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Guidelines on how to meditate.

These guidelines apply to all of the meditations offered on this website. They will also be useful for anyone who is finding their own way to meditate and wants an easy, natural meditation style. Posture How long to meditate When to meditate How often to meditate Thoughts in meditation Noise Falling asleep in meditation Strong emotions Ending meditation Posture Different postures affect how the energy flows through the body and how alert the mind is in meditation. For most meditations, we suggest sitting upright with the spine erect while still being comfortable. It is not necessary to get into a precise or difficult posture to meditate! If you are uncomfortable or straining to be in a certain position, you will not be able to relax completely. Some meditations, such as our Walking Meditation, are done while active.  Obviously, if you are doing a meditation for falling asleep, it would be best to lie down. How Long to Meditate Usually 15-30 minutes is a
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I WANT YOU TO KNOW THE SCIENCE BEHIND MEDITATION.

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The science behind meditation, and why it makes you feel better 1 Expand Meditation yields a surprising number of health benefits, including stress reduction, improved attention, better memory, and even increased creativity and feelings of compassion. But how can something as simple as focusing on a single object produce such dramatic results? Here’s what the growing body of scientific evidence is telling us about meditation and how it can change the way our brains function. Before we get started it’s worth doing a quick review of what is actually meant by meditation. The practice can take on many different forms, but the one technique that appears most beneficial, and which also happens to be among the most traditional, is called mindfulness meditation , or focused attention . By mindfulness, practitioners are asked to focus their thoughts on one thought and one thought alone. An overarching goal is to be firmly affixed to the present moment. This typically me
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LEVEL OF PROCESSING.

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The levels of processing model of memory (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) was put forward partly as a result of the criticism leveled at the multi-store model . Instead of concentrating on the stores/structures involved (i.e. short term memory & long term memory ), this theory concentrates on the processes involved in memory. Unlike the multi-store model it is a non-structured approach. The basic idea is that memory is really just what happens as a result of processing information. Psychologists Craik and Lockhart propose that memory is just a by-product of the depth of processing of information and there is no clear distinction between short term memory and long term memory. Craik defined depth as "the meaningfulness extracted from the stimulus rather than in terms of the number of analyses performed upon it.” (1973, p. 48) We can process information in 3 ways: Shallow Processing
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WORKING MEMORY.

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Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store model was extremely successful in terms of the amount of research it generated. However, as a result of this research, it became apparent that there were a number of problems with their ideas concerning the characteristics of short-term memory. Building on this research, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed an alternative model of short-term memory which they called working memory (see fig 1). Baddeley and Hitch (1974) argue that the picture of short-term memory ( STM ) provided by the Multi-Store Model is far too simple.  According to the Multi-Store Model , STM holds limited amounts of information for short periods of time with relatively little processing.  It is a unitary system. This means it is a single system (or store) without any subsystems.  Working Memory is not a unitary store.
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MULTI STORE MODEL OF MEMORY.

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Multi Store Model of Memory - Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968. The multi store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968) is a classic model of memory. It is sometimes called the modal model or the dual process model. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) suggest that memory is made up of a series of stores (see below) The multi store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968) describes memory in terms of information flowing through a system. Information is detected by the sense organs and enters the sensory memory . If attended to this information enters the short term memory . Information from the STM is transferred to the long-term memory only if that information is rehearsed. If rehearsal does not occur, then information is forgotten, lost from short term memory through the processes of displacement or decay. Sensory Memory • Duration: ¼ to ½ second • Capacity: all sensory experience (v. larger
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LONG TERM MEMORY.

Theoretically, the capacity of long term memory could be unlimited, the main constraint on recall being accessibility rather than availability. Duration might be a few minutes or a lifetime.  Suggested encoding modes are semantic (meaning) and visual (pictorial) in the main but can be acoustic also. Bahrick et al (1975) investigated what they called very long term memory (VLTM). Nearly 400 participants aged 17 – 74 were tested.  There were various tests including:  A free recall test, where participants tried to remember names of people in a graduate class. A photo recognition test, consisting of 50 pictures.  A name recognition test for ex-school friends. Results of the study showed that participants who were tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in identifying names and faces. After 48 years they were accurate 80% for verbal and 70% visual.  Free recall was worse. After 15 years it was 60% and after 48 years it was 30% accurate.
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Short Term Memory

Short term memory has three key aspects: 1. limited capacity (only about 7 items can be stored at a time) 2. limited duration (storage is very fragile and information can be lost with distraction or passage of time) 3. encoding (primarily acoustic, even translating visual information into sounds). There are two ways in which capacity is tested, one being span, the other being recency effect. Miller’s (1956) Magic number 7 (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity of short term memory. Most adults can store between 5 and 9 items in their short-term memory.  This idea was put forward by Miller (1956) and he called it the magic number 7. He though that short term memory could hold 7 (plus or minus 2 items) because it only had a certain number of “slots” in which items could be stored. However, Miller didn’t specify the amount of information that can be held in each slot. Indeed, if we can “chunk” information together we can store
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