What being silent can do to your brain?

How come being silent for some time can help you boost your performance on a simple brain game? What is the science behind it? And how can I use that to boost my grades up?

We were asking these questions at our Cognitive Science lab for the past whole year and we finally got the answer!

We designed a simple experiment that involved our friends and university students (no guinea pigs!) to help us understand how and why does this practice affects the brain. We asked them to play a simple cognitive game called Stroop task to start off, which they pretty much enjoyed. You can play the game too, there are simple rules: Watch the video below, and try to read aloud the colour of words appearing on the screen. 

Well played!

Now to boost your performance on the 'incongruent' words (e.g., YELLOW), let's help you out. Sit with your eyes closed for next five minutes, put your screen to sleep too (to avoid distraction from screen brightness), open your mind to all the thoughts coming in and going out, let them flow like water, and it's really easy to do! 

You can take help of this timer alarm video which will beep at the end of five minutes, just hit start here and dive into the silent state.

Well, it's the time!

If you done that right, you should be feeling internally exuberant right now. Let's take a test if it worked on you, go back to the first Stroop video and play that game again, let's see if it helps you reading the incongruent words faster. 

If it worked out for you, congratulations, something like this just happened in your brain: 

In this study, we found out that at certain important time events after you have watched the word written on the screen, your brain starts to process it to 'prepare' an answer for it. And this processing occurred very differently after being in the meditative state for just five minutes. Before this intervention, the parietal lobe of the brain appears to be 'densely active' as indicated by yellow colour in the image above which depicts high electrical activity in the brain. Whereas after intervention of five minutes silence state, the same region of the brain appears to use less activity and yet brings increase in the accuracy to answer the incongruent words. 

The results are interesting, so is the significance of silence, focus and being open to experiences in our lives!

We are publishing our results soon on this study, to get updates, stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

Posted by: Manvi Jain, Coordinator, CSRG