A Global Collection of Mindfulness and Meditation Research Resources
The NY Times just published a story concerning the urging of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to involve Tibetan monks with Western Science. In a time where “mindfulness” is trendy everywhere, it is important to study the rigors of Buddhist science/epistomology of the mind and the benefits of long-term contemplative practitioners
check it out HERE
Jayanath Narayanan of the National University of Singapore, also affiliated with University of Michigan School of Business and center for Positive Organizational Scholarship has been studying how mindfulness training can affect the workplace.
In two studies, they claim that, “mindfulness leads to superior performance and lower emotional exhaustion thereby contributing to workplace well-being and performance”
for more info check out: HERE
“We were able to show that the training improved the connection between a central nervous system structure, the anterior cingulate, and the parasympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system to help put a person into a more bodily state,” Posner said. “The results seem to show integration — a connectivity of brain and body.”
see link for study HERE.
How do these changes speak to state vs. trait-level changes in self-regulation? 5 Days of training is a short period of time to show such changes, but they are likely to disappear within the same amount of time. Continued practice is clearly essential for sustained trait-level changes.
ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2009) — Meditation has been practiced for centuries, as a way to calm the soul and bring about inner peace. According to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there is now evidence that a specific method of meditation may temporarily boost our visuospatial abilities (for example, the ability to retain an image in visual memory for a long time).
The question that this study addresses is whether meditation practice, specifically meditation on a Deity, or open presence allows practitioners to access a heightened state of visual-spatial awareness. What “heightened” actually refers to physiologically and behaviorally may refer to the ability to maintain complex images in the visual short-term memory for minutes or hours, which is rather long compared to a normal undergraduate student. Such sustained attention in the visualspatial domain may indicate a more developed attentional system and visual-spatial ability.
The researchers focused on two styles of meditation: Deity Yoga (DY) and Open Presence (OP). During DY meditation, the practitioner focuses intently on an image of deity and his or her entourage. This requires coming up with an immensely detailed, three-dimensional image of the deity, and also focusing on the deity’s emotions and environment. In contrast, practitioners of OP meditation believe that pure awareness cannot be achieved by focusing on a specific image and therefore, they attempt to evenly distribute their attention while meditating, without dwelling on or analyzing any experiences, images, or thoughts that may arise.
In these experiments, experienced DY or OP meditation practitioners along with nonmeditators participated in two types of visuospatial tasks, testing mental rotation abilities (e.g., being able to mentally rotate a 3-D structure) and visual memory (e.g., being shown an image, retaining it in memory and then having to identify it among a number of other, related images). All of the participants completed the tasks, meditators meditated for 20 minutes, while others rested or performed non-meditative acitivities, and then completed a second round of the tasks.
The results revealed that all of the participants performed similarly on the initial set of tests, suggesting that meditation does not result in an overall, long-lasting improvement of visuospatial abilities. However, following the meditation period, practitioners of the DY style of meditation showed a dramatic improvement on both the mental rotation task and the visual memory task compared to OP practitioners and controls.
These results indicate that DY meditation allows practitioners to access greater levels of visuospatial memory resources, compared to when they are not meditating. The authors state that this finding “has many implications for therapy, treatment of memory loss, and mental training.” Although, they conclude, future studies will need to examine if these results are specific to DY meditation, or if these effects can also occur using other visual meditation techniques.
Journal reference:
1. Kozhevnikov et al. The Enhancement of Visuospatial Processing Efficiency Through Buddhist Deity Meditation. Psychological Science, 2009; DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02345.x
Hi all,
Mind & Life has decided to break into the social networking scene. I will continue blogging about my experience in Dharamsala there:
The monkeys
It is a beautiful day in Dharamsala. We woke in our modest suite at the Pema Thang house to a view of the abode of His Holiness and the sound of loud banging….apparently the monkeys were waking up and pouncing over the tin rooftops closely followed by the barking dogs. Soon thereafter, we were able to discern the sounds of Tibetan trumpets and prayer reverberating throughout the foothills of the towering Himalayas. These mountains peak at 28,000 feet while Dharamsala is at around 6000 feet….so the immensity of the raw energy of nature is clearly present all around
Last night, the 9 presenters ate dinner together and mingled over late-night conversation and today we are immersed in the planning process to ensure a fruitful dialogue
Diego, Rob, and Adam immersed in planning process
Rob and I are sitting here in our beautiful New Delhi hotel, The Radisson. Lets be clear, the difference between Delhi and New Delhi is about 2-3 generations of progressive change. The Radisson has beautiful flower arrangements that are changed daily. See the orchids below.
Total travel time was 19 hours from New York to Delhi with a stop in Paris. The auspicious nature of the journey reared its head once again when I was boarding the plane and situating myself for the next 7 hour flight and there was Jon Kabat-Zinn and his family. Jon is always a welcoming face. We met up Rob Roeser at the airport and after our short car ride to the hotel had some Indian whiskey and beer.
