Outline: Meditation & Perception of Time (Anna Takahashi)

Meditation and Perception of Time
Based on Attention, Positive Visualization, Emotion, and Physical Sensation

Can a positive visual image in the mind alter one's emotion in a significantly positively way? This experiment looks into the relationship between physical sensation, emotion and attention in meditation. During this meditation, The Secret Universal Mind Meditationa meditation sound track is played through head phones. The track itself is 60 minutes long, and functions as a guideline to judge the duration of the meditation session. The goal of the meditation is to continuously meditate for 20 minutes or more, without keeping track of the time. I am free to discontinue the session at any given moment, and will press the stop button and record the time displayed on the control.

This project started in mid July of 2009 when I became intrigued by how attention is capable of altering the way in which one perceives one's surrounding environment. Personally, I have noticed how attention is capable of altering sensation, most notably during my 10 minute meditation rituals that I had continued from January 10th through March 15th of 2009, right after I had moved to Pasadena, California from Tokyo, Japan.

When I arrived in America in December of 2008, I arranged a meeting with my friend and psychotherapist, Dr. Tatsuko Martin who is also a prominent author in Japan spreading the notion of "positive thinking", as a method to support individuals to realize one's goal or wishes. At the time I consulted Dr. Martin, I had anxieties regarding my graduate studies in fine arts, along with personal issues regarding relationships. I also had many high goals that I aimed to achieve in America. Dr. Martin endowed me with her wisdom on solving these issues: many clients of hers have succeeded in solving their problems through this method; vizualizing the outcomes of achieving the goals while in meditation, in a way that would fill me with a positive and joyful sensation. In addition, I was advised to take a look at The Secret (DVD), so that I would get a better visual idea of what she was referring to as "positive visualization".

Having a background of being brought up by spiritually-open parents, I strongly "believed" that this method of meditation would benefit me in some unpredictable way. This is a crucial point. Although I must honestly mention that I was slightly skeptical of the validity of this method at first. I immediately started meditating every morning, partially out of curiosity to see what would result from this process. Fundamentally, the intensity of my belief is what motivated me to continue this practice and invest serious concentration into it. Also, it was influential to the degree of concentration I was able to force.

The experiment looks into how emotion, physical sensation and attention can change the degree of concentration and perception of time during a meditation session.