Meditation: A Presentation Technique?

Boosting Productivity

We all have those lulls in the workday: maybe you typically move a bit slower on Monday mornings, or perhaps when Friday afternoon rolls around you’re just about drained of focus. Sometimes, the preparation for your next presentation seems to just drag along interminably. These things happen to everyone, and we all have our own ways of dealing with them.

Some of us reach for coffee or tea, thinking a jolt of caffeine will give us the boost we need to keep working hard. And increasingly, people in accommodating offices are reaching for headphones and earbuds to drown out the distracting ambient workplace noise. Although it’s understandable why people would be inclined to keep their heads down when they feel themselves losing focus, the ongoing research in this area suggests that they should probably be doing the opposite.

We’ve written about this rather unintuitive set of facts previously on the Ethos3 blog, and we cited a University of Illinois study that had this to say on the topic of taking a regular break from work:

“We propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused. From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!”

Those findings line up with our own experiential evidence:

“[A]im for a 15-20 minute break at intervals when you feel your energy draining. One of the best ways to engage your brain and increase endorphins before you return from a break is to exercise. Even if it means walking around the block, a bit of cardio is proven to reduce stress and help you re-focus.”

So while taking a break is an important step for maintaining productivity, using your time to exercise can also be beneficial. At first glance, it might seem strange that these functionally oppositional activities could both work on our brains in the same way, but if you consider that they actually intersect at a historically important and ubiquitous discipline, it all becomes clearer.

The Power of Meditation

Meditation has been a part of various world cultures and traditions for thousands of years, up to and beyond the advent of recorded history. Though the practice has enjoyed a relatively recent surge in popularity among Western practitioners, it is primarily understood to have descended from Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. There is evidence of the practice of meditation in religious texts and art from all over the world and throughout the ages. Though the reasons for its popularity may vary from region to region and individual to individual, the overall indication is that people do it because, somehow, it works. And anyone can benefit – from the athlete in her prime to the presenter who stays active on the stage and beyond.

For religious devotees, meditation will often assume a more powerfully metaphysical role. It may be used to communicate with a higher being or reach a higher plane of existence. But, especially as different styles of Yoga have penetrated more secular societies, many have come to associate meditation with exercise and relaxation. That unique combination of benefits makes meditation the ideal workday companion.

As Viatcheslav Wlassoff, PhD writes at BrainBlogger,

“Over the years, neuroscientists have carried out brain imaging tests on long-term practitioners of meditation, including several Tibetan monks. According to the results of these studies, not only sustained meditative practices but also short-term meditation can produce profound physical, biochemical, and functional changes in the brain.”

The mechanisms that produce this result are predictably complex, as the phenomena surrounding them are a mixture of physical and mental processes. In short, however, the chief reason that meditation practitioners seem to experience an increased level of brain function is that, whether they are doing it as a short term hobby or a lifelong pursuit, meditation increases something in users known as gamma wave activity.

The brain is an electric organ, and the information that is exchanged between its cells (neurons) is transmitted by means of electric signals, or waves. There are different types of signals that are tasked with different jobs, and gamma waves are the type of signal with the highest frequency. It is thought that these are closely linked to our higher order thought processes, such as the formation of memories and how we pay attention. Some theories suggest that these important waves are part of what gives human beings our consciousness, but this is far from undisputed gospel.

Brain Waves

So the nature of gamma waves is not totally clear to science at this point; what we do know is that they are a part of our brain structure. But our brains are extraordinarily complicated systems, to say the very least — is there any real link between increased gamma activity and increased intelligence or productivity? Perhaps. Again, from BrainBlogger,

“Sustained meditative practices can result in improved brain functionality by increasing the gamma wave activity. Here’s how:

When nerve cells “fire” synchronously, there is improved communication between the different regions of the brain. This aids higher mental processes. High gamma wave activity in the brain indicates thousands of neural cells are firing in unison and sending out signals to different parts of the brain at great speeds. Synchronized neural activity not only improves cognitive functioning but also keeps the brain active and energized to prevent age-related neural degeneration.”

In other words, gamma waves are essentially like high-intensity workouts for our brain. Where other, lower energy waves are akin to walking or jogging, the stronger gamma wave works on the entirety of our brain just like full speed sprints work on the whole of our cardiovascular system. Basically, it’s a snowball effect. The more gamma waves we produce, the more those areas (visual information, motor skills) of the brain activate, and the more they activate, the better quality and frequency gamma waves we produce.

People with a brain used to that sort of activity are more skilled at picking up new skills and paying close attention to the skills they already have — these people may even be CEOs or public speakers at higher rates than the general population. Intuitively, this makes sense. Meditation is essentially a practice that requires focus and attention; it’s no surprise that people who do it often would be more focused and attentive!

“Researchers have found that the ability to attend to a task with full focus is also greater in long-term meditation practitioners than novices because the former show less activity in the amygdala region in response to distracting sounds. This finding suggests that advanced meditation practitioners have greater control over how they react to emotions rising within them. Emotionally reactive behavior hampers steady concentration.”

Implications for Us

If it seems especially daunting to take on a new hobby or lifestyle in order to achieve a small amount of improvement in concentration, take heart. Researchers in that same study showed that even novice meditators had taken steps to improve their brain power.

They also showed that these effects were not temporary or short-lived. For those that had stuck with the practice for many years, the same types of beneficial brain activity were observed, on a smaller scale, during periods of sleep. This indicates that the positive effects of meditation can take root in the subconscious, proving that they’re more than just a statistical blip.

You don’t necessarily need to be concerned with neuroplasticity or spiritual enlightenment to try meditation as a self-improvement tool. Maybe you’re interested in improving your memory, practice for your next presentation, or just trying to find a way to get away from the computer every once in a while. Either way, there appear to be real scientific benefits to this millennia-old practice, even if we’re just now finding out about them.