On Wednesday, over 16,000 students will write the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), commonly referred to as Common Entrance. When those results are available, we know definitively that the little ones who have been successful in their endeavours will be attributing that success to their parents, their teachers, and more importantly, the focus that they exerted in applying themselves towards their studies.
There is no short cut or easy way around it, for there to be success in any field of study, one has to develop their mental faculty to the point where assimilating information, compartmentalising it and subsequently disseminating it becomes second nature. This is relatively easy for some persons to do, while for others it is more complex. Regardless of the individual variances, one of the best-known ways for anybody to improve their mental faculty is by extending their ability to concentrate.
Research has shown that one, if not the best, method to use for the improvement of a person’s concentration, whether that person is a child, teenager or adult, is the use of meditation, otherwise known in Western culture as “mindfulness practice”.
Simply put, it is an exercise where a person engages in resting the mind and attaining a state of awareness that is different from the normal waking state. This is achieved by stilling the mind and focusing – pointedly on a desired object until the mind becomes silent. When the mind is silent and no longer distracted, meditation develops.
Meditation, which is grounded in Hinduism and known more as a spiritual exercise, has over the years caught the attention of the Western scientific community, which has been able to quantify the benefits of this “mindfulness practice” by scanning the brains of persons who meditate against those who don’t, with devices such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), to determine the differences in their brain density and grey matter of the areas associated with memory retention and happiness, among others.
What those studies have found is that meditation, in addition to improving the alertness and concentration of individuals, also slows the aging of the brain as persons become older, helps with wandering of the mind by decreasing the activity on the Default Mode Network (DMN) of the brain ,as well as relieving persons of their anxiety and stress levels among many other listed benefits.
As it pertains to concentration, a Harvard study headed by Sara Lazar on “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” (MBSR) outlined that meditation actually changed the structure of the brain, by increasing the “cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. There were also decreases in brain cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our subjective perception and feelings as well.”
Another study found that meditation might have more promise for children than adults as it pertains to memory retention and concentration. According to an article on Forbes, Healthcare, on meditation, “Some schools have started implementing meditation into their daily schedules, and with good effect: One district in San Francisco started a twice-daily meditation programme in some of its high-risk schools – and saw suspensions decrease, and Grade Point Averages (GPAs) and attendance increase. Studies have confirmed the cognitive and emotional benefits of meditation for schoolchildren.”
So, for those children who have given their best in the NGSA, but when the results are released, they do not see the results of all the effort that they put in, they should not lose hope now. The important thing is that beyond that point is secondary education, the end result of which will define what jobs the children could get and the level of tertiary education they could further pursue.
It is, therefore, worthy for parents to examine the above-mentioned technique and possibly incorporate it in their schedule as well as their children’s, so that going forward they could be better equipped and focused in their studies and life in general.
