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Meditation promotes insightful problem-solving by keeping people in a mindful and alert conscious state
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  • Research Papers
  • Open Access
  • Published: 29 October 2011

Meditation promotes insightful problem-solving by keeping people in a mindful and alert conscious state

  • Jun Ren1,
  • ZhiHui Huang1,
  • Jing Luo2,
  • GaoXia Wei2,
  • XiaoPing Ying3,
  • ZhiGuang Ding4,
  • YiBin Wu5 &
  • …
  • Fei Luo2 

Science China Life Sciences volume 54, pages 961–965 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although previous studies have shown that sleep can inspire insight, it is still unclear whether meditation can promote insight. Meditation differs from other types of passive rest such as relaxation and sleep because it requires full consciousness and mindfulness of targets such as one’s breathing. Forty-eight university students without meditation experience were recruited to learn a simple meditation technique. They were given a list of 10 insight problems to solve (the pre-test session). In this study, we focused on the unsolved problems and examined if they could be successfully solved after a 20 min rest interval with or without meditation. Results showed that relative to the control group that listened to Chinese or English words and made a language judgment, the groups who learned meditation successfully solved significantly more failed problems from the pre-test session, providing direct evidence for the role of meditation in promoting insight. Further analysis showed that maintaining a mindful and alert state during meditation (raising a hand to report every 10 deep breaths compared to every 100 deep breaths) resulted in more insight regarding the failed items from the pre-test session. This implies that it was watchfulness in meditation, rather than relaxation, that actually contributed to insight. Consistently, in the meditation session or control task, the percentage of alpha waves-a brain index of mental relaxation-was negatively correlated with insight. These results suggest a meditation-based insight-promoting mechanism different from that involved in passive rest such as relaxation and sleep.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 321004, China

    Jun Ren & ZhiHui Huang

  2. Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Jing Luo, GaoXia Wei & Fei Luo

  3. Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 100026, China

    XiaoPing Ying

  4. Department of Social Sciences, Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, 050015, China

    ZhiGuang Ding

  5. Beijing Easy Monitor Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, 100101, China

    YiBin Wu

Authors
  1. Jun Ren
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  2. ZhiHui Huang
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  5. XiaoPing Ying
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  6. ZhiGuang Ding
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  8. Fei Luo
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jun Ren or Jing Luo.

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This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Cite this article

Ren, J., Huang, Z., Luo, J. et al. Meditation promotes insightful problem-solving by keeping people in a mindful and alert conscious state. Sci. China Life Sci. 54, 961–965 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-011-4233-3

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  • Received: 23 December 2010

  • Accepted: 27 June 2011

  • Published: 29 October 2011

  • Issue Date: October 2011

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-011-4233-3

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Keywords

  • meditation
  • insight
  • problem solving
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