Does practice make you perfect? Meditation does

Creativity depends on greater brain integration and transcendental meditation could help achieve this, a new study has found.

Scientists refer to brain integration as mind-brain development.

People with high mind-brain development are alert, interested in learning new things and disposed to see the whole picture.

They think in wide circles and are emotionally stable and unselfish.

"It is a simple fact that some people stand out, and we are trying to find out why," said brain researcher Fred Travis from Maharishi University in the US.

"We hypothesised that something must be different about the way their brains work, and that's what we are finding," he noted.

Travis used a measure he developed called a "Brain Integration Scale".

He used EEG recording to assess frontal brain wave coherence - a measure of connectedness among the various areas of the brain - and alpha power, a measure of inner directedness of attention.

He then assessed the brain's preparation response which measures how efficiently the brain responds to a stimulus.

In all of his studies so far, top-level performers consistently show higher levels of brain integration.

Previous studies by Travis and colleagues have found that greater brain integration is present in world-class athletes, top managers and professional musicians.

The current study was conducted on 21 product-development engineers in Sweden - a group that would be expected to have high levels of creativity.

Travis and his colleagues assessed their level of creativity and looked at their levels of brain integration, speed of processing information, speed of executive decision-making and sense-of-coherence.

"Our empirical findings highlight that creativity, in the form of flexibility and originality, is connected to whole brain functioning and psychological development," Lagrosen maintained.

While there is a common notion that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary for high achievement, some people put in long hours and do not excel.

"People who want to excel in any field should consider learning Transcendental Meditation," Travis suggested.

The findings were published in Creativity Research Journal.