--- In [email protected], Anil Sahal <A.Sahal@...> wrote:
>
> I first became interested in meditation and brain whilst attending the
> 'Neuroscience' conference in San Fransisco as few years ago in which the
> Dalai Lama was the key note speaker and offered us, with a big grin, the
> use of several of his monks for research purposes!
>
> One of the things I note about the field now, is that there seems to be
> very few studies in which direct comparisons can be made between schools
> of meditation. So I got one of my students to try and piece together
> different snippets of information from lots of different science papers
> which he did very well (he was a good Neuroscience student). The
> conclusions of this exercise seem to be that different types of
> meditation produce different patterns of brain area activations and
> deactivations. But we don't know what this really means because we don't
> really know what these areas really do in the big scheme of things.
> Other studies showed that long term meditators (and that means people
> who've been doing it regularly and frequently of many, many years) seem
> to retain the amount of grey matter they have in their brains and may
> even increase it. Grey matter loss seems to be associated with dementia
> etc, so inference it cold be beneficial but we don't know that for sure.
> Tumours are an increase in tissue in a certain area after all (albeit
> from weird cells!) and that most definitely is not beneficial.
>
> When I get time I'll have a look at this research critically, because
> you have to remember that neurones in the brain do not regenerate (as
> far as we know) so this is saying something pretty spectacular!
>
Hi Anil. Thank you. One more good reason to meditate! Say, in your opinion,
is the relationship between brain area activations and states of consciousness
causal or correlative? And what about qualia?
Do you subscribe to the cognitive paradigm endorsed by the likes of
Dennet and Pinker?
Steve
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