Recent quotes:

Mindfulness meditation reduces pain by separating it from the self: UC San Diego study reveals neural circuitry supporting mindfulness-induced pain relief -- ScienceDaily

The study, published July 7, 2022 in PAIN, showed that mindfulness meditation interrupted the communication between brain areas involved in pain sensation and those that produce the sense of self. In the proposed mechanism, pain signals still move from the body to the brain, but the individual does not feel as much ownership over those pain sensations, so their pain and suffering are reduced. "One of the central tenets of mindfulness is the principle that you are not your experiences," said senior author Fadel Zeidan, PhD, associate professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "You train yourself to experience thoughts and sensations without attaching your ego or sense of self to them, and we're now finally seeing how this plays out in the brain during the experience of acute pain."
#meditation #pain #mindfulness - sciencedaily.com

How to calm a stressed kid? A one-minute video can help, according to Stanford researchers | Stanford Graduate School of Education

Researchers measured two biomarkers in all of their recruits: heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which refers to the changing pace of the heartbeat when a person inhales and exhales.  RSA plays an important role in influencing heart rate, Obradović said, and it has been linked to children’s ability to regulate their emotions, focus their attention and engage in tasks. “When it comes to measuring the effects of deep breathing on stress physiology, RSA seems to be the most appropriate biomarker,” said Obradović. “RSA is the only pure measure of the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, the system we’ve evolved to help us deal with everyday challenges – the kinds of challenges that don’t require a flight-or-flight response.”  The change in the measures was profound: RSA increased and heart rate decreased only in response to the deep-breathing video, and the effects were greater during the second half of the video, which included most of the deep breathing practice. The children in the control group showed no change in either measure. “Our findings showed that guiding a group of children through one minute of a slow-paced breathing exercise in an everyday setting can, in the moment, significantly lower the average level of physiological arousal,” Obradović said.
#meditation #breath - ed.stanford.edu

Mindful body awareness training during treatment for drug addiction helps prevent relapse -- ScienceDaily

The intervention is called Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT) and combines manual, mindfulness and psycho-educational approaches to teach interoceptive awareness and related self-care skills. Interoceptive awareness is the ability to access and process sensory information from the body. Researchers studied 187 women at three Seattle-area locations. The cohort, all women in treatment for substance use disorder (SUD), was split into three relatively equal groups. Every group continued with their regular SUD treatment. One group received SUD treatment only, another group was taught the mindfulness technique in addition to treatment, and the third group received a women's education curriculum in addition to treatment in order to test whether the additional time and attention explained any positive study outcomes. Women were tested at the beginning, and at three, six and 12 months on a number of factors including substance use, distress craving, emotion regulation (self-report and psychophysiology), mindfulness skills and interoceptive awareness. There were lasting improvements in these areas for those who received the MABT intervention, but not for the other two study groups. "Those who received MABT relapsed less," Price said. "By learning to attend to their bodies, they learned important skills for better self-care."
#addiction #meditation #bio-sensors #relapse - sciencedaily.com

The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler - The New York Times

In her 1995 paper, Nancy Andreasen included two key observations that would grow in significance over the subsequent decades. When she interviewed the subjects afterward, they described their mental activity during the REST state as a kind of effortless shifting back and forth in time. “They think freely about a variety of things,” Andreasen wrote, “especially events of the past few days or future activities of the current or next several days.” Perhaps most intriguing, Andreasen noted that most of the REST activity took place in what are called the association cortices of the brain, the regions of the brain that are most pronounced in Homo sapiens compared with other primates and that are often the last to become fully operational as the human brain develops through adolescence and early adulthood. “Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.”
#brain #memory #meditation #time #cerebral-cortex - nytimes.com

Sometimes noise is the signal

“What happened is that we began putting people in scanners that can measure their brain activity,” Buckner recalls now, “and Mother Nature shouted back at us.” When people were told to sit and do nothing, the PET scans showed a distinct surge of mental energy in some regions. The resting state turned out to be more active than the active state. The odd blast of activity during the resting state would be observed in dozens of other studies using a similar control structure during this period. To this first generation of scientists using PET scans, the active rest state was viewed, in Buckner’s words, as “a confound, as troublesome.” A confound is an errant variable that prevents a scientist from doing a proper control study. It’s noise, mere interference getting in the way of the signal that science is looking for. Buckner and his colleagues noted the strange activity in a paper submitted in 1993, but almost as an afterthought, or an apology.
#brain #meditation # - nytimes.com

