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

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Power of ‘Om’ Brain researchers discover meditation’s myriad benefits, says Carey Goldburg In search of peace: A group of Buddhists of European and US origin attend a prayer ceremony in Bangkok Meditation seems to energise the sleep-deprived. It seems to help with concentration. It even seems to bolster the very structure of the brain as we age. Neuroscientists presenting their latest research at a convention of 34,000 colleagues recently had so much praise for

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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