Poor mood and elevated anxiety are linked to increased incidence of disease. This study examined the effects of sound meditation, specifically Tibetan singing bowl meditation, on mood, anxiety, pain, and spiritual well-being. Sixty-two women and men (mean age 49.7 years) participated. As compared with pre-meditation, following the sound meditation participants reported significantly less tension, anger, fatigue, and depressed mood (all Ps<.001). Additionally, participants who were previously naïve to this type of meditation experienced a significantly greater reduction in tension compared with participants experienced in this meditation (P<.001). Feeling of spiritual well-being significantly increased across all participants (P<.001). Tibetan singing bowl meditation may be a feasible low-cost low technology intervention for reducing feelings of tension, anxiety, and depression, and increasing spiritual well-being. This meditation type may be especially useful in decreasing tension in individuals who have not previously practiced this form of meditation.

PURPOSE:To determine the physiological and psychological effects of adding a Himalayan singing bowl (HSB) to a directed relaxation (DR) session.

DESIGN:Randomized crossover study.

SETTING:Community-based counseling practice.

SUBJECTS:Fifty-one participants completed two randomly assigned sessions beginning with either 12 minutes of HSB or silence, followed by a 20-minute DR session.

INTERVENTION:Random order of HSB intervention/silence prior to DR.

MEASURES:Blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scores measured before and after both sessions.

ANALYSIS:Analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared differences between variables over time between both study days, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) analyzed changes from baseline, controlling for baseline, age, and sex.

RESULTS:Fifty-one participants completed both sessions. There was a greater decline in systolic BP (p = .044) and HR (p = .003) with HSB compared to silence prior to DR. Changes in diastolic BP were greater with HSB, with a nonsignificant trend (p = .073). Hypertensive subjects (n = 20) had similar and significant BP changes with HSB and silence when compared to normotensive subjects (n = 31). PANAS scores fell significantly with both interventions.

CONCLUSIONS:BP and HR responses were enhanced by HSB exposure. HSB may be used as an adjunct to DR to produce physiological and psychological responses prior to DR.

Binaural beats represent the auditory experience of an oscillating sound that occurs when two sounds with neighboring frequencies are presented to one's left and right ear separately. Binaural beats have been shown to impact information processing via their putative role in increasing neural synchronization. Recent studies of feature-repetition effects demonstrated interactions between perceptual features and action-related features: repeating only some, but not all features of a perception-action episode hinders performance. These partial-repetition (or binding) costs point to the existence of temporary episodic bindings (event files) that are automatically retrieved by repeating at least one of their features. Given that neural synchronization in the gamma band has been associated with visual feature bindings, we investigated whether the impact of binaural beats extends to the top-down control of feature bindings. Healthy adults listened to gamma-frequency (40 Hz) binaural beats or to a constant tone of 340 Hz (control condition) for ten minutes before and during a feature-repetition task. While the size of visuomotor binding costs (indicating the binding of visual and action features) was unaffected by the binaural beats, the size of visual feature binding costs (which refer to the binding between the two visual features) was considerably smaller during gamma-frequency binaural beats exposure than during the control condition. Our results suggest that binaural beats enhance selectivity in updating episodic memory traces and further strengthen the hypothesis that neural activity in the gamma band is critically associated with the control of feature binding.