Three Brain Pathways to Reading

The frontal reading system has been implicated in phonological processing and semantic processing (word analysis). This is also where Broca’s area is found. Broca’s area is involved in language processing, speech production, and comprehension. Neuron activation is increased in this area when words are spoken (Devlin, Matthews, & Rushworth, 2003). The ventral posterior processing system (located in the occipital and temporal lobes) is most associated with orthographic processing (visu...

 Meditators Can Switch Mental Processes More Quickly

In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that the habitual practice of being heedful to distraction from spontaneous thoughts during meditation renders regular meditators, as compared to control subjects, more able to voluntarily contain the automatic cascade of conceptual associations triggered by semantic stimuli. To this purpose, we adapted a simple lexical decision task [11] that required the subjects to decide whether the visually presented stimuli were real English words or string...