re-factor your brain: meditation for geeks

Re-factor Your Brain:Meditation for Geeks

Christie KoehlerOpen Source Bridge

June 2009

Friday, June 19, 2009

Part 1: How I Started

Meditating


Mindball in Vancouver

Lower alpha & theta waves = better (more focused, more relaxed). I lossed twice!

Meditator(my partner)

Non-Meditator(Me)


My Conclusions

Huh, maybe there is something to this mediation thing...


So I Started Meditating

• Calmer

• Clearer thinking, better able to concentrate

• Less reactive

• Better able to integrate


Part 2: What is Meditation?


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.)


Ultimate Goal

to transform the baseline state of experience such that there is no

distinction between meditative and non-meditative state


How?

through sustained, dedicated practice over a significant

length of time


Part 3:What Does Science Say About Meditation and

the Brain?


“different types of meditation and training duration lead to

distinguishable short- and long-term changes at the neural level”

Briefly, it says:


2 Categories of Meditators

• Focused Attention (FA) and Open Mind (OM)

• Many traditions utilize both styles, at once or over time


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)


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)


How Neuroscientists Study Meditators

• Subjective tests (perception)

• EEG (electrical activity)

• fMRI (blood flow/area of activity)

• MRI (structural changes)


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.


Subjective Tests

• Attentional blink

• Binocular Rivalry

• Motion induced blindness


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


fMRI (FA)

• less emotionally responsive when presented with conflicting stimuli

• suggests a partial de-coupling mental processes interpret and respond to perceptual stimuli


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)


MRI

• Cortical region of the brain thicker in meditators than in non-mediators.

• Difference was greatest in older meditators (offsets thinning due to aging).


Part 3: How to Meditate


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


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


re-factor your brain: meditation for geeks

Technology

subjective

focused attention

term meditators

open mind

meditators

mindfulness

mind

brain