How Meditation Reshapes Your Brain

[Dover]

Excerpt:

...Sharon Gannon, the co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga, the largest yoga center in the U.S., tells Big Think that meditation is all about ignoring stimuli. "We're so habituated to reacting to every stimulus," she says. If the phone rings, we answer it; if someone knocks at the door, we open it. But meditation is a space where we don't react to the stimuli that constantly bombard us; it is about letting go, and it paradoxically makes us better able to engage. "Without taking the time every day to let things come and let things go without acting upon it, you won't have clarity of mind," she says.

But what is actually happening in the brain as we seek nirvana? Meditators have long described their experiences as transformative states that are markedly different from normal consciousness, but only recently have researchers found the evidence to back this up.

Richard Davidson is one of the foremost researchers of meditation's effects on the brain. A Harvard Ph.D graduate and a friend of the Dalai Lama, he was chided early in his career for wanting to study something as unscientific as meditation. But in 2004 he became an overnight scientific celebrity for discovering that Buddhist monks exhibit vastly different brainwaves during meditation than normal people. ..cont'd

http://bigthink.com/ideas/24358


How to meditate:
http://www.how-to-meditate.org/