What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
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What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
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Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#2I can highly recommend reading the Relaxation Response for a scientific treatment of meditation.
Much like exercise, if it came in pill form, everybody would take it.
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#3I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#4If you are particularly fidgety and have trouble concentrating, here is a thought experiment that might help:
Sit in a room with minutes to spare and task yourself this: to get to the market and back from your house. Maybe you shop for some fruits or something.
Step into your mental realm imagining every step you have to do in this task. Changing your clothes, tying your shoe lace, locking your door...everything. Not in frames but in a continuous motion as in a movie. It could be boring and I have felt the strong need to snap out of it. It still is difficult to power through, imagining every step and "looking" at the trees and shrubs along the way, picking up and inspecting an apple and putting it in the basket, paying for the goods, etc.
The whole thing is much more difficult than it sounds if you are the kind of person who gets restless easily. With practice, it gets better. Hopefully this helps you get in the productive zone. Good luck!
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#5I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
The descriptions are generally accurate, although very broad. The reticular formation is part of the brain stem, responsible for supporting breathing, cardiac function, and other somatic functions. The most relevant function is it's control of alertness and circadian rhythms.
The thalamus does function as a 'gatekeeper', although that's a bad term, the level to which the thalamus processes sensory input isn't fully understood / agreed upon. It's more like a transit hub connecting all the various parts of the brain and sensory tracts. It receives a lot of sensory fibers from the eyes, nose, ears, tongue.
For the parietal lobe, 'orienting you in time and space' just means that the parietal lobe creates a 3D grid system that helps in coordinating muscle movements. This system is supported by sensory input (auditory and visual). The parietal lobe will receive input from other lobes as well as the thalamus.
The frontal lobe is fairly well described, it basically handles higher level thinking, moral decisions, etc. It receives input from other lobes, the thalamus, and the brain stem.
An important take away is that these are really non-specific anatomical regions, the thalamus has ~30 distinct regions all handling different things. The frontal lobe has numerous gyri (regions) with different functions ranging from executive to motor skills.
What he's saying is pretty bs too. The logical conclusion is not that meditation specifically reduces brain activity, it's more that any lack of sensory stimulation will cause brain activity to slow down because less neurons are firing, this can be achieved with other techniques as well, simply staring at a wall will do the same thing.
I can post sources if you'd like but this information (about the compartments of the brain) is very well accepted by those in the medical sciences.
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#6Is reducing beta waves actually a good thing? It might allow for focus and relaxation, but I wonder if that might do something like clear your working memory and make you less able to make connections between things. Could anyone that has a good grasp on this comment on whether this might be true?
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#7I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
The descriptions are generally accurate, although very broad. The reticular formation is part of the brain stem, responsible for supporting breathing, cardiac function, and other somatic functions. The most relevant function is it's control of alertness and circadian rhythms. The thalamus does function as a 'gatekeeper', although that's a bad term, the level to which the thalamus processes sensory input isn't fully u…
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/hallucinations/
seems to debunk
"The logical conclusion is not that meditation specifically reduces brain activity, it's more that any lack of sensory stimulation will cause brain activity to slow down because less neurons are firing"
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#8I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
The descriptions are generally accurate, although very broad. The reticular formation is part of the brain stem, responsible for supporting breathing, cardiac function, and other somatic functions. The most relevant function is it's control of alertness and circadian rhythms. The thalamus does function as a 'gatekeeper', although that's a bad term, the level to which the thalamus processes sensory input isn't fully u…
>The logical conclusion is not that meditation specifically reduces brain activity, it's more that any lack of sensory stimulation will cause brain activity to slow down because less neurons are firing, this can be achieved with other techniques as well, simply staring at a wall will do the same thing.
This is gross misunderstanding of what happens when people meditate. Of course, the whole word meditation is very generic term. Saying that you meditate is like saying that you do sports.
Most traditional meditation techniques the meditation is exercise in concentration and awareness. You are active and constantly doing something with your mind even if you are relaxed.
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#9If you are particularly fidgety and have trouble concentrating, here is a thought experiment that might help: Sit in a room with minutes to spare and task yourself this: to get to the market and back from your house. Maybe you shop for some fruits or something. Step into your mental realm imagining every step you have to do in this task. Changing your clothes, tying your shoe lace, locking your door...everything. Not…
That's a great tip. I occasionally sit through a somewhat exotic variant: I imagine I can take to flight like a bird (slow flight only, not like Superman) and mentally take off from the balcony and imagine what the town would look like from above. The end of the exercise would be taking a full trip and 'returning' home.
It's a bit more engaging to figure out the aerial view of a place you normally navigate only by road. It's very hard to sustain this practice for even a minute or two initially.
Re: What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
#10I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
The descriptions are generally accurate, although very broad. The reticular formation is part of the brain stem, responsible for supporting breathing, cardiac function, and other somatic functions. The most relevant function is it's control of alertness and circadian rhythms. The thalamus does function as a 'gatekeeper', although that's a bad term, the level to which the thalamus processes sensory input isn't fully u…
Also, surely the presence of beta waves (12-30Hz) needs to be detected by an electroencephalogram (EEG), not fMRI? I thought fMRI has a much lower temporal resolution (~1Hz).