Meditation goes digital in new clinical trial

Individualized program improves attention and memory in healthy young adults

June 3, 2019

Science Daily/University of California - San Francisco

Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed a personalized digital meditation training program that significantly improved attention and memory in healthy young adults -- a group already at the peak of brain health -- in just six weeks.

The intervention, called MediTrain, utilizes a closed-loop algorithm that tailors the length of the meditation sessions to the abilities of the participants, so they are not discouraged by their initial attempts to focus attention on their breath, a time-honored meditation technique.

Scientists tested the program in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial at UCSF with 59 participants between 18 and 35 years old. The results were published Monday, June 3, 2019, in Nature Human Behaviour.

The magnitude of the effects on attention and memory, which were unexpected for healthy young adults, were similar to what has been seen in previous studies of middle-aged adults after months of in-person training or intensive meditation retreats.

The app-based program, however, required just 20 to 30 minutes of cumulative practice each day, composed of many very short meditation periods. In the beginning, participants were prompted to pay attention to their breath for just 10 to 15 seconds at a time. As they improved over the six weeks, the application challenged them to increase the amount of time they could maintain focus, which averaged several minutes after six weeks.

"This is not like any meditation practice that exists, as far as we are aware," said senior author Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and executive director of Neuroscape at UCSF. "We took an ancient experiential treatment of focused meditation, reformulated it and delivered it through a digital technology, and improved attention span in millennials, an age group that is intimately familiar with the digital world, but also faces multiple challenges to sustained attention."

MediTrain made some concessions to tradition. Before they began, participants listened to recorded meditation instructions from Jack Kornfield, PhD, a meditation teacher who co-founded Spirit Rock Meditation Center north of San Francisco, and an author on the study. Then, they used the techniques on their own, without spoken instruction and with their eyes closed.

But MediTrain had other digital features that aren't present in the traditional practice of breath meditation and that may have been the reason why it achieved such strong results over such a short period and with such a healthy population.

For one thing, it underscored the need to pay attention by requiring participants to regularly check in on how they were doing.

At the end of each brief meditation segment, participants were asked to indicate whether they had been able to pay continuous attention for the allotted time, pressing a button on the left side of an iPad screen if the answer was no, and a button on the right if the answer was yes. For those who said yes, the application adapted to a slightly longer meditation period; for those who said no, the period was shortened.

The researchers believe the participatory nature of the design was important.

"Not only do you learn how to maintain focus on your breath, but you are also required to introspect on how well you're able to do that," Gazzaley said, "We believe that's part of the active ingredient of this treatment."

MediTrain also gave everyone regular feedback, with progress reports during the training sessions, at the end of each day of training and at the end of each week.

The results were impressive. On their first day, participants could stay focused on their breath for an average of only 20 seconds. After 30 days of training, that rose to an average of six minutes.

This improvement, in turn, conferred better performance on other, much more complicated tasks that scientists use to assess sustained attention and working memory. Not only did the MediTrain participants perform more consistently on attention tests than the placebo group, the scientists also found a correlation between how long participants were able to focus on their breath and how consistently they performed on these tests. The MediTrain group also performed better than the placebo group on a test of working memory, measured after the intervention.

"We thought it was a long shot to see these types of improvements in a group this young and healthy," said David Ziegler, PhD, director of multimodal biosensing in the technology division at UCSF's Neuroscape, and the first author of the paper. "But it speaks to the power of the method."

Using electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain activity in a subset of the participants in each group, the researchers identified parts of the brain, particularly in the front, that altered their activity as participants learned to stabilize their attention with meditation training.

According to Ziegler, "These frontal brain areas, which are important for controlling attention, showed greater moment-to-moment consistency in their activity after the meditation training." They are also known to strengthen their activity when other areas of the brain called the "default mode network," that are associated with distracted thinking and self-preoccupation, get weaker. Deactivation in the default mode network is also associated with better performance on tasks that require focused attention.

The researchers said that MediTrain, which has been patented by the University of California, holds promise for a younger generation that is accustomed to digital devices but faces multiple challenges to sustained attention from heavy use of media and technology.

The breath meditation -- a seemingly simple, yet quite demanding task -- worked as well in cultivating sustained attention as other more intellectually and physically challenging training programs that have been developed at Neuroscape, a translational neuroscience center at UCSF engaged in technology creation and scientific research to better assess and optimize brain function for all people.

Its very simplicity may fill a particular need created by the frenetic pace of today's world.

