Sydney, July 8 (ANI): An Australian study has shown that meditators may seem to be asleep, but in reality they are surprisingly alert.

PhD researcher Dylan DeLosAngeles, who conducted the study at the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, says that mediation produces changes in brainwaves that are usually associated with increased alertness.

"There are a lot of subjective reports of meditation benefiting subjects on a personal level," ABC online quoted DeLosAngeles as saying.

"I wanted to try and quantify some of that and look at how that was changing the brain on a neurophysiological level," adds the researcher, who will present his findings at the IBRO World Congress of Neuroscience in Melbourne later this month.

The study was focused on a type of Buddhist mediation that teaches people to achieve several distinct states. Thirteen participants in a meditation group were asked to describe their experiences of five different states, both before and after the study.

"We found common experiences in each person," says DeLosAngeles.

He says that people focused their thoughts on breathing in the first meditative state, while they stopped thinking and just breathed in the second state. In the third state, they felt a loss of body boundaries and spatial orientation, while they felt their mind and breath became one in the fourth state. In the fifth state, the meditators felt their mind expanding into space.

DeLosAngeles then measured brain activity in each state using an electroencephalograph.

"We were able to correlate the changes in certain brainwaves against the changes is subjective experience," he says.

The researcher found that the brains of people in the first state showed an increase in the amplitude of alpha brainwaves, which are associated with alertness, focus, attention, and concentration. There was also a decrease in delta brainwaves, ones associated with drowsiness or sleep.

As mediators progressed through the other four stages of mediation, their alpha brainwaves slowly decreased in a linear fashion, which DeLosAngeles feels happened because the mind was already very alert and focused.

DeLosAngeles insists that the findings support the idea that meditation is a unique state, and that it can be used to help people improve their ability to concentrate.

"Meditation is a finely held state of attentiveness and alertness that differs from eyes-closed resting or sleep," he says. (ANI)