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Brain scans show meditation changes minds, increases attention
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
For hundreds of years, Tibetan monks and other religious people have used meditation to calm the mind and improve concentration. This week, a new study shows exactly how one common type of meditation affects the brain.
Using a scanner that reveals which parts of the brain are active at any given moment, the researchers found that meditation increased activity in the brain regions used for paying attention and making decisions.
"Most people, if they heard a baby screaming, would have some emotional response," Davidson says, but not the highly experienced meditators. "They do hear the sound, we can detect that in the auditory cortex, but they don’t have the emotional reaction."
The changes were associated with the practice of concentration meditation, says study leader Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the Waisman Center. Practitioners were instructed to focus attention intently on a stimulus, and when the attention wandered off, to simply bring the attention back to the object, explains Davidson.
To read full article go here: http://www.news.wisc.edu/13890
Using a scanner that reveals which parts of the brain are active at any given moment, the researchers found that meditation increased activity in the brain regions used for paying attention and making decisions.
"Most people, if they heard a baby screaming, would have some emotional response," Davidson says, but not the highly experienced meditators. "They do hear the sound, we can detect that in the auditory cortex, but they don’t have the emotional reaction."
The changes were associated with the practice of concentration meditation, says study leader Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the Waisman Center. Practitioners were instructed to focus attention intently on a stimulus, and when the attention wandered off, to simply bring the attention back to the object, explains Davidson.
To read full article go here: http://www.news.wisc.edu/13890
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Comments
I have been doing research for at least 10 years...lol!
Here's another article I found. There's a cool little meditation trick discussed in the middle (regarding sitting on a park bench), invented by a Westerner, apparently. I never heard of it from Buddhism. Pretty clever!
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2008914,00.html
Let's begin!
What kind of research do you do?
What is your favorite topic/subjects?
Do you have Facebook?
(in short involve in dhamma-vicaya in Insight meditation) relationship among four elements and individual illnesses yes, but my involvement in such things are very little
My main research in Psychology/Spirituality...
So Buddhism and Psychology combination.