The Benefits of Meditation

What are the benefits of meditation? To find out, you could simply ask people who regularly meditate. One of them happens to be Mr Wang.

And Mr Wang would tell you: “Based on my personal experience, meditation sharply improves concentration. It makes you smarter. You will understand things faster, and become more creative. You will even become wise. Furthermore, meditation brings you happiness. Therefore I encourage you to meditate.”

Whereupon the skeptical might say: “Well, Mr Wang, how do you know this? Have your claims been verified in any double-blind experiment? And if so, I insist that the double-blind experiment be replicated by other scientists. Make sure that the sample size is good and please do your statistical analysis properly. Otherwise I shall not believe your ludicrous claims.”

Mr Wang would reply: “Oh well. If you don’t believe me, you could go ask other people who meditate regularly. Based on their personal experience, they would probably tell you the same things as I have. In fact, some old people say that meditation helps them to stay alert and think as sharply as much younger people. And why would they lie to you? Anyway, the effect of meditation is something you can easily verify for yourself. Just try it three times a week, for about 20 minutes each time. And you will see.”

Whereupon the skeptical would say: “Nonsense! Do you actually expect me to trust my very own experience? Show me evidence, in the form of a scientific paper published in a scientific journal! And not just any scientific journal, but a peer-reviewed scientific journal. And not just a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but a top-tier peer-reviewed scientific journal. And make sure the scientists come from world-class academic institutions like Yale, MIT or Harvard Medical School! Anything less will be totally unacceptable to me!”

And then Mr Wang would say: “Eh, you think I very free ah? I give you good advice, if you don’t believe, then don’t believe lah. Like I owe you money, liddat. Throughout the history of mankind, people have known about the benefits of meditation for THOUSANDS of years, not as if it’s a DAMNED BIG secret or what. Is it my fault that modern science is so slow in catching up? Next time you want to know anything, don’t ask me lah, go and google for the answer yourself! Duh.”

Meditation found to increase brain size
Mental calisthenics bulk up some layers
By William J. Cromie

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't.

Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

"Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being," says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice." .... Link.

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Thoughts Affect Reality. Let's Imagine Muscles

Hilariously, some readers are still missing the point. I wonder when they'll get it.

I have been using different sorts of examples to illustrate the "thoughts affect reality" concept.

But when I used Buddhism as an example, some readers said I shouldn't use Buddhism.

When I used quantum physics, some readers said I shouldn't use quantum physics.

When I used financial markets, some readers said I shouldn't use financial markets.

When I used rats and children in the Rosenthal experiment, some readers said I shouldn't use rats and children.

They miss the point. They just don't see that reality refuses to be divided up into neat slices according to our academic classifications.

Reality is not "Buddhism". Reality is not "quantum physics". Reality is not "financial markets" and reality is not "rats" or "children".

Reality is just reality. And thoughts affect reality - all of it. Whatever you think about.

And that is why you can look into ANY area of reality, including such diverse areas as Buddhism, quantum physics, finance, psychology etc, and still find evidence of the same "thoughts affect reality" phenomenon at work.

Today, what shall we talk about? Ummm, let's see. How about health and fitness? Shall we proceed to grow our muscles just by thinking about them?

"Ridiculous! Mr Wang is insane! Next he'll tell us that scientists have really discovered that you can increase your muscle size AND strength, just by thinking!"

Yawn. It's quite old news, actually:

Physical Training in Your Dreams

Scientists have come up with just about the best news that a couch potato could ever want to hear.

They say you can increase the strength of your muscles just by sitting back and imagine yourself taking exercise.

The discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from strokes or other injuries.

If the technique works in older people, they might use it to help maintain their strength.

Muscles move in response to impulses from nearby nerve cells called motor neurons. The firing of those neurons in turn depends on the strength of electrical impulses sent by the brain.

Dr Guang Yue, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, says that this suggests you can increase muscle strength solely by sending a larger signal to motor neurons from the brain.

New Scientist magazine reports that Dr Yue and his colleagues have already found that visualising exercise was enough to increase strength in a muscle in the little finger, which it uses to move sideways.

