Chicago: Meditation and classical ballet may make you wiser, say scientists who, for the first time, found that physical practices may lead to increased wisdom.
The researchers included ballet in the study, "not expecting to find that it was associated with wisdom, but rather for comparison purposes," said lead author Patrick B Williams, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology in US.
"The link between ballet and wisdom is mysterious to us and something that we're already investigating further," Williams said.
The research was groundbreaking because science has overlooked somatic practices as a possible path to wisdom, Williams said. "No studies have examined whether physical practices are linked to the cultivation of personal wisdom, nor have they theorised that this association might exist," the study stated.
"As we learn more about the kinds of experiences that are related to wisdom, we can gain insight into ways of studying the mechanisms that mediate wisdom," he said.
"This also lets us shift from thinking about wisdom as something like a talent to thinking about it as something more like a skill," he said.
The researchers administered an Internet-based survey to 298 participants. The survey asked about experience (both in number of years and hours of practise) as a teacher or student of four activities: meditation, the Alexander Technique (a method for improving posture, balance, coordination, and movement), the
Feldenkrais Method (a form of somatic education that seeks to improve movement and physical function, reduce pain, and increase self-awareness), and classical ballet.
It also included psychological questionnaires that asked about characteristics thought to be components of wisdom, such as empathy and anxiety.
The results showed that those who practise meditation - vipassana (29 per cent), mindfulness (23 per cent), Buddhist (14 per cent), and other types - had more wisdom, on average, than those in the three other groups.
More importantly, it established for the first time that the link between meditation and wisdom might be attributable to a lower level of anxiety.
"We are the first to show an association between wisdom, on the one hand, and mental and somatic practise, on the other," Williams said.
"We're also the first to suggest that meditation's ability to reduce everyday anxiety might partially explain this relationship," he said.
Participants who practised ballet had the lowest levels of wisdom. Nevertheless, the more they practised ballet, the higher they scored on measures of psychological traits that are associated with wisdom.
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
