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'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers -- mindfulness. The researchers analyzed data obtained from a study published in 2015 that compared mindfulness meditation to placebo analgesia. In this follow-up study, Zeidan sought to determine if dispositional mindfulness, an individual's innate or natural level of mindfulness, was associated with lower pain sensitivity, and to identify what brain mechanisms were involved. In the study, 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated first completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness, to determine their baseline levels. Then, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, they were administered painful heat stimulation.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
Mindfulness is the new religion of modern medicine. What exactly is it? No one can clearly explain. How is it achieved? Well, opinions differ. How can it be objectively measured? Yeah, that's what I thought.
But yet we have oh so many "studies" showing mindfulness purported to effective, of course always for conditions like pain or depression/anxiety that they lack good and/or safe treatment for. But substitute "mindfulness" with "prayer" (which itself could be seen as a form of mindfulness), would the study be taken seriously by the medical community? Yet I fail to see any significant difference between the two.
And hey, if it works for you, great! However, it's insulting when a practitioner of supposedly science-based medicine starts touting ill-defined magical solutions as if they were science.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
In this context, Mindfulness is an oxymoron, where to become mindful is to remove oneself from one's own mind. It's the application of adding a level of indirection (*) to every variable.
Mindfulness in this context is just a measure of how people score on a straightforward practical questionnaire. The questions are practical, so there's no oxymoron. The only oxymoron comes from your own putative definition "remove oneself from one's own mind" which isn't what was used in the study. Here are some of the questions in the questionnaire, on a scale from Rarely to Almost Always:
Q. I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning or talking.
Q. I am able to appreciate myself.
Q. I pay attention to what’s behind my actions.
Q. I am friendly to myself when things go wrong.
Q. I am impatient with myself and with others.
Note that the "mindfulness" used in this context doesn't require you to semantically analyze the questions for what you believe to be contradictions or oddities or the logic of the questions; it's merely an observation of how people respond to it, correlated with population observations of how other people respond to it.
I think your analogy of "adding a level of indirection" isn't the right one. These questions make it sound like mindfulness is more like executing the code under a debugger, and being in the habit of pausing it in tough situations or just periodically, and inspecting the values of local variables so as to have a better idea of what's going on. The alternative would be to only figure out what's going on by looking at the output values of all functions, or what's printed to stdout.
My personal experience syncs with this.
I recently completed a 10-day Vipassana course meditation course. ~10 hours of seated meditation per day, quite a struggle at first. Midway through the course, you are tasked with sitting for an hour straight without moving, 3 times per day. At first I thought this task impossible, as after 10 minutes my knees and ankles would start hurting terribly from sitting in the lotus position.
However, with practice over just a few sessions, I learned to observe the pain with equanimity, and my obsession with the pain dissipated. The pain was very much still there, but it didn't both me. It was an incredible experience.