"Many of us struggle with challenges to our attention, which seem to be exacerbated by modern technology," Gazzaley said. "What we've done here is flip this story around by creating and studying a digital delivery system that makes cognitive benefits of traditional focused attention meditation more personalized, accessible and deliverable."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124705.htm

Motivation to move may start with being mindful

May 14, 2018

Science Daily/Iowa State University

A meditation and stress reduction program may be as effective at getting people to move more as structured exercise programs, according to a new study. This is part of another study that found resistance training reduces symptoms of depression.

The study compared two intervention programs -- mindfulness-based stress reduction and aerobic exercise training -- with a control group and measured changes in exercise, general physical activity and sedentary time. Jacob Meyer, an ISU assistant professor of kinesiology, says people assigned to the two interventions were more active than those in the control group, logging roughly an extra 75 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity following the eight-week interventions. The results are published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Meyer and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Mississippi Medical Center say helping sedentary adults get those 75 minutes of exercise can extend life expectancy by nearly two years. Researchers expected the exercise intervention to increase physical activity more than the meditation training. Meyer says to see similar results from the mindfulness intervention was somewhat surprising.

"Structured exercise training is something as a field we have used for decades to improve physical activity and physical health," Meyer said. "To see a similar effect on physical activity from an intervention that focuses on the way someone thinks or perceives the world, was completely unexpected."

The researchers used a mindfulness-based stress reduction program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, which aims to reduce stress through meditation, self-awareness and being present in the moment, Meyer said. People in the mindfulness intervention spent 2 1/2 hours a week in class learning how to be mindful. They practiced mindful stretching and movement as well as breathing exercises to incorporate into their daily activities.

Similarly, those in the exercise group attended 2 1/2 hour weekly sessions learning various exercise techniques and discussing strategies to change behavior. An hour of each class was dedicated to a group activity such as walking or jogging. Meyer says both groups were encouraged to do the intervention at home for 20 to 45 minutes each day.

Shifting from structured exercise to overall movement

While the interventions did not significantly increase time spent exercising or decrease sedentary time, participants generally maintained activity levels. Meyer says this is important given the timeframe for the study. Researchers collected data during the fall and early winter months as part of a larger study focused on the cold and flu season. Seasonal variation in weather likely contributed to the sharp decline in activity for the control group, Meyer said, but the intervention groups did not experience the same drop-off.

The study focused on exercise in bouts that lasted at least 10 minutes, but also tracked general physical activity, such as walking from the parking lot to the office or working in the yard. Meyer says both intervention groups saw smaller drop-offs in general activity levels than the control group, which is encouraging given the forthcoming changes to federal physical activity recommendations.

Researchers used the 10-minute threshold to be consistent with federal guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise weekly, in bouts of at least 10 minutes, Meyer said. However, the recommendations only focus on a small percentage (1.5 percent) of minutes in the week. That is one reason why the updated guidelines, expected later this year, emphasize overall activity, regardless of length of time.

"There are clinical and cardiovascular health benefits to exercise training, but there are also important general health benefits from a more active lifestyle," Meyer said. "Shifting from thinking we need to be in a gym for an hour at a time to thinking about being more active throughout the day helps people understand how physical activity could play a role in helping improve their health."

Resistance training and depression

A primary focus of Meyer's research examines the benefits of exercise for people with depression. As part of a separate study, Meyer worked with researchers at the University of Limerick in Ireland, and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, to test the effects of resistance training on symptoms of depression. The results, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found weightlifting and muscle-strengthening exercises significantly reduced depressive symptoms.

The meta-analysis, led by Brett Gordon at the University of Limerick, included 33 randomized controlled trials with more than 1,800 participants. Resistance training reduced symptoms for adults regardless of health status, the volume of training and whether or not strength improved, Meyer said. The results appear similar to the benefits from aerobic exercise found in other studies.

Depression affects more than 300 million people, according to the World Health Organization. Meyer says resistance training could provide a treatment option with benefits that extend beyond mental health. In the paper, researchers explain the economic costs as well as other health risks associated with depression. Meyer says resistance training also gives patients an alternative to medication.

"For general feelings of depression and the beginning phases of major depression, antidepressants and medications may not be very effective. There also is a shift toward finding options that do not require someone to start a drug regimen they may be on for the rest of their lives," Meyer said. "Understanding that resistance training appears to have similar benefits to aerobic exercise may help those wading through daunting traditional medication treatment options."

Meyer says future research is needed to know if aerobic exercise and resistance training work through similar channels to reduce depressive symptoms or work independently.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180514122420.htm