On the Relationship Between the Practice of Mindfulness Meditation and Personality—an Exploratory Analysis of the Mediating Role of Mindfulness Skills | SpringerLink

Thirty-five experienced mindfulness meditators (age range, 31–75 years; meditation experience range, 0.25–35 years; mean, ∼13 years) and 35 age-, gender-, and ethnicity-matched controls (age range, 27–63 years) without any meditation experience completed a personality (NEO-FFI) and mindfulness (KIMS) questionnaire. The practice of MM was positively related to openness and extraversion and negatively related to neuroticism and conscientiousness. Thus, the results of the current study associate the practice of MM with higher levels of curiosity and receptivity to new experiences and experience of positive affect and with less proneness toward negative emotions and worrying and a reduced focus on achievements. Furthermore, the mediating role of specific mindfulness skills in the relationship between the practice of MM and personality traits was shown.
#meditation #mindfulness - link.springer.com

Even Quick Meditation Aids Cognitive Skills - Neuroscience News

College students who listen to a 10-minute meditation tape complete simple cognitive tasks more quickly and accurately than peers who listen to a “control” recording on a generic subject, researchers at Yale University and Swarthmore College report. The study, published Aug. 6 in the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience, shows even people who have never meditated before can benefit from even a short meditation practice. “We have known for awhile that people who practice meditation for a few weeks or months tend to perform better on cognitive tests, but now we know you don’t have to spend weeks practicing to see improvement,” said Yale’s Hedy Kober, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology and senior author of the study.
#meditation #IQ #focus #cognition - neurosciencenews.com

Mindfulness is Key to Tinnitus Relief - Neuroscience News

Relaxation therapy provides patients with specific skills to reduce stress arousal levels. In contrast, MBCT, taught by highly-trained clinical psychologists, teaches patients to pay purposeful, present-moment attention to experiences, rather than trying to supress those experiences. Practicing mindfulness meditation in this way can cultivate a more helpful way of responding to tinnitus. People learn how to ‘allow’ and ‘accept’ tinnitus, rather than having to ‘fight it’ or ‘push it away’. Mindfulness does not aim to change the nature or sound of the tinnitus, but the therapy can lead to tinnitus becoming less intrusive, to a point where it is no longer a problem for people.
#meditation #mindfulness #tinnitus - neurosciencenews.com

Yoga and meditation boost your ego, say psychology researchers — Quartz

When students were evaluated in the hour after their yoga class, they showed significantly higher self-enhancement, according to all three measures, than when they hadn’t done yoga in the previous 24 hours. A second study of 162 people who practiced meditation, recruited through Facebook groups devoted to meditation, found that the practice had similar impacts on self-enhancement as yoga. In this study, participants were asked to evaluate themselves based on statements like, “In comparison to the average participant of this study, I am free from bias.” The study found that participants had higher self-enhancement in the hour following meditation, than when they hadn’t meditated for 24 hours.
#meditation #ego #yoga - qz.com

How Mitochondria Keep Our Brains and Minds Moving – Association for Psychological Science

Although the exact mechanisms through which mitochondria may contribute to such a range of disorders is still poorly understood, the authors wrote, studies suggest that the path to mitochondrial health is a familiar one: Exercise, getting enough sleep, eating a nutrient rich diet, and engaging in stress-reducing activities like yoga and meditation can all have a positive influence. In one study, rats who swam for 10 to 30 minutes a day for 20 weeks were found to have fewer mutations in their mitochondrial DNA than those who did not. Some research suggests that eating a ketogenic diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates and sugar may improve energy production.
#exercise #paleotherapy #meditation #mitochondria - psychologicalscience.org

Differential Experimental Effects of a Short Bout of Walking, Meditation, or Combination of Walking and Meditation on State Anxiety Among Young Adu... - PubMed - NCBI

