April 23, 2011

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, meditation produces a powerful pain-relieving effect on the brain, and even those new to meditation can reap its benefits. The small study was conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and followed 15 volunteer participants who attended four 20-minute classes to learn a type of mindfulness meditation called “focused attention” that involves breath focus and the release of distracting thoughts and emotions.

Before and after meditation training, researchers generated pain by heating a small region on the participants’ right legs to 120 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately six minutes, and the participants used a plastic sliding scale to report their level of discomfort. Scans of brain activity were conducted using a type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to capture long duration brain processes.

Results indicated that meditation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest. According to researchers, morphine and other pain-relieving drugs typically reduce pain ratings by approximately 25 percent.

“One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing,” said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist.

“This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist.

Source: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Study: Zeidan F, et al. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation” Journal of Neuroscience. 2011 Apr 6;31(14):5540-8.

Dave Gorczynski is president of SPARK, a non-profit organization that has provided free energy work sessions and workshops across New York City since 2002. He writes a regular column about energy work and meditation for the Compact News in New York City's Chinatown. E-mail him at dave@sparkenergy.org.