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Meditation is the ultimate open source tool. You can do it anywhere and it’s free. It requires only your brain and your body. It’s positive effects are numerous, including increased productivity, better problem-solving and a reduction in overall stress. Learn about long-term effects of mediation on the brain, some meditation techniques and how mediation can help you do your job better.
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Re-factor Your Brain:Meditation for Geeks
Christie KoehlerOpen Source Bridge
June 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Part 1: How I Started
Meditating
Friday, June 19, 2009
Mindball in Vancouver
Lower alpha & theta waves = better (more focused, more relaxed). I lossed twice!
Meditator(my partner)
Non-Meditator(Me)
Friday, June 19, 2009
My Conclusions
Huh, maybe there is something to this mediation thing...
Friday, June 19, 2009
So I Started Meditating
• Calmer
• Clearer thinking, better able to concentrate
• Less reactive
• Better able to integrate
Friday, June 19, 2009
Part 2: What is Meditation?
Friday, June 19, 2009
Meditation...
• is the settling and focusing of the mind
• has been practiced for thousands of years
• spans many traditions (religious and secular)
• has many forms (insight, transcendental, mindfulness, etc.)
• has many goals (enlightenment, union with god, stress reduction, pain management, etc.)
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ultimate Goal
to transform the baseline state of experience such that there is no
distinction between meditative and non-meditative state
Friday, June 19, 2009
How?
through sustained, dedicated practice over a significant
length of time
Friday, June 19, 2009
Part 3:What Does Science Say About Meditation and
the Brain?
Friday, June 19, 2009
“different types of meditation and training duration lead to
distinguishable short- and long-term changes at the neural level”
Briefly, it says:
Friday, June 19, 2009
2 Categories of Meditators
• Focused Attention (FA) and Open Mind (OM)
• Many traditions utilize both styles, at once or over time
Friday, June 19, 2009
Focused Attention (FA)
• Maintain attention on a single object (e.g. the breath sensation)
• Detect thoughts and other distractors through non-judgmental cognitive appraisal (e.g. “I’m writing code”)
• Disengage from distractors and re-orient focus to original object (return to sensation of the breath)
Friday, June 19, 2009
Open Mind (OM)
• No explicit focus on objects (listening to the room)
• Non-reactive/Non-judging monitoring of experience (not judging the noise, letting it arise)
• Non-reactive awareness of automatic cognitive and emotional interpretations stimuli (take note of any judgements)
Friday, June 19, 2009
How Neuroscientists Study Meditators
• Subjective tests (perception)
• EEG (electrical activity)
• fMRI (blood flow/area of activity)
• MRI (structural changes)
Friday, June 19, 2009
Subjective Tests
• Our brains constantly have to make sense of incomplete stimuli.
• The way in which we perceive this stimuli says a lot about how are brain works.
• Long-term meditators are better at perceptual challenges than non-meditators.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Subjective Tests
• Attentional blink
• Binocular Rivalry
• Motion induced blindness
Friday, June 19, 2009
EEG: Gamma-Synchrony
• Gamma rhythms: binding of different populations of neurons together into a network for the purpose of carrying out a certain cognitive or motor function
• Gamma function related to neuro-plasticity (the ability of the brain to change itself)
• Long-term meditators had greater gamma-synchrony during meditation and at rest
Friday, June 19, 2009
fMRI (FA)
• less emotionally responsive when presented with conflicting stimuli
• suggests a partial de-coupling mental processes interpret and respond to perceptual stimuli
Friday, June 19, 2009
fMRI (OM)
• Long-term OM practitioners are more adept at detecting and feeling human emotion (greater empathy)
• OM meditators showed superior performance on a sustained attention task in comparison with FA meditators when the stimulus was unexpected (more distributed attentional focus)
Friday, June 19, 2009
MRI
• Cortical region of the brain thicker in meditators than in non-mediators.
• Difference was greatest in older meditators (offsets thinning due to aging).
Friday, June 19, 2009
Part 3: How to Meditate
Friday, June 19, 2009
How to Meditate
• Many different forms
• Try a few, pick one that resonates
• Stick with it for a while
• Try a little bit each day
• It’s work, exercise for the mind
Friday, June 19, 2009
More Resources
• Attend a local meditation group
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
• Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon-Kabat Zinn
• Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
• Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, Thich Nhat Hanh
• Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness by Antoine Lutz, John D. Dunne, Richard J. Davidson (in the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness)
• Train your Mind, Change your Brain by Sharon Begley
Friday, June 19, 2009