Significant group × time interaction effects were observed ( P = .01). Post hoc paired t tests revealed that state anxiety significantly decreased from baseline to postintervention in the meditation ( P = .002), meditation then walk ( P = .002), and walk then meditation ( P = .03) groups but not the walk ( P = .75) or control ( P = .45) groups.
#paleotherapy #anxiety #meditation #walking - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The Yogi masters were right -- meditation and breathing exercises can sharpen your mind: New research explains link between breath-focused meditation and attention and brain health -- ScienceDaily

Michael Melnychuk, PhD candidate at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity, and lead author of the study, explained: "Practitioners of yoga have claimed for some 2,500 years, that respiration influences the mind. In our study we looked for a neurophysiological link that could help explain these claims by measuring breathing, reaction time, and brain activity in a small area in the brainstem called the locus coeruleus, where noradrenaline is made. Noradrenaline is an all-purpose action system in the brain. When we are stressed we produce too much noradrenaline and we can't focus. When we feel sluggish, we produce too little and again, we can't focus. There is a sweet spot of noradrenaline in which our emotions, thinking and memory are much clearer." "This study has shown that as you breathe in locus coeruleus activity is increasing slightly, and as you breathe out it decreases. Put simply this means that our attention is influenced by our breath and that it rises and falls with the cycle of respiration. It is possible that by focusing on and regulating your breathing you can optimise your attention level and likewise, by focusing on your attention level, your breathing becomes more synchronised."
#meditation #rhythm #breath #noradrenline - sciencedaily.com

Meditation could help anxiety and cardiovascular health -- ScienceDaily

In "Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Aortic Pulsatile Load and Anxiety in Mild to Moderately Anxious Adults," Durocher, along with fellow researchers Hannah Marti, a recent Michigan Tech graduate, Brigitte Morin, lecturer in biological science, and Travis Wakeham, a graduate student, explains the finding that 60 minutes after meditating the 14 study participants showed lower resting heart rates and reduction in aortic pulsatile load -- the amount of change in blood pressure between diastole and systole of each heartbeat multiplied by heart rate. Additionally, shortly after meditating, and even one week later, the group reported anxiety levels were lower than pre-meditation levels.
#anxiety #meditation #hrv - sciencedaily.com

Animal study connects fear behavior, rhythmic breathing, brain smell center -- ScienceDaily

Other groups have observed that the amygdala and prelimbic prefrontal cortex, which govern learning and memory, emotion, and decision-making, were electrically active during "freezing," at an average of 4 Hz. Moberly observed that freeze behavior, breathing rate, and electrical activity of these brain regions were coordinated literally on the same wavelength.
#anxiety #meditation #amygdala #fear #breath - sciencedaily.com

Seven-year follow-up shows lasting cognitive gains from meditation -- ScienceDaily

The new study shows that those gains in attention observed immediately after retreat were partly maintained seven years later, especially for older participants who maintained a more diligent meditation practice over the seven years. Compared to those who practiced less, these participants maintained cognitive gains and did not show typical patterns of age-related decline in sustained attention.
#meditation #cognition - sciencedaily.com

Medium – Read, write and share stories that matter

In layman’s terms, neuroscientists at NorthWestern University determined that breathing in through your nose lights up brain centers that govern positive and negative emotions. Further, nasal inhalation coordinates those centers with other neural systems that are central to memory and cognition. Exhaling through your nose or mouth-breathing accomplish none of these things.
#meditation #emotion - medium.com

Neuroscience Has a Lot To Learn from Buddhism - The Atlantic

Ricard: That is what a study conducted by Julie Brefczynski and Antoine Lutz at Richard Davidson’s lab seems to indicate. Brefczynski and Lutz studied the brain activity of novice, relatively experienced, and very experienced meditators when they engage in focused attention. Different patterns of activity were observed depending on the practitioners’ level of experience. Relatively experienced meditators (with an average of 19,000 hours of practice) showed more activity in attention-related brain regions compared with novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators (with an average of 44,000 hours of practice) demonstrated less activation than the ones without as much experience. These highly advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control. This observation accords with other studies demonstrating that when someone has mastered a task, the cerebral structures put into play during the execution of this task are generally less active than they were when the brain was still in the learning phase. Singer: This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!
#brain #meditation #connectome #practice #flow - theatlantic.com

