Study: Meditation Changes Your Brain!?!

[Suwai0303]

I started meditating when I was six years old back in Myanmar. Nineteen years later in the US, I am a vegetarian, a climber, an artist, a musician, a writer, and a recent college graduate with honors, awards, and scholarships. Let me assure you that not only does meditation benefits mental, emotional, and physical well being, it also increases creativity, productivity, self-awareness, empathy, and so much more. Scientific study has only scratched the surface.

[allisonralphvideo]

click to see our video

[TheWayshowerTube]

Deepak chopra meditates for 1 hour.

[thehype04]

you can feel your brain changing when you start meditation

[TwistedMind6969]

I've been meditating for over 6 months now and it has changed my life. This is an excellent video. Thank you!

[TheDailyConversation]

@TwistedMind6969 Nice. So what's your routine with it? Do you do it inside or outside?

[TwistedMind6969]

@TheDailyConversation I do it very early in the morning around 5:30 A.M in my dark quite room for about 30 minutes right before getting ready for the gym and then work. That's my daily personal gift to myself. It allows me to relax my mind before my stressful days. I totally transcend and go thoughtless. Amazing feeling, hehe...

[JollSSteR]

Front lobal corteX wins

[jgbloyd]

Gee, thanks for showing that practice works. concentration actually improves concentration? duh. Did you know that exercise can help increase muscles control, too? Come on, most of us already knew about the connection between mind and body, and that improving one is exactly the same as improving the other.

[TheHitCollective]

Great VID! Guess I better look into this whole meditation thing...

[givebirthathome]

@TheHitCollective Meditation is definitely excellent. Bruce Kumar Frantzis gives a good intro to Taoist techniques in his books, or some of Mantak Chia's people are good too. Sri Karunamayi travels all over the US giving one-day meditation trainings, which is all you need to start...she doesn't demand that you join anything or subscribe to a particular philosophy, either. Her schedule is at her website.

[jgbloyd]

@TheHitCollective Use it or lose it. But like other forms of exercise, there are better and worse methods. Don't just relax and clear your mind unless that's all you want to be good at. Try to turn some lights on, not just dimming things down. It's also how I fixed my own scoliosis.

[braithmorgan]

I love you guys... I have noticed a difference in my mind as I have taken on meditation and at first like someone else here said, it seemed like work...and sometimes I still get frustrated but, I think its cuz I was trying too hard. I am learning to just turn inward, be aware of my thoughts, watch them come & go, to be aware of the silence for within the silence is knowledge that may not seem like it at the time but,may come as a knowingness later. Plus I notice a sense of peace. love it...

[jgbloyd]

@braithmorgan That's the lazy person's meditation. Makes you really good at being lazy. There are other more difficult methods that might help actually improve things. The harder the task, the better.

[PeaceRocker01]

Being a Nichiren Buddhist I'll agree lol. It is part of my practice to do morning and evening Gongyo. I wouldn't necessarily call it meditation because we chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo but I will say that after doing so for 30 min twice a day (you can chant for as long as you desire though) I feel so refreshed, positive, and glowing.

[lupocephalic]

Meditation changed my brain.

Which was nice, because it had a terrible case of diaper-rash.

[dookiecheez]

Just wait for the mind body dualists to come out and misunderstand the significance of the findings.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez The dualists are already here. They even did the study. If you don't believe in the separation between mind and body, then such studies merely demonstrate the obvious. Only a dualist would see meditation as causing changes in the brain instead of seeing meditation as the changes. Dualism in today's science is very prevalent. No one is surprised when a computer defrags and actually changes data on its harddrive because, duh, the two events are really just one event explained twice.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

Agreed. I find it sort of bizarre that certain dualist's don't understand parsimony, and that some think that dualism is required to explain what we're seeing. I mean how hard is it to understand a basic tautology? If the mind is a result of the physical structure of the brain, than a change of the mind is a change of the brain.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez But like many today, you reduce the mind to the brain (mind always being put in some special place tucked away...). So, for example, if you burn your hand, you would not consider that the pain was ever in the hand, you know, the place where lots of tissue just got cooked alive. If you think of neurons as merely wiring, then what about the rest of the computer? Reductionism is fine as long as we remember that no level of description is primary.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd I'm not sure I understand your response. The mind is the emergent property of the brain.

Pain is after all a subjective experience of the CNS, in your example our PNS is sending messages from neurons in the affected area ie the hand. Technically speaking no, the pain was never in the hand so to speak. The message actually has to reach the brain before we experience what we call pain.

I don't know much about computers so I don't think I understand your analogy at the end there.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez As I suspected, you're actually still a dualist, revealed by your retreat to the subjective. You're holding tight to the idea of a subjective mind vs an objective body. It's hard not to, given that just about everyone from every philosophy is also a dualist. But if you study an experimental philosopher like Danial Dennet, then apply his model to a neurologist's work, like Damasio, you start to get a non-dualist picture which dissolves many of the big problems of philosophy.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

Say what? If you sever the connection from the PNS to the CNS you can't feel pain in your hand thus pain is a subjective experience in the brain directly caused by nervous signals from the PNS. Nowhere in there did I suggest the brain and the mind, or the mind and the body are separate entities.

A messenger can surely do that. It happens all the time, messages are sent in a form that is incomprehensible to the messenger.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez If I cut you in half right down the middle, severing all connections, one part won't feel the pain of the other part. Your illustration of disconnecting the hand demonstrates your obsession with placing the mind in some special part of the body, particularly areas behind the eyes, likely because we're so focussed on vision. IMO it's as if you're trying to locate focal points for some sort of vital energy that brings life and declaring it's behind the eyes! By what measure?

