The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body

WIDENING OUR CIRCLE OF CARING A highly accomplished Tibetan meditation master studied in Richie’s lab once said that one hour spent practicing loving-kindness toward a difficult person is equivalent to one hundred hours of the same toward a friend or loved one. The generic loving-kindness meditation takes us through an ever-widening circle of the k

eight or so hours of training in loving-kindness, volunteers showed strong echoes of those brain patterns found in more experienced meditators.12 The beginners’ temporary wave of mellow feeling may be an early precursor of the more striking brain changes in people who practice loving-kindness for weeks, months, or years.

In many East Asian countries the name Kuan Yin, the revered

believing you harbor no such animus. These hidden biases can be detected via clever tests. For example, a person may say he has no racial prejudice, yet when presented with a reaction time test in which words that have pleasant or unpleasant connotations are paired with the words black or white, words with pleasant meaning are more quickly paired w

symbol of compassionate awakening, translates as “the one who listens and hears the cries of the world in order to come and help.”

One study found that just seven minutes of loving-kindness practice boosts a person’s good feelings and sense of social connection, if only temporarily.11

The first mental training, “Presence,” entailed a body scan and breath focus. Another, “Perspective,” included observing thoughts via a novel interpersonal practice of “contemplative dyads,” where partners share their stream of thought with each other for ten minutes daily, either through a cell phone app or in person.23 The third, “Affect,” includ

And consider a random group of people who volunteered to try web-based instruction in meditation, for a total of two and a half hours (that is, twenty sessions of ten minutes each). This brief loving-kindness training resulted in people feeling more relaxed and donating to charity at a higher rate than those in a comparison group who did a comparab

Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in Leipzig taught volunteers a version of loving-kindness meditation.7 The volunteers practiced generating such loving-kindness in a six-hour instructional session, and at home on their own. Before they had learned this loving-kindness method, when the volunteers saw graphic videos of people suffering,

The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain’s circuitry for happiness energizes, along with compassion.19 Loving-kindness also boosts the connections between the brain’s circuits for joy and happiness and the prefrontal cortex, a zone critical for guiding behavior.20 And the great