Flexing biceps

Now his team have turned their attention to a larger, more frequently used muscle, the bicep.

They asked 10 volunteers aged 20 to 35 to imagine flexing one of their biceps as hard as possible in training sessions five times a week.

The researchers recorded the electrical brain activity during the sessions.

To ensure the volunteers weren't unintentionally tensing, they also monitored electrical impulses at the motor neurons of their arm muscles.

Every two weeks, they measured the strength of the volunteers' muscles.

The volunteers who thought about exercise showed a 13.5% increase in strength after a few weeks, and maintained that gain for three months after the training stopped.

Controls who missed out on the mental workout showed no improvement in strength.

The researchers are now repeating the experiment with people aged 65 to 80 to see if mental gymnastics also works for them .....

Boy, this sure gets repetitive. Do I have to say it again? Thoughts affect reality, yadayadayada.
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Mind Influences Matter

You're about to flip a coin. You really, really hope to get tails. Does the effect of your hope, your intention, have any effect on the likelihood that you do get tails?

Of course it does. Duh. Thought affects reality, remember? I must have told you that about 50 times in the past two weeks. Haven't you been paying attention?

See below for an article about an experiment, conducted at one of the Ivy League universities in the United States, to determine whether human intention can affect events which are apparently of a purely random nature.

The experiment is still ongoing. Based on current results so far, the answer is yes, pure human intention does affect such random events. So far, the statistical probability that this answer is wrong is calculated at less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000.

In other words, there is more than a 999,999,999,999 out of 1,000,000,000,000 chance that human intention does affect apparently random events.

Note: this is not to say that you're going to get 999,999,999,999 tails out of 1,000,000,000,000 times you flip a coin. What the experiment says is that your intention DOES influence the outcome on the event. And that the probability that such a conclusion is wrong is less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000.

To put it another way, it is quite absurd to believe that human intention does NOT affect "random" events.

Somewhere in the late 1970’s, an undergraduate student at Princeton University approached the then dean of engineering, Dr. Robert Jahn, and complained that not a single member of the engineering faculty was willing to supervise her senior project. “That’s impossible” thought Jahn, until she went on explain what her project was about. “I want to replicate experiments which show that the mind can influence physical matter!” announced the student. When he heard this, Dean Jahn knew exactly what the problem was; even he wouldn’t want to advise a project that was based on such non-sense!

Rather than dismissing her project off the bat, Jahn remembered his earlier promise that students at Princeton could pursue projects in any legitimate topic that interested them. For the sake of promoting free intellectual inquiry he told the student that he would supervise the work himself if she could demonstrate the serious nature of the project.

In the months that followed, Professor Jahn was persuaded that the subject at least warranted some kind of precursory inquiry. Experiments run by a man named Helmut Schmidt at Boeing labs claimed to show a correlation between the output of a device known as a random event generator and the intention of human participants. After talking with Schmidt and contemplating the engineering implications of the data, Jahn agreed to supervise a replication of Schmidt's experiment.

In this experiment, a device called a random event generator would be used much like an electronic coin flipper. The device produces outcomes that can have one of two states, which are analogous to the heads and tails of a coin toss, each with exactly a 50% probability of occurring. Unlike an electronic coin flipper, the REG takes advantage of the fundamental properites of quantum mechanics to generate its random outputs. Unlike most other objects that we encounter, even with information about every element of the system, modern physical theory states that it is impossible to predict the next output from one of these devices.

In the experiment that was being attempted, operators would attempt to distort the 50/50 balance of the device using nothing more than their intention. Operators would literally sit in front of the random event generator and “will” that one outcome be produced more often than another. Over the course of many outcomes, a statistical profile could be built up that would allow the experimenters to contrast the device's output when a person was not attempting to influence it ....

The article is quite long, and split over several web pages. To read in full, start here.

I am busy with some other personal mindhacking projects - I may not blog here so often in the next 2 weeks or so. But rest assured that Mr Wang shall be back to tell you more about how thought affects reality.

There is no escape! Your mind is the universe. Change your mind and the universe must ___________. .
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