Abstract
The practice of meditation has seen a tremendous increase in the western world since the 60s. Scientific interest in meditation has also significantly grown in the past years; however, so far, it has neglected the idea that different type of meditations may drive specific cognitive-control states. In this study we investigate the possible impact of meditation based on focused-attention (FA) and meditation based on open-monitoring (OM) on creativity tasks tapping into convergent and divergent thinking. We show that FA meditation and OM meditation exert specific effect on creativity. First, OM meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated. Second, FA meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem. We suggest that the enhancement of positive mood induced by meditating has boosted the effect in the first case and counteracted in the second case.
Highlights
The practice of meditation has seen a tremendous increase in the western world since the 60s (Murphy and Donavon, 1997)
If so, engaging in OM meditation should facilitate subsequent performance in tasks that require weak, “distributed” control while engaging in FA meditation should be beneficial for subsequent performance in tasks requiring a more focused control style. We investigated this hypothesis by having participants practicing OM- and FA-type meditation, in addition to a third visualization exercise that was considered as a baseline, and performing a divergent thinking and a convergent thinking task
OM meditation was assumed to induce a relatively “distributed” cognitive-control state that is characterized by weak top-down biasing of information processing and weak local competition among alternative thoughts, while FA meditation was assumed to induce a relatively focused cognitive-control state characterized by strong top-down control and strong local competition
Summary
The practice of meditation has seen a tremendous increase in the western world since the 60s (Murphy and Donavon, 1997). While some studies found evidence for a strong positive impact of meditation practice on creativity (Orme-Johnson and Granieri, 1977; Orme-Johnson et al, 1977; Ball, 1980), others found only a weak association or no effect at all (Cowger, 1974; Domino, 1977). There is still no mechanistic model explaining how creative processes operate and how different type of meditations might affect these operations, which in view of the lack of conceptual clarity may not be surprising. To address this issue, we tried to avoid addressing meditation and creativity as a whole but, rather, focused on particular, relatively well-defined meditation techniques and specific subcomponents of creative performance
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