Yoga, meditation improve brain function and energy levels, study shows -- ScienceDaily

Thirty-one study participants completed 25 minutes of Hatha yoga, 25 minutes of mindfulness meditation, and 25 minutes of quiet reading (a control task) in randomized order. Following both the yoga and meditation activities, participants performed significantly better on executive function tasks compared to the reading task. "This finding suggests that there may be something special about meditation -- as opposed to the physical posing -- that carries a lot of the cognitive benefits of yoga," said Kimberley Luu, lead author on the paper. The study also found that mindfulness meditation and Hatha yoga were both effective for improving energy levels, but Hatha yoga had significantly more powerful effects than meditation alone.
#meditation #mindfulness #energy #yoga - sciencedaily.com

Mindful Meditation Training Lowers Biomarkers of Stress Response in Anxiety Disorder – Neuroscience News

HomeFeatured Mindful Meditation Training Lowers Biomarkers of Stress Response in Anxiety Disorder Neuroscience NewsJanuary 27, 2017 FeaturedPsychology6 min read Summary: According to researchers, mindful meditation can reduce stress hormones and inflammatory responses to stressful situations in people with GAD. Source: Georgetown University Medical Center. Hormonal, inflammatory reactions to stress were reduced after meditation training, in rigorous NIH-sponsored trial. Mindfulness meditation is an increasingly popular treatment for anxiety, but testing its effectiveness in a convincing way has been difficult. Now a rigorously designed, NIH-sponsored clinical trial led by a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher has found objective physiological evidence that mindfulness meditation combats anxiety. The researchers found that anxiety disorder patients had sharply reduced stress-hormone and inflammatory responses to a stressful situation after taking a mindfulness meditation course–whereas patients who took a non-meditation stress management course had worsened responses. “Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Elizabeth A. Hoge, MD, associate professor in Georgetown University Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry. The study, published January 24 in Psychiatry Research, included 89 patients with generalized anxiety disorder, a condition of chronic and excessive worrying. The disorder is estimated to affect nearly 7 million Americans during any one year. Hoge and her colleagues randomly divided the patients into two groups: One took an eight-week mindfulness based stress reduction course, the other — the control group — took an eight-week Stress Management Education course, which included general tips on the importance of good nutrition, sleep habits and other wellness topics. Both courses had similar formats but only the former included training in meditative techniques. Many prior tests of meditation-based therapies have compared a meditation group to an untreated control group. Because participants in such studies are not “blinded” — they know if they are getting treatment or not–they are likely to be influenced by the placebo effect and other forms of expectancy bias. “The FDA would never approve a drug based on such a clinical trial design,” said Hoge. In this study, she added, participants would have had little or no expectancy bias, because they were all assigned to a treatment, and were not told which was the treatment of interest to the researchers. Before and after the training course, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, a standard experimental technique for inducing a stress response, in which the participants are asked at short notice to give a speech before an audience, and are given other anxiety-inducing instructions. “Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Elizabeth A. Hoge. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Photodune. “We were testing the patients’ resilience,” Hoge said, “because that’s really the ultimate question–can we make people handle stress better?” For the stress test, the team monitored blood-based markers of subjects’ stress responses, namely levels of the stress hormone ACTH and the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-α. The control group showed modest rises on the second test compared to the first, suggesting a worsening of their anxiety from having to endure the test again. By contrast, the meditation group showed big drops in these markers on the second test, suggesting that the meditation training had helped them cope. Hoge and colleagues also found — as they reported in an earlier paper on this study — that the meditation group patients, compared to controls, experienced significantly greater reductions in self-reported measures of stress after their course. The study adds to evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in treating anxiety, Hoge said. She noted too that with its rigorous “active control” design, it provides a good paradigm for the future study of interventions such as meditation, to which patients cannot be blinded.
#meditation #stress - neurosciencenews.com

