Meditation as a form of mental training is not the best way to develop creativity, in particular cognitive flexibility. This is the conclusion reached by the psychologists of St. Petersburg State University; they demonstrated this by the example of creating metaphors. The study was supported by a grant from the Government of the Russian Federation.
Meditation, namely one of its types – the so-called open monitoring (open monitoring), fell into the sphere of scientific interests of psychologists at St. Petersburg State University. This type of meditation involves observing your experiences without evaluating them, which allows you to increase the awareness of your own bodily and mental experience. Scientists have suggested that it could potentially improve cognitive flexibility and thereby enhance human creativity. The researchers decided to test this on the example of creating metaphors in the course of a randomized controlled trial.
It was attended by 62 people (52 of whom are women) aged 18 to 33 years with incomplete and completed higher education. They were all randomly assigned to three groups. The first received material and instructions for conducting mental training.
For 14 days, the participants, while listening to the audio guide, had to be aware of their own bodily and mental experiences, observe them and keep a diary. The second group was a little less fortunate: the subjects, unknowingly, received a placebo training to listen to, namely, a record of caring for plants: in all other parameters – pace, number of pauses and words – it was identical to the first. Members of this group were also required to keep a diary of observations. The third – the control – group did not change their usual way of life for two weeks.
Before the start of the training, participants in all groups underwent testing, during which the researchers measured the level of intelligence, attention, assessed the state of health, activity and mood of the subjects, as well as their cognitive flexibility. To do this, the participants were offered the task “Consequences” from the Torrance test – a not quite realistic hypothetical situation from which they need to come up with a way out (for example, “In three days our entire planet will be flooded with water and turn into one ocean. What are you going to do?”) … All participants were also asked to create a metaphor for concepts such as “nobility” and “loyalty”. The responses, as well as the creativity of the metaphors, were assessed by three independent judges with experience in the study of creative and intellectual abilities. “We did not find significant differences between the groups of participants in terms of indicators that could influence the results of open observation meditation or creativity as such,” noted Yana Bashmakova, one of the authors of the study.
After the training, the participants were re-tested and created metaphors for concepts such as “harmony” and “honesty”. “We made sure that the words for which the metaphors were created, both in the first and second stages of testing, were equal in emotional mood and the number of syllables,” emphasizes Yana Bashmakova.
After analyzing the data obtained, the authors of the study did not find confirmation of the hypothesis about the effect of meditation on cognitive flexibility. “However, this does not mean that this issue is over. Further longer studies on a wider sample are required, ”Yana Bashmakova believes.
Perhaps the findings of the study are capable of disappointing the layman, but not the scientific community. “Firstly, we were the first to study the effect of mental training on cognitive flexibility through the use of metaphors. Everything related to cognitive flexibility as such, with the generation of metaphors as such and with the effects of meditation, but in other areas of mental life, has been studied for a long time. However, no one has tried to analyze the impact of mental training on cognitive flexibility and its relationship with the creativity of metaphors before us, ”says Olga Shcherbakova, head of the study, Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Associate Professor of St Petersburg University.
“Secondly, we tried to control as much as possible all the confounding variables that could affect the result. From a scientific perspective, we have created a well-functioning research paradigm. Researchers who will continue to work on this topic can, based on our experience, greatly facilitate their task, ”the expert noted. According to the scientist, it is also important for researchers who study the effects of meditation to work in a wide information field and reach out to meditation experts. “So, at the stage of selecting the stimulus material, we were consulted by a specialist in this field, Dr. Russell Weili Chan. We are very grateful to him, ”notes Olga Shcherbakova.
The research results make a theoretical contribution to the understanding of the extent to which meditative practices are able to influence certain cognitive processes (taking into account that a large number of additional factors have been controlled). Olga Shcherbakova also emphasizes that different studies of meditation are not always comparable with each other, since there are a lot of types of meditation, and there is no single generally accepted classification at the moment.
По материалам статьи «Just Open Your Mind? A Randomized, Controlled Study on the Effects of Meditation on Creativity»; Iana Bashmakova, Olga Shcherbakova; журнал Frontiers in Psychology, июнь 2021 г.
.