Sublime

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.

These techniques are part of a course developed by two of the world’s leading cognitive therapists—Dr. Steven Hollon, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University and editor of the major journal in the field, and Dr. Arthur Freeman, professor of psychiatry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—along with myself, to change ex

These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.

Mark Mattson suggests that agility education and linguistics are two ways to keep an active, functional mind.

Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with acti

each person has the power to change his or her brain for the better—what Jeffrey Schwartz has called self-directed neuroplasticity.

Dr. Halifax is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, activist, and author of several books on Engaged Buddhism.