Hey, I just was listening to a recent Buddhist Geeks interview with James Austin, author of Zen and the Brain. Found this to be really interesting. He analyzes types of attention, consciousness and the science behind kensho. It's a two part, "This is your brain on meditation," and "The Mechanism of Kensho." Here are some highlights from the transcript: And from part two... What are your thoughts on studying consciousness, meditation and neuroscience? To me it helps support the insights meditation and contemplative practice helps us develop. Many see spiritual experiences as hallucinogenic or delusional, a strange brain "malfunction." People like Austin, IMO, help dispel this bias and reveal the fascinating science behind spiritual practices.
I'm very interested in meditation and am considering going to grad school to study nueroscience in 4 years. I'm very happy these days to see that academic research in meditation, and things like the current rebirth of lsd research. try this article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meditation-on-demand "A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human." here's what wiki says about gamma waves and meditation: "Experiments on Tibetan Buddhist monks have shown a correlation between transcendental mental states and gamma waves.[12][13] A suggested explanation is based on the fact that the gamma is intrinsically localized. Neuroscientist Sean O'Nuallain suggests (2009) that this very existence of synchronized gamma indicates that something akin to a singularity - or, to be more prosaic, a conscious experience - is occurring[12]. This work adduces experimental and simulated data to show that what meditation masters have in common is the ability to put the brain into a state in which it is maximally sensitive and consumes power at a lower (or even zero) rate, briefly. The "Zero power hypothesis" suggests that the lower power states may correspond to a "selfless" state and the more typical non-zero state, in which gamma is not so prominent, corresponds to a state of empirical self."
another thing that is fascinating are mirror neurons. These neurons essentially cannot tell the difference between me feeling or doing something and someone else feeling or doing something. if i see someone sad, mirror neurons make part of me feel sad, so they have major implications in empathy. We know that meditation can increase capacity for empathy, so it would be really cool if mirror neuron functional changes could be pinpointed in relation to meditation. I also wonder how DMT levels in the body correlate to mirror neuron activity as well as gamma waves, as well as the effect on all of this on visual processing. There's so much to find out, I really hope i can contribute to this type of research one day.
The main difference is in Christian hell you go in, you ain't coming back out; while in Buddhist hell you go in and you can still go out - though that would be extremely difficult to do.
