Neuroscience & Meditation

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The science of meditation

Marcia Barinaga3 October 2003Source:

"Recently, Western neuroscientists have flocked to study Buddhism. The

attraction? Meditation, that introspective inquiry into the workings

of the mind that Buddhists have practised for millennia. A key player

in this quest is the Mind and Life Institute, created in the 1980s by

businessman Adam Engle and the late neuroscientist Francisco Varela.

In this article, Marcia Barinaga reports on how the institute’s

two-day conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has

furthered this unusual meeting of minds. More than 1,000 Western

neuroscientists and Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama, focused on

attention, emotion and mental imagery – subjects of interest to

both.One of the most fruitful areas explored was how Buddhist monks

foster positive mental states through meditation, a technique of

great interest to Western psychologists. Some of the scientists gave

other phenomena short shrift. What ultimately emerged, however, was

that both groups are fired by a very similar spirit of inquiry."

Link to full article in Science

http://www.SciDev.net

Reference: Science, 302, 44 (2003)

~photo by Zen O'Leary

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