Meditation Benefiting College Students
College students are taught that without studying and doing homework, grades will rarely be up to par. Although this may be true, research is now showing that students should do more to better their grades. This article on psychcentral.com explains how zen meditation helps to reduce the amount of outside, distracting thoughts that can get in the way of the capacity to understand, learn, and retain information. It is especially helpful for those with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, and major depression.
Retaining information is difficult when students have other classes, sports, clubs and activities to also focus on. Students are pulled in all directions during their college lives and could benefit from some time to relax. Setting some time aside each day to perform zen meditation may be benefitial as the time spent studying will be more efficient.
Link for article, Zen Training Clears Brain:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/09/03/zen-training-clears-brain/2873.html
awesome article!
Casey, I love that article! Do you think we should try an experiment with Zen Meditation on campus? I’d be interested in seeing the results of whether or not it really does help students focus on their studies. Do you know if there is any more research currently being done on the subject?
I found another recent article (http://www.livescience.com/health/080902-zen-meditation.html) that explains how beneficial Zen Meditation is in filtering out distracting thoughts. The article briefly describes some research as well. NPR also has a broadcast about the brain and meditation (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4770779). I think it would be very interesting to do an experiment and see if the results correlate.