Mar 26, 2008
Meditation and The Brain
By: Alvaro Fernandez
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!