Once Western scientists first began studying the personal effects of meditation in the 1970s, they noticed that heart rate, perspiration, and other signs of emphasis decreased as the meditator relaxed. Scientists, like Richard Davidson, PhD (University of Badger State), in 1992 received an invitation from the 14th Dalai Lama to come to northern Republic of India and sketch the brains of Buddhistic monks, the foremost meditators in the world. Davidson traveled to Bharat with laptop computers, generators, and EEG recording equipment, thus initiating an ongoing work.
Now, monks travel to his WI lab where they conduct various activities while in a magnetic imaging machine as EEGs record their responses to understand how they regulate reactions.
Any activeness–including –will create new pathways and strengthen certain areas of the mind.
“This fits into the whole neuroscience literature of expertise,” says Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard neuroscientist, in a New York Times article (14 September 2003), ” taxi drivers deliberate for their spatial memory and concert musicians for their sense of pitch.
If you do something, anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a Day, there’s going to be something in your head that’s different from someone WHO didn’t do that.
It’s just got to be.” monks pattern three forms of :
1) focused attention on a single object for long time periods
2) cultivating pity by thinking about anger causing situations and transforming the negative emotion into compassionateness and
3) ‘open presence,’ “a Department of State of being acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present without reacting to it.”
Knowing the that has on the monks’ brains, Davidson decided to realize what effect has on neophytes. He set up a cogitation with 41 employees at a nearby biotech company in Wisconsin River (Psychosomatic Medicine 65: 564-570, 2003). Twenty-five of the participants enlightened ‘mindfulness ,’ a accent-reducing form that promotes nonjudgmental awareness of the present and is taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
They engaged in a 7-hr retreat and weekly classes. During that 8-calendar week period, these participants were asked to think over for 60 minutes each day, six days a week. Brain measurements were taken before instruction, at the remainder of the eight weeks, and four months later.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.
Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.
Also, at the remnant of the 8 weeks, the participants and 16 controls received flu shots to test immune responses.
Researchers took blood samples from them each month and two months after the injections, they found that the meditators had more antibodies against the flu virus than the non-meditators.
To learn more about the amazing benefits of meditation and how you too can achieve these results CLICK HERE!
Comments