Sublime

Today, with the help of brain-scanning technology, we may be getting closer to the answer. In 2005 an Emory University neuroscientist named Gregory Berns decided to conduct an updated version of Asch’s experiments. Berns and his team recruited thirty-two volunteers, men and women between the

However, psychologists aren’t sure this short-term benefit (observed in one-on-one conversations) translates to large groups or workplaces.

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.

An ingenious method for remedying this bottom-up skew is so subtle that people have no idea that their attention patterns are being rewired (just as they had no idea that wiring was going on as they acquired it in the first place). Called “cognitive bias modification,” or CBM, this invisible therapy has those suffering from severe social anxiety lo

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror. Att