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

What does the fact that severing the ability of messages to be transmitted stops messages from being transmitted have to do with the fact that the mind is a product of the brain? It has nothing to do with vision, it has to do with decades of neuroscience. Without certain parts of the brain a persons consciousness is altered and even lost entirely, nowhere else is this true. If one loses the lower half of their body they have not lost one bit of their mind, just a source of signals.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez About the "message" you refer to, let me ask you this: Can a messenger create a message and pass it along without understanding the message? Why would a body talk to a mind, I mean, if it could already talk then it wouldn't need a mind. So your parsimony might have you reconsider any communication between brain stuff and non brain stuff. Have you read Hofstadter's stuff on where meaning comes from?

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

The mind as it is a function of the brain is apart of the "body". Which is why I use the terms PNS and CNS.

The PNS has to talk to the CNS because the CNS contains the centralized component that translates sensory information into subjective and perceptible reality. Which is really where pain comes from. It's a translation of sensory information.

I can't make heads or tails of your second last sentence.

No I have not read that.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez And that's not dualism because... why?

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

Because the distinction between the PNS and the CNS is basically arbitrary? It's all the same nervous system. And I'm not proposing an additional agent I still only have one agent: the nervous system, which includes the brain as part of the CNS (I forget what other things they list under CNS, It's been a while since I was in biology class), and the nerves and all that jive as part of the PNS.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez So which parts of the brain or whatever do you ascribe to mind stuff and which do you exclude? Yes, it does seem a bit arbitrary to me. But arbitration alone doesn't make it incorrect. What concerns me is the way you talk about parts of the brain dealing in subjective experience with the rest of the body being mere mechanical sensors. What makes one part more or less mechanical, exactly?

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

That ultimately depends on what we're defining the mind as. I don't see a point in making the distinction between parts of the body as being mechanical or less mechanical as what we call the mind is a meaningful connection of otherwise mechanical components. If small enough, any part of the nervous system can be removed and the mind will remain. It's the sum of the parts type of thing. Although consciousness is more centralized.

"arbitration alone doesn't make it incorrect" what?

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez You asked if your distinction was arbitrary. I said it doesn't make it wrong, just arbitrary. It's like when people assume circular definitions are illogical. Yours comes preprepared full of meaning, which is blatantly circular, to distinguish it from your arbitrary divide of otherwise mere mechanics. This is all fine so long as you are aware of your methods.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

How am I using circular definitions?

I assume you're using personification, mechanical stuff does not figure out anything.

There are certain biologically inherent meaningful connections. Basic motor functions, breathing, that sort of thing. The meaningful mind stuff is a learning process, just gaining the ability to form long term memories takes time. It's kind of like experience is a programmer. What this has to do with dualism I do not know.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez Test question: If the mind is a function of the brain (or body), how then can the mind be an agent able to act on the brain? If one is derived (like in calculus) from the function of the other, then there can be no interaction. It's the age old problem of thinking in dualistic terms. When you split the self into two (mind and body), one gets demoted to being passive and impotent while the other steals all the glory.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd The mind doesn't act on the brain, it is the brain. Fire doesn't act on what it's burning, it's merely the name we give the chemical reaction occurring in what is burning. This is kind of like talking about how can velocity act on a car. It's the car that produces the velocity. It's an argument of splitters vs lumpers aka nonsense.

Sorry about inherency, but it's kind of how the brain stem works. It's basic functions are programmed in as part of constructing it. Not sure how tho.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez Why can't mechanical stuff figure things out? "Inherent" meaning is cheating! No miracles allowed.

[dookiecheez]

@jgbloyd

Mechanical things can't figure stuff out because it's the meaningful arrangment of mechanical things that has the capacity to do 'figuring'. It's like having a computer program that can do math and then taking out a small piece of code and expecting it to be able to continue to function as the whole was.

[jgbloyd]

@dookiecheez But how then do merely mechanical stuff figure out how to become meaningful stuff? How do meaningfull connections get made before there is a mind? This is where arbitrary and circular defs get into trouble. I know, like magic, the mind is an emergent property of a complex, dynamic system. But that doesn't help either because, to me, that covers just about everything, including the universe as a whole.

[jackbrightside]

OMG, i always knew that was the shit

[WolverineDeus]

I propose mandatory meditation exercises for GOP lawmakers.

[braithmorgan]

@WolverineDeus ... that would be nice... if the GOP would bother with meditation... I don't think they would get it.

[grendelcatt]

ooohmmm,ooohhhmmm ,not working yet...

[layahma]

dooby time!

[ForceOfWizardry]

30 minutes is a damn long time. At 5 minutes i plunk over and sleep.

[WH012]

wow i better do some meditating myself.

[jason0998]

This is so weird because My Friends were meditating this morning they aksed me to join but I declined their offer becasue I had classes :) I might just start joining them after this

[2RISKon]

cool 

[carygoleman]

Not sure why this comes at surprising. Form dictates function and vice versa. Still cool though.

[Sirwastealot]

@carygoleman For one thing 8 weeks is a small period of time for the brain to physically change.

[EricBoisen]

Interesting. And I like this style better than yesterdays, no random jump cuts and yet still short and sweet.

[TheDailyConversation]

@EricBoisen Cool. Yeah, we're trying to keep the jump cuts to a minimum.