Mindfulness Meditation Helps You Handle Stress Better | Time.com

Not only did the people who learned to meditate report feeling less stressed than people in the other class, but their blood measurements of ACTH, a stress hormone released in the brain and then into the bloodstream, were lower too, as well as markers of inflammation called pro-inflammatory cytokines. But in the control group, people were actually more stressed the second time they did the test, possibly because they knew and anticipated how bad the it would be.
#inflamation #meditation #stress - time.com

Health Benefits Shared by Psychedelics, Yoga, and Meditation -- Science of Us

Last year, Enzo Tagliazucchi, a postdoc at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, co-led a brain-imaging study in Current Biology on LSD-induced ego dissolution, and found that the state was associated with increased connectivity between several brain areas. In explaining to me why that dissolution might be therapeutically helpful, he said that the entire psychedelic experience — even the challenging parts — has a way of “extracting the patient from his or her usual patterns of thought and contemplat[ing] upon them from a vantage point,” he explained over email. The dissolution itself seemed to play a direct role in the case of anxiety in terminal cancer patients, he added. It’s a catalyst for epiphany. “In a typical ego-dissolution experience, the user feels the boundaries between his or her body and the rest of the universe dissolve, and becomes ‘one’ with the surroundings,” he added. “This might lead to feelings of transcendence or permanence in the patients, making them realize that even after their death they will still be part of something ‘larger.’”
#anxiety #meditation #ego #psilocybin - nymag.com

Making life harder to live in the moment

Adam Gopnik in his “Paris Journal” who wrote, “The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.” And yet perhaps the only way to achieve this freedom, and therefore this ability to understand what it means to be alive, is to go somewhere entirely new and foreign, a place where even the most basic actions – a trip to the grocery store or the pharmacy, ordering at a restaurant, or even negotiating the language – become deeply fascinating, trying, difficult.
#meditation #paris #zen #expats - delistraty.com

The Lovely Loneliness of the Solitary Run | Runner's World

I applaud the running tribes who are inspiring new people to enjoy our sport. And I love that celebrating the difficulty of hard work is integral to the appeal of many of them. I’ve reluctantly enjoyed the few times I’ve joined such groups, and admit that, if I relax my default defenses, the cheers and music and hearty camaraderie can produce a rush. But if you, like me, find yourself longing for the quiet of the empty road or trail, accompanied by nothing but the sound of your breath and the wind in the trees, know that you are not alone. Our tribe dates back to before the first running boom. It is a tribe of solitary silhouettes moving quietly through still early mornings on empty roads. We’re not outcasts. We’ve chosen this loneliness, and it defines and enriches us.
#running #meditation - runnersworld.com

breath in through your nose

"One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation," said lead author Christina Zelano, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, all across the limbic system."
#synchronize #meditation #hippocampus #amygdala #breath - sciencedaily.com

The Scientific Basis of How Yoga Works -- Science of Us

If you’re doing the same poses over and over again, day after day, year after year, you’re going to get pretty intimate with how your body expresses itself in those forms, and along the way cultivate what researchers call proprioception, or the awareness of where your body is in space, and interoception, or the sensations not just of the air on your skin, but your bones, tendons, and body tissues as you mindfully contort your body, as well as your emotional state. As your yoga teachers have exhorted you to do, you’re gaining a finer-grained sense of where your skeleton is within your body, and how all the flesh layers on top of that. As Harvard Medical School assistant professor Sat Bir Singh Khalsa told me, these increases in internal awareness can change entire lifestyles. “Somebody’s who’s practiced yoga for eight weeks and then smokes a cigarette, will say, ‘My god, I never noticed how bad these things were, I can’t stand this, this feels awful,’” he says. With training, the body’s sensations become more perceptible to you, so you feel the toxicity of things at a higher intensity. For this reason, he says, yoga can be super powerful in controlling lifestyle diseases. “People change their diets, change their behaviors to ones that make them feel better, because now, for the first time in their lives, they’re actually feeling more.”
#brain #meditation #mind-body #yoga - nymag.com

Zen and the Art of Running – Personal Growth – Medium

Ask someone what it means to do a good job on an intricate project at the office and it could take them an hour to explain and require charts and graphs. Ask that same person what it means to do a good job in their next race and I bet they can tell you in less than a minute, no PowerPoint required.
#running #racery #meditation - medium.com