Friday, December 12, 2014

Meditating Your Way to a High GRE Score

It almost seems that every few months another article is released citing a new research publication stating the various mental benefits of meditation. Meditation research continues to gain traction for a variety of reasons. In fact, over 100 randomized clinical trials studying the effects of meditation on our mental health have been studied since 2005.
That being said, a recently published randomized controlled investigation published in Psychological Science that showed that even 10 minutes a day of meditation for simply two weeks improved verbal scores on the Graduate Record Examination by 16 percentile. The reasoning behind this is that mindful meditation seems to be an effective technique in improving the ability to tend to a task without distraction, an ability that is pertinent in verbal reasoning tasks. This relationship between meditation and increasing attentional awareness has been looked at more closely in a 2008 study conducted by Lutz et al., titled “Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation”, and is referenced in a talk by Marcia Grabowecky, an associate professor at Northwestern University.
            Grabowecky explores the positive benefits of mindful meditation in her talk by referring to its ability to increase cortical thickness, improve emotional reactivity, and decrease the amygdala’s response to negative distractions. This decrease in the response of the amygdala may explain why students who practice meditation have shown an increase in verbal reasoning scores, as reading comprehension depends heavily on maintaining the ability to avoid external distractors.
            Although meditation seems to do nothing but good for those who regularly engage in it, there have been some instances where it is not beneficial. For example, for those who have underlying psychosis, regular meditation can accelerate the emergence of these psychiatric conditions. Luckily for others, however, the benefits of meditation seem to continuously increase with more research.

Lutz, A., Slagter, H.A., Dunne, J.D., Davidson, R.J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends Cogn Sci. 12(4), p. 163-169


Michael D. Mrazek, M.D., Franklin, M.S., Phillips, D.T., Baird, B., Schooler, J.W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychology Science 20(10), p. 1-6

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