The Power of OM - Benefits of Meditation Recieve Certificate from Science.

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meditation that it was starting to sound like a mantra. Their work fits into a

growing body of data that tries to bring modern science to bear on age-old

methods to quiet the mind. Enthusiasts have long touted the health benefits of

meditative practices such as chanting, yoga, and prayer. Now, using the latest

high-tech tools of neuroscience and biochemistry, they are teasing out how

those benefits work. And increasingly, they are focusing on how meditation may

help not only the body but the brain. “As time goes on, we’re understanding

this phenomenon in ever more advanced scientific terms,” said Dr Herbert

Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and a Harvard Medical

School associate professor who has studied the body’s “relaxation response” for

nearly 40 years. “And why it’s so important today is because over 60 per cent of

visits to the doctor are in the

stress-related realm.” While some of the most striking studies have involved

monks who were experts at meditation, the new research also backs up claims

that garden-variety meditation can bring scientifically demonstrable benefits.

Consider-ed on the fringes of science just a generation ago, serious research

on meditation now includes hundreds of studies examining its possible benefits.

Three of five researchers on a panel about meditation at the recent Society for

Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., were from Harvard. In recent years,

academic researchers seeking to turn anecdotes into hard data have suggested

that meditation may provide a broad array of benefits, from lifting depression

to relieving pain to fighting flu. Skeptics remain. Many of the studies are

small and preliminary, and some depend on the meditators’ own descriptions of

what they feel, which could be

biased by their desire for it to work. When the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan

spiritual leader and a longtime collaborator with brain scientists, was

scheduled to speak at the Society for Neuroscience conference, several hundred

scientists signed a petition questioning his presence, and arguing that

meditation research has not been objective enough. But researchers say that

that is their very aim: to improve the quality of the research, using new tools

and better methods, to determine more conclusively what meditation really does.

“If we’re going to make extraordinary claims, and claim that certain

individuals can break the rules we have about human performance, the

methodology has to be absolutely airtight,” said Sam Moulton, a psychology

student at Harvard. As the power of meditation gained credibility during the

1970s and 1980s, Moulton noted,

researchers were looking mainly for physiological effects, such as blood

pressure and heart benefits. “Now, we’re looking for mental effects.” Monks are

considered the superstars of meditation, but Benson and others say benefits can

come from a spectrum of repetitive, mind-clearing practices that elicit the

so-called relaxation response — from swaying in prayer to saying the rosary to

knitting. Among the studies presented at the recent conference was one by

Massachusetts General Hospital researchers, who scanned the brains of 20 people

who meditated regularly. These people had four regions of cortex — the rind of

the brain, associated with higher functions like memory and decision making —

that were thicker than in 15 subjects who didn’t meditate. In addition, the

researchers found signs that one area of the cortex seemed to have aged less

quickly than it did in nonmeditators. The study did not look at whether

those brain differences had a noticeable impact on behaviour, but researchers

are now doing follow-up work to assess that. The findings “provide the first

evidence that alterations in brain structure are associated with Western-style

meditation practice, possibly reflecting increased use of specific brain

regions,” said Sara Lazar, of Harvard, the study’s lead author. In the other

Harvard-affiliated work, researchers reported that by using a device that can

analyse every breath a person exhales, they could measure the depth of

relaxation a person had achieved. People who reached deeper states of

relaxation exhaled more nitric oxide, a gas known to relax the smooth muscles

in arteries, and aid blood flow. “Our results provide initial evidence of how

the relaxation response intervention and other mind/body approaches might lower

blood pressure,” said Jeffery A. Dusek, the study’s lead author. Another new

study, from the University of Kentucky, found that meditation could offset the

sluggishness of sleep deprivation better than a nap. Researchers tested

volunteers on a button-pressing speed task, and found that even novice

meditators improved their performance more after 40 minutes of meditation than

after a 40-minute nap. Meditation helped even after a full night of sleep

deprivation, the study found, said researcher Bruce ’Hara. NYTNS

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051205/asp/knowhow/story_5548507.asp We have

grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a

world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know

about peace, more about killing that we know about living. -- General Omar

Bradley

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