Landscape artist Jane Anderson struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the winter months. She tried meditation and noticed a change within a month.
“My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says.
Her experience inspired a new study which found changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training, the journal Psychological Science reports.
But Anderson, who did this research as an undergraduate student, together with a team of University of Wisconsin-Stout faculty and students, wanted to know if there was a change in brain activity after a shorter period.
At the beginning of the new study, each participant had an EEG, a measurement of the brain’s electrical activity, according to a Wisconsin university statement.
Then a group was invited to take part in meditation training, while the other group was told they would be trained later.
The group was offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practise as much as they could between sessions, but there wasn’t any particular requirement for how much they should practice.
People who had done the meditation showed a greater proportion of activity in the left frontal region of the brain, in response to subsequent attempts to meditate, as compared to the group which did not meditate.