All you happy Buddhists

[Liokault]

An artical in this months New Scientist magazine showing that buddhists can affect there own level of happyness by medatation not only during the time that they are medatating but also in the long term,

"Activity in the left prefrontal lobe indicates positive emotions and good mood, whereas persistant activity in the right prefrontal lobes indicates negative emotion. The first Buddhist practitioner studied by Davidson showed more left prefrontal lobe activity than anyone he had ever stuided before"


And so on.

[David Jamieson]

I would think that would apply to many forms of meditators and not just those of the buddhist variety.

cheers

[Former castleva]

Sounds a bit "pop".

[Former castleva]

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993744

New Scientist.

[ZIM]

It's coz the Buddha was telling the punchline to a joke nobody has told yet...

Koan: "What was the original joke?"

[Guile]

cool

[GeneChing]

Can you link us to the original article? Or at least provide a proper biblio reference...

[norther practitioner]

yahoo

They needed a study to know this....lol

[kungfu cowboy]

They needed a study to make such an observation without just relying on opinion or personal bias, which are subjective. Objective studies that control for extraneous variables uncover real relationships between variables, like meditation to brain activity.

[dwid]

Shambala Sun had an article about this a couple of issues ago. They brought a monk into the lab and he engaged in different types of meditation that each lit up different parts of the brain.

[Liokault]

But this article is saying that the happy areas of the brain stay lit up even when the bubdhist is not meditating.

Was a lot more to it than that but im not about to type it all out.

[dwid]

No wonder I've been increasingly depressed since I stopped meditating regularly. I wonder if there's an element of withdrawal involved in losing that quality.

[norther practitioner]

dwid,
possibly,

cowboy, as if I wasn't being sarcastic.

[kungfu cowboy]

Oops! I'm sorry! Sometimes my idiocy brilliantly shines through!

[ZIM]

Thats a really interesting observation, dwid.

Logicaly speaking, your brain is balancing out- giving more 'energy' to the right hemisphere [which is sorta more naturally disposed towards pessimism, IIRC].

Question: do you dream more, or less? Been more emotional, etc? Is there any history of depression or seasonal depression in your family? [you don't have to answer any of that, but esp. the last, if you don't want to].

Reason I ask: its been said that children born into depression-history families typically have higher than average activity in the right frontal lobe. Meditatiion typically stimulates the left, and trains that.

NP: you're an artist right? Are you more right brained, do you think? Curious, not sarcastic. I know I'm more naturally disposed towards that.