Science and Meditation
Empirical evidence concerning meditation.
Folksonomies: science meditation
Memes
24 DEC 2013
Our Relationship to Our Thinking
I invite you to pay attention to anything—the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair—for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything—even the feeling of a knife at your throat—for more than a few seconds, before your awaren...Folksonomies: thinking mindfulness meditation
Folksonomies: thinking mindfulness meditation
1 
Sam Harris on mindfulness in the many religious traditions.
24 MAR 2013
Benefits of Even Casual Meditation
In 2011, researchers from the
University of Wisconsin studied a group
of people who were not in the habit of
meditating and instructed them in the
following manner: relax with your eyes
closed and focus on the flow of your
breath at the tip of your nose; if a random
thought arises, acknowledge the thought
and then simply let it go by gently bringing
your attention back to the flow of your
breath. For fifteen minutes, the
participants attempted to follow these
guidelines. Then they were broken...Folksonomies: science meditation
Folksonomies: science meditation
Even introductory mediation pushed practitioners into the left-brain(?) and positive/approach-oriented emotional states.
26 JUN 2012
Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Cognitive Rigidity
Two experiments examined the relation between mindfulness practice and cognitive rigidity by using a variation of the Einstellung water jar task. Participants were required to use three hypothetical jars to obtain a specific amount of water. Initial problems were solvable by the same complex formula, but in later problems (“critical” or “trap” problems) solving was possible by an additional much simpler formula. A rigidity score was compiled through perseverance of the complex formula. In Exp...Folksonomies: meditation cognitive rigidity
Folksonomies: meditation cognitive rigidity
Demonstrated using tests with "traps" that can only be overcome with novel thinking.
26 JUN 2012
Vulcan Meditation
In any system of meditation, one can categorize the techniques endlessly.
One could divide them into active, passive, and waking, or make
distinctions between mental, emotional, and physical meditations. Active
meditation techniques require you to focus on some object to the
exclusion of all else - like a meditating on a symbol, a set of words or
an image. A passive meditation involves stilling the mind so that the
train of thoughts which occupy our consciousness so pervasively stop. The
su...Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
There are three types of meditation: intellectual, emotional, and physical.
26 JUN 2012
Labeling Emotions Helps Control Them
Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”
When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right vent...Folksonomies: meditation mindfulness
Folksonomies: meditation mindfulness
An experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in calming emotional states.
26 JUN 2012
Definition of Meditation
The Buddhist meditative exercise has its roots in the metaphysical tenet of “emptiness,” particularly emphasized by the Zen schools [3]. According to this view, reality is originally devoid of ontological properties and it is only via an incessant and largely unconscious habit of emotional self-reference and categorization that a conceptual structure is created and ultimately reified; a process necessary for daily life, but that also tends to condition the individual into predefined patterns ...Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
The human brain naturally categorizes things, but things are not naturally categorized. Meditation is the exercise of not thinking in order to free the mind of categorization and self-reference.
26 JUN 2012
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...Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
In an experiment where they are flashed words and non words at random during meditation and tasked to categorize which they are seeing.
26 JUN 2012
Survey of Studies on the Benefits of Meditation
...there has been a growing body of research over the last years examining various cognitive abilities related to mindfulness, most of which focusing on various measures of attention and memory... Although some studies did not find differences between meditators and non-meditators in rigidity related tasks (e.g [47], [48]), others have found that meditators exhibit decreased Stroop interference [49], [50](in a Zen meditation sample). The Stroop task requires participants to name the ink color...Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
Decreased Stroop interference, superior visual perspective switching, superior verbal fluency, improved category production tasking, and reduced rumination.
21 MAY 2011
Step-by-Step Relaxation
Your wife can be shown the principles of relaxation and she can be taught the consciousness of her muscles' state of tension in prenatal classes under the supervision of experienced teachers. Being a human animal, however, she needs to practice these principles at home daily in order to perfect them. This you can help her do. A suggested time is just before retiring for the night, as a prelude to sleep. This serves a double purpose: It establishes her self-confidence in her physical relaxatio...Good for getting through labor.
15 APR 2011
Controlling Pain with Meditation
In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on "mindfulness meditation" — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It's all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.
"You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don't need to react," Zeidan explains. "What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blat...Folksonomies: meditation pain
Folksonomies: meditation pain
Highlights from a study of meditation being used to control the sensation of pain.
08 FEB 2011
Mental Exercises for Coping with a World of Memes
If my understanding of human nature is that there is no conscious self inside then I must live that way--otherwise this is a vain and lifeless theory of human nature. But how can 'I' live as though I do not exist, and who would be choosing to do so?
One trick is to concentrate on the present moment--all the time--letting go of any thoughts that come up. This kind of 'meme-weeding' requires a great concentration but is most interestin in its effect. If you can concentrate for a few minutes at...Folksonomies: memetics meditation
Folksonomies: memetics meditation
Being in the moment and paying attention to everything equally are strategies for escaping the self-centered aspect of memes seeking our attention.
References
19 DEC 2013
This Will Make You Smarter
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Brockman , John (2012-02-14), This Will Make You Smarter, HarperCollins, Retrieved on 2013-12-19Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: science
Folksonomies: science
52 
21 MAR 2013
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Konnikova , Maria (2013-01-03), Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Viking Adult, Retrieved on 2013-03-21Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: psychology mindfulness
Folksonomies: psychology mindfulness
17
26 JUN 2012
"Mind the Trap": Mindfulness Practice Reduces Cognitive R...
Periodicals>Journal Article: Greenberg, Reiner, Meiran , "Mind the Trap": Mindfulness Practice Reduces Cognitive Rigidity, PLoS ONE, Retrieved on 2012-06-26Source Material [www.plosone.org]
Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
3
26 JUN 2012
Vulcan Meditation
Electronic/World Wide Web>Message Posted to a Newsgroup: Zook II, Robert L. (1997), Vulcan Meditation, Retrieved on 2012-06-26Source Material [syvak.wordpress.com]
Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
1
26 JUN 2012
"Thinking about Not-Thinking": Neural Correlates of Conce...
Periodicals>Journal Article: Pagnoni, Cekic, Guo (2008), "Thinking about Not-Thinking": Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation, PLoS ONE, Retrieved on 2012-06-26Source Material [www.plosone.org]
Folksonomies: meditation
Folksonomies: meditation
2
26 JUN 2012
Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Wenner, Melinda (29 June 2007), Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works, livescience.com, Retrieved on 2012-06-26Source Material [www.livescience.com]
1
21 MAY 2011
Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley M...
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Bradley , Hathaway , Hathaway , Hathaway (2008-05-20), Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, Bantam, Retrieved on 2011-05-21
Folksonomies: pregnancy childbirth
Folksonomies: pregnancy childbirth
13
15 APR 2011
Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation
Electronic/World Wide Web>Blog: Cole, Adam (April 6, 2011), Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation, NPR, Retrieved on 2011-04-15Source Material [www.npr.org]
Folksonomies: meditation pain
Folksonomies: meditation pain
1
09 JAN 2011
The Meme Machine (Popular Science)
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Blackmore , Susan (2000-05-16), The Meme Machine (Popular Science), Oxford University Press, USA, Retrieved on 2011-01-09
Folksonomies: memetics
Folksonomies: memetics
15
