out prior to and after the initiation of regular meditation in one group of children, while another group served as controls.

To explain what the researchers were looking for, it is necessary to explain that during ordinary waking consciousness, the brain uses a predominance of the faster beta waves and a smaller percentage of slower theta waves, which typify the state of consciousness during deep sleep, and also when focusing on inner mental tasks, such as association or memory processing. Ordinarily, the lower level of theta activity enables the brain to block out any irrelevant data in order to focus.

In a child with ADHD, however, the beta-to-theta ratio is altered, showing higher theta and lower beta activity than normal. This means that the brain blocks out the relevant as well as the irrelevant. This ratio of brainwave activity also lessens the ability to concentrate on a particular task, something parents of children with ADHD will have experienced.

In addition, studies of children with ADHD reveal higher than normal levels of stress, which also affect the ability to focus. Consequently, the purpose of the Washington, DC study was to determine whether TM (which is known to help lower levels of stress) might also help to improve the ability to focus and process information for these children.

By the end of the study, those children who had been practising TM for six months showed a 48 per cent reduction in the ratio of theta-to-beta brainwaves. This compares with a three per cent decrease in the same brainwave ratio for those children being treated with drugs to treat ADHD, such as Ritalin.

It also showed a 25 per cent increase with neurofeedback. In addition, the parents were surveyed at the end of the study and they all reported improvements in the children’s overall happiness and quality of sleep, as well as their ability to focus and work independently.

The question will be asked: “How does meditation change the brain?” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, has studied expert and novice meditators. He found that meditation alters brainwave patterns even among new practitioners. Neophytes, who had practised meditation for only eight weeks, showed increased activation of the ‘happy-thoughts’ part of the brain (Psychosom. Med., 2003).

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence (Bloomsbury Press, 1996), carried out research showing that the brain cortices of meditators are ‘cut off from’ the limbic emotional centre. This suggests that meditation enhances attention and perception while tuning out emotional ‘noise’ (Am. J. Psychother., 1976).

Sarah Lazar, a neuroscientist and expert in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has confirmed that meditation produces actual physical changes in the brain. Lazar gathered together 20 long-term practitioners of Buddhist mindfulness meditation who had an average of nine years of meditation experience. Fifteen non-meditators served as controls. The participants meditated in turn inside an MRI scanner, while Lazar took detailed images of their neural structures.

Lazar discovered that those portions of the brain associated with attention, awareness of sensation, sensory stimuli and sensory processing were thicker in the meditators than in the controls. Lazar’s research offers some of the first evidence that meditation causes permanent alterations in brain structure.

Interestingly, cortical thickness was even more pronounced in the older participants. Cortical thickness is proportional to the overall amount of time that the participant has been a meditator. Ordinarily, cortical thickness deteriorates with age. Regular meditation appears to reduce or reverse this process.

In a functional MRI study, Lazar found evidence that meditation appears to affect not only the brain’s reasonable, analytical ‘upstairs’ but also the unconscious and intuitive ‘downstairs’.

She discovered greater activation in the part of the brain responsible for what is usually called ‘gut instinct’. Her work offers physical evidence that meditation not only increases our ability to receive intuitive information, but also our conscious awareness of it (Neuroreport, 2000).

kathryn@maltanet.net