William Reville, The Irish Times: Meditation has never been more popular than it is now. Transcendental meditation (TM), a mind-emptying type of meditation, used to be the most popular form, but it has now ceded pole position to mindfulness meditation.
Meditation can undoubtedly confer benefits, and extensive scientific investigations are afoot to tease out its effects on the human brain. This work is summarised by Matthieu Ricard and colleagues in the November 2014 edition of Scientific American. The authors define meditation as the cultivation of a more stable and secure mind, …