Prayer is a cornerstone of religious life, practiced by over 50% of Americans on a daily basis(1). Prayer practices foster a variety of contemplative experiences with deep personal and cultural significance(2,3). For example, evangelical or charismatic Christians—who make up nearly 10% of the global population(4)—often report seeing visions that they experience as originating from an …
Continue reading “Cultivating mental imagery through prayer”
With the aging global population, dementia is becoming an increasing concern for global public health. Currently, some evidence suggests that meditation and yoga practice may help decrease risk for dementia and cognitive decline. Furthermore, these interventions have the strengths of being inexpensive and scalable, while also being helpful for brain aging as well as general …
Continue reading “Investigating the impact of yoga on brain aging: A randomized controlled trial”
In his lectures to the Università di Bologna published in 1992, Francisco Varela, Chilean neuroscientist and co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute, developed the theoretical infrastructure for a lively intersection between contemplative practices of “three wisdom traditions of the East” (as he puts it) and neuroscientific research on embodied cognition and mindfulness practices. Varela …
Pain is a multidimensional experience that combines sensory, affective, and cognitive factors, causing its treatment to be extremely complicated and expensive. However, mindfulness meditation has been shown to be a cost-effective approach to decreasing experimental and clinical pain. We have repeatedly shown that four days of mindfulness meditation training can significantly reduce experimentally induced pain …
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Prosociality, an inherent part of society, ensures the thriving and success of social groups. Understanding the role of stress on empathic prosocial behaviors, like helping behavior, is important for societal well-being, and for shedding light on stress-related neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, social anxiety, and autism. As opposed to chronic and severe stressors, there is …
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Meditation-naïve participants (n=45) will be recruited from Auburn University. Once recruited, participants will be randomized to either the meditation group, the active control group, or the inactive control group. Every effort will be made to promote engagement and reduce attrition, including offering extra credit in psychology classes along with monetary incentives. Each EEG and psychophysiological …
There is clear evidence that mindfulness is a beneficial trait and one that can be cultivated with training. However, science has made relatively modest progress in developing our ability to measure mindfulness. To date, most research relies heavily on asking people how mindful they are, gathering assessments that may or may not accurately reflect reality. …
An important next step in the field of mindfulness measurement is the development of behavioral methods quantifying processes of attention and awareness in mindfulness meditation. We propose that these processes include: sustained attention, disengagement from mindlessness, intentional shifting of awareness, and an open field of awareness. Accordingly, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm measuring these …
Maladaptive habits are at the root of a variety of clinical concerns, including depression, substance abuse and suicidality. Mindfulness meditation is believed to inhibit maladaptive habit formation by increasing awareness of cognitive and emotional states while also decreasing reactivity. Relaxing cognitive and behavioral habits may allow more mindful people to behave in ways that are …
Over years of long-term practice, meditators’ brains and minds develop extraordinary abilities. One such ability is being able to exercise control over even basic mental processes that have long thought to be automatic from decades of research on non-meditating populations. A prior behavioral study conducted with expert Tibetan Buddhist practitioners who were shown ambiguous visual …
Continue reading “The neural bases of heightened awareness to the present moment”
