Meditation and The Brain

by

Superb blog arti­cle by Newsweek’s Sharon Beg­ley: The Lotus and the Synapse, intro­duc­ing a new Study that shows com­pas­sion med­i­ta­tion changes the brain.

To read the orig­i­nal paper led by Richard David­son and Antoine Lutz, click Here. We will be cov­er­ing this in more detail next week.

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Comments

  1. Mike Logan says

    What won­der­ful infor­ma­tion to have final­ly mak­ing its way into main stream media. I have been study­ing Chi Gong for about nine years now, and I won­der what an fMRI would show when I do my exer­cis­es and med­i­ta­tions. Mike Logan, MS

  2. Alvaro says

    Hel­lo Mike,

    Researchers are start­ing to build data­bas­es to dis­play fMRI data for dif­fer­ent activities…not very user-friend­ly at this point, but it won’t be long before you can search for typ­i­cal brain acti­va­tion pat­terns while med­i­tat­ing, or play­ing the piano, or writ­ing a poem…that’s an area we are very inter­est­ing in, so we’ll track it in this blog.

  3. Adrian Preda says

    At this time a major lim­i­ta­tion of all the brain imag­ing tools lim­i­ta­tion is that they require the sub­ject to lie down in the scan­ner. EEG stud­ies on the oth­er hand can pro­vide a win­dow into the brain activ­i­ty of a sub­ject who is mov­ing around.

    Or alter­na­tive­ly one can be in the scan and imag­ing that he/she is mov­ing or play­ing the piano etc. Think­ing about doing some­thing pro­duces very sim­i­lar acti­va­tion to actu­al­ly engag­ing in the activ­i­ty. And that might be anoth­er way to under­stand the under­ly­ing brain cir­cuit­ry of dif­fer­ent activities.

  4. lewis says

    there is a real­ly inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion between Richard David­son and Daniel Gole­man about the neu­ro­log­i­cal effects of med­i­ta­tion which can be lis­tened to at http://www.morethansound.net

  5. dharma singh khalsa, md says

    My research at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia reveals for the first time that a nov­el med­i­ta­tion tech­nique revers­es proven mem­o­ry loss in only 12 minutes.

  6. justin black says

    Is any­one plan­ning to apply behav­ioral psy­choa­coustics and clin­i­cal neu­roa­coustics to the ter­ror­ist pris­on­ers held in U.S. custody?

    We can induce neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, and oth­er epi­ge­net­ic alter­ations with­in these crim­i­nals, with the pos­si­ble neu­ro­phys­i­cal cor­re­la­tions to their poten­tial­ly new-found inter­ests for lov­ing com­pas­sion, hav­ing valu­able glob­al implications.

  7. Alvaro says

    Lewis: thank you for the link.

    Dr. Dhar­ma and Justin: if you are so kind as to leave spe­cif­ic sci­en­tif­ic ref­er­ences, we’ll glad­ly take a look!