http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...hts-meditation
Neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama Swap Insights on Meditation
An encounter with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the scientific study of meditation
By Christof Koch
...From introspection, we are all familiar with the mental clutter, the chatter that makes up our daily life. It is a rapid fire of free associations, of jumping from one image, speech fragment or memory to the next. Late-night lucubrations are particularly prone to such erratic zigzagging. Focusing on a single line of argument or thought requires deliberate, laborious and conscious effort from which we flee. We prefer to be distracted by external stimuli, conversations, radio, television or newspapers. Desperate not to be left alone within our mind, to avoid having to think, we turn to our constant electronic companions to check for incoming messages.
...More important, even when the monks were not meditating, but simply quietly resting, their baseline brain activity was distinct from that of the students. That is, these techniques, practiced by Buddhists for millennia to quiet, focus and expand the mind—the interior aspect of the brain—had changed the brain that is the exterior aspect of the mind. And the more training they had, the bigger the effect.
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