Dalai Lama’s brain challenge produces split decision

Wildmind Meditation News

New Scientist: If you’re going to challenge the Dalai Lama to a memory game, don’t do it just after he’s meditated. New research finds that meditation boosts visual memory, but only in the short term. The findings counter the claims of some monks who say that years of practicing a meditation technique that centres on creating an elaborate mental picture of deities can offer long-lasting improvements in visual memory and processing. Read more here.

“They claim they can do it all the time – they cannot,” says Maria Kozhevnikov, a neuroscientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who travelled to several monasteries in Nepal to test the Buddhist monks’ visual memory.
Holy

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Meditation key to treat depression

Wildmind Meditation News

Times of India: People with severe and recurrent depression could benefit from a new form of therapy that combines ancient forms of meditation with modern cognitive behaviour therapy, early-stage research by Oxford University psychologists suggests. Read more here.

The results of a small-scale randomised trial of the approach, called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), in currently depressed patients are published in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy.

In an experiment, 28 people currently suffering from depression, having also had previous episodes of depression and thoughts of suicide, were randomly assigned into two groups.

One group received MBCT in addition to treatment as usual, while the other just received treatment as usual. The result indicated

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“Ten Zen Questions,” by Susan Blackmore

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Susan Blackmore

Title: “Ten Zen Questions.”
Author: Susan Blackmore
Publisher: Oneworld Publications, Oxford (2009).
ISBN: 978-1-85168-642-1
Available from: Amazon.com.

Susan Blackmore’s Ten Zen Questions may at first glance seem silly or pointless — “Where is this?” for example — but when approached with a focused mind they can be used to push back our assumptions and let us have a glimpse at what’s really going on.

Susan Blackmore is justifiably something of a superstar in the small but important and expanding world that exists where science and Buddhism overlap.

She’s well-known on the TED circuit for her work on “memes” — ideas and cultural phenomena understood as viral-like entities that “infect” …

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Publilius Syrus, “To do two things at once is to do neither”

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Latin inscriptionThe other day I read about a family of six who were wiped out when a truck-driver plowed into their vehicle. He’d allegedly been driving and attempting to look at a laptop screen at the same time.

  To do two things at once is to do neither (Publilius Syrus, an Iraqi enslaved by the Romans. Flourished first century BCE.)

Not all multitasking is that catastrophic, but nevertheless attempting to juggle too many things in a short space of time is causing us stress, reducing our productivity, and making it harder to maintain focus when we need to.

What happens in the long term to an economy built on the labor of information workers when …

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Research: Naming negative emotions makes them weaker

Wildmind Meditation News

naming emotionsWired Magazine reports on research that’s of relevance to meditators — especially those that use the vipassana technique of “noting,” where we name the most prominent aspect of our experience, saying inwardly, for example, “anger, anger” when we recognize that that emotion is present.

Meditation generally, and the technique of noting in particular, helps us to stand back from our emotions and to recognize that they are transitory events passing though our consciousness. Without this ability to stand back from our emotions we can easily become engulfed by them and we identify totally with them. Instead of experiencing anger we simply are angry.

It’s akin to flying in an airplane. When the plane is …

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Pioneer in emotions suggests training increases happiness

Wildmind Meditation News

Deseret News: Think of happiness as a skill, not so different maybe from learning to play the piano: the more you train, the better you get. That was the encouraging message Wednesday night from Richard Davidson, a pioneer in the biology of emotions. Read more here.

Our emotions, it turns out, are revealed deep inside our brains, in areas such as the amygdala and the uncinate fasciculus. And these structures of our brain can physically change with training, says Davidson, who is a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is director of the school’s Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. He will also head up a
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Meditation practice linked to less pain sensitivity

Wildmind Meditation News

Modern Medicine: Experience in Zen meditation is associated with reduced pain sensitivity, a finding supporting the value of mindfulness-based meditation, according to research published in the January issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

Joshua A. Grant, and Pierre Rainville, Ph.D., of the Universite de Montreal in Quebec, Canada, analyzed data from 13 experienced Zen meditators and 13 age- and gender-matched controls who were unfamiliar with meditation. All were exposed to a heating device on the calf that provided a series of episodes of non-painful warmth or moderately painful heat. In different experimental conditions, participants were told to focus all attention on the stimulation, observe the sensation in a mindful way, or were given no task.

Meditators …

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Just who do you think you are?

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phrenology head

There’s a compelling article in Atlantic on the theory that the self is not unitary but a composite of multiple selves.

“First Person Plural,” is written by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University and the author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. He’s writing a book on the theme of pleasure, and I imagine it’ll be well-worth reading.

His article shows that the self is not a single entity but a multiplicity:

Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might

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