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Meditation, the new panacea...?
So, I've started meditating again. The last time I did this regularly was in '98 where I would sometimes sit for some mini-marathon of 2 hours. I had been meditating intermittently for some time now, so have been thinking about some of the research studying the effects, e.g. (with some relevant claims in smaller text below each linked article):
Meditation Changes Temperatures: Mind Controls Body in Extreme Experiments
Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.
Buddhist 'really are happier'
Tests carried out in the United States reveal that areas of their brain associated with good mood and positive feelings are more active.
Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.
...found that experienced Buddhists, who meditate regularly, were less likely to be shocked, flustered, surprised or as angry compared to other people.
revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners. This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament. Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists' brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.
Meditation associated with increased grey matter in the brain
...shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing
Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.
International Education: Meditation helps students
Proponents say that students who meditate daily are calmer, less distracted and less stressed and less prone to violent behavior.
Those who practiced 15 minutes of transcendental meditation twice daily steadily lowered their daytime blood pressures over four months compared to non-meditating teens who participated in health education classes and experienced no significant change.
And a couple of the more interesting lines of research involve the Dalai Lama's increasing activity and advocation of studying neurology:
Dalai Lama and neuroscientists build bridge between Buddhism and Western medicine
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has demonstrated his many gifts as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, but how often does he get asked to become a reviewer for a neuroscience journal?
That proposal came at a medical school panel on Nov. 5 at Memorial Auditorium from a neuroscientist who had just heard the Dalai Lama's critique of her imaging study. While her suggestion was somewhat tongue in cheek, she was dead serious in her admission that she might have conducted her research differently if she had spoken with him first.
The study showed that empathy for others causes activity in the same areas of the brain as does pain itself. The researchers used loved ones to elicit empathy from the test subjects. In Buddhism, the belief is that empathy and compassion for loved ones is an extension of the self. But real compassion comes from feelings for those unrelated—or even enemies. So a more telling experiment, the Dalai Lama remarked, would be to examine such feelings toward these less-related people to see if activation arises in the same areas of the brain.
apparently, meditatiors seem to be relatively good FACS (Facial Activation Coding System) readers:
Dalai Lama's Brain
Dr. Ekman also participated in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial muscles
As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by Times Books in April, these microexpressions - ultrarapid facial actions, some lasting as little as one-twentieth of a second - lay bare our most naked feelings.
We are not aware we are making them; they cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for those who can read them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.
Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments.
Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people can learn to detect these expressions in just hours with proper training, his testing shows that most people - including judges, the police and psychotherapists - are ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than someone making random guesses.
Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six, considered quite rare. Normally, a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.
and neurologist, James Austin, who is a Zen practitioner who reached Kensho:
Book Review: Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin, M.D.
There are, however, some things that can be said about the state of enlightenment, and Austin does a remarkable job of expressing its essence. He characterizes the state as non-dual, non-conceptual, wordless, providing ultimate and authentic meaning, deconditioning inappropriate learned responses and expectations, and destroying all fear. All of these qualities derive from the perception of "suchness," reality as it is directly experienced without presuppositions or interference from our analytic thought processes. As he describes it, the chief characteristic seems to be a loss of the sense of "self" that is central to human identity, and a corresponding feeling of union with the outer world, including humanity as a whole and the living planet that sustains us all.
From a scientific viewpoint, the great contribution of Zen and the Brain is in relating alternate states of reality to specific changes in the neurological activity of the brain. Ever since the pioneering work of William James, science has been aware that experiences of various "altered states of consciousness" can and do occur naturally. Indeed, some such altered states are so common that we take them for granted, such as sleep, dreaming, conditioning, and emotional states such as euphoria or pain and suffering. In all of these states, as well as the more exotic states of religious visions or spiritual enlightenment, our basic perceptions of reality and our relation to the world around us differ from the perceptions of so-called "rational" or "objective" consciousness, sometimes radically so.
So yeah, some lofty claims, and really all this follows on the tails of the "Cultural Psychology Movement"--namely the questioning of the universality of human psychology when most of the data from which conclusions about so-called "universal psychological processes" were (predominantly) taken from college students (where subjects are abundant and readily available) who tended to be predominantly American, European, and European-American. For example, work done by Durga Sinha, Richard Nisbett, Kaipeng Peng has been pioneering and instrumental in bringing out the cross-cultural differences in psychology, neurology, and even perceptual physiology (for an excellent summary of Cultural Psychology, see the relevant section in Shinobu Kitayama's appendix to The Aging Mind, "Cultural Variations in Cognition: Implications for Aging Research").
So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Austin and the Dalai Lama (as well as an increasing amount of researchers) would follow in those lines.
So to summarize, there seems to be evidence that meditation can increase happiness, lower blood pressure, increase Facial recognition skills, control body temp. and metabolism (as well as, interestingly, raising the temp. of the extremities), increase grey matter, increase concentration, etc., etc., etc. (yes, I know that iterations of "etc." is "redundant")--then yeah, a few minutes or more of meditation a day doesn't seem like much of a waste of time. So I have to ask myself--why have I wasted so much of my time not meditating since '98...
ugh
10:15 PM
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