Meditators can concentrate the hurt away
Volunteers felt less pain while practicing mindfulness
If a tree falls on you in the forest while you’re meditating, does it still hurt?
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Well, yes. But maybe not quite as much as it would if you weren’t meditating, researchers from North Carolina and Wisconsin report in the April 6 Journal of Neuroscience. Individuals who practiced mindfulness meditation, or samatha, during a pain experiment reported much less discomfort than they did in earlier, meditation-free sessions. Samatha, the team says, flipped switches on or off in diverse regions of the brain underlying attention, expectation and even the awareness of thoughts themselves.
Getting hit by a tree limb will hurt, but it won’t hurt everyone in the same way, says study coauthor Robert Coghill, a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. The conscious mind, which is informed by personal experience and context, is an expert at deciding which sensations to take note of and which to ignore. “All the time we’re hanging out, our brain is being bombarded with all sorts of information,” he says. “But we let it go.” A falling tree is more jarring than the tickle of a forearm hair, but meditation may help people to similarly let “ouch!” and “yowza!” reflexes go.