Now in New Delhi, a majority of the participants have congregated for breakfast before our flight to Dharamsala.
Alan Wallace, Diego Hangartner, and David Meyer
The Dosas were delicious (the coconut, mint, chili chutneys)…actually, we are not sure what the green and red chutneys were.
One more picture for the religious heterogeneity of India
I don’t know how many details I will be writing about, but I thought I could set the stage as I scramble this evening to make the “to-do lists” that I haven’t already, finish some loose ends on an NIH challenge grant, check the weather in Dharamsala, Delhi, and the phase of moon.
Well here it is:
The moon first:
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| Today |
4 / 2
First Quarter
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4 / 9
Full
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4 / 17
Last Quarter
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4 / 25
New
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The full moon at the end of the meeting. Seems appropriate.
There surely is a stark contrast between the two cities in terms of weather:
Dharamsala’s 5-day forecast:
| Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
 66° F | 48° F
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68° F | 51° F
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 68° F | 53° F
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71° F | 50° F
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69° F | 50° F
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| Chance of Rain
20% chance of precipitation
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Chance of Rain
30% chance of precipitation
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Chance of T-storms
40% chance of precipitation
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Chance of Rain
20% chance of precipitation
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Chance of Rain
20% chance of precipitation
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Delhi’s 5-day forecast:
| Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
 91° F | 73° F
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 93° F | 75° F
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96° F | 69° F
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 95° F | 73° F
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96° F | 71° F
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| Scattered Clouds | Partly Cloudy | Partly Cloudy | Clear | Partly Cloudy |
Dear Friends,
I have the unique opportunity to attend the private conference Mind and Life XVIII: ATTENTION, MEMORY AND THE MIND: A SYNERGY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL, NEUROSCIENTIFIC, AND CONTEMPLATIVE PERSPECTIVES: with His Holiness in Dharamsala, India – April 6-10, 2009.
http://mindandlife.org/conf09.dharamsala.html
I will be blogging my experiences from my perspective daily and hope to hear your comments, questions, and/or feedback during this time (or after).
To begin, I can say that my own perspective is one from mutiple levels. One certainly is a personal one. The auspicious nature of the opportunity and timing is one that I smile about every time I think about it. It happens to be my 34th birthday April 6th, the first day of the meeting. At this personal level, it appears that all roads have led (and would have led) to this one that takes me to Dharamsala to participate in a discussion about memory and attention. From another level, this journey is going to happen because of simple choices that have been made throughout my life, each choice being one that can be retrospectively observed and associated with one or another aspect of the context of my life at which time and in which place I made those decisions/choices. At this same level, I think we can collectively investigate the interdependency of all relations with whom we interact and with whose paths we cross. From a third level, I am a research fellow at Harvard University Medical School in the department of Psychiatry. Here I investigate resilience and vulnerability to psychopathology. If I need to be considered part of a socialized academic category, I typically identify myself as a cognitive neuroscientist with a background in the basic neuroscience of learning and memory. My final perspective is from my position as Senior Research Coordinator of the Mind & Life Institute. As the research coordinator of Mind & Life, I work very diligently and passionately to maintain the rigorous standards of the scientific method in all aspects of research supported by Mind and Life and in our program and event planning.
Well now, those are my levels of perspective and if you find any one of those perspectives intriguing then I look forward to sharing fruitful discussion with you in the next few weeks and beyond.
I leave you with two quotes:
Mind and ideas are nonexistent entities invented for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations…Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them” – B.F. Skinner
“Open to me, so that I may open.
Provide me your inspiration
So that I might see mine.”
-Rumi[1]
Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman at the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, University of Pennsylvania publish new book on beliefs of God and neuroimaging data.
REVIEWS: Library Journal: “God” can be reality or metaphor for physician Newberg and counselor Waldman (Ctr. for Spirituality and the Mind, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Born To Believe). In their latest collaboration, they encourage questioning and contact with diverse beliefs and people. Americans, they reveal, mostly view God as authoritarian, critical, or distant—only 23 percent of believers see God as gentle and forgiving, but the notable trend toward the latter should be beneficial for the individual and society. In the most provocative section, readers learn that there are regions of the brain that respond to thoughts, emotions, and experience and can be changed by willed concentration and practice. The authors present an elaborate, engaging meditation program to reduce anger and fear and increase serenity and love. They embrace faith (not necessarily religious), diversity, tolerance, and “compassionate communication.” Extensive notes—73 pages—include hundreds of recent references to neuropsychological research. Though it may seem speculative to neuroscientists and upsetting to religious conservatives, this is a substantial advance in the self-help/spirituality genre and an excellent choice for general collections.—E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC
Wildmind
