Meditation's Impact on the Brain | Documentary Clip

science has contributed to our understanding of the effects of meditation on the brain and body the research that we've done on meditation in the brain has focused on two major domains that meditation actually affects one is attention and the other is emotion and what we have discovered is that the circuits in the brain that are important for regulating both attention and emotion can be transformed by meditation the 30,000 foot goal is to use the scientific research to understand the nature of suffering and how it can best be alleviated in minier and pre-shave was one of

our first long-term practitioners this will be strapped onto the arm and we'll get your ratings of how that normal without meditation yes yes without meditation usually when you do this kind of research with either brain electrical measurements or MRI it takes a lot of what we call post processing to look at the data and what post processing means is simply lots of computer algorithms turning at the data after the data is collected and it often takes many many days of computer processing to extract these really weak signals in a lot of noise it's finding a

needle in a haystack with mingi rinpoche we didn't need any fancy post-processing we actually were able to see a signal with our naked eye of course the first thing we thought is that there's artifact and there's something wrong because you dis just is not something that we typically would see and so then we had to go through the entire recording system and take everything apart and put it back together before we convinced ourselves that this is actually real then when we discovered that it was real it was really quite amazing because nobody had ever seen

these kinds of signals before this length of time and what we were looking at are gamma oscillations in the brain they're very fast frequency brain oscillations and they are seen in any ordinary person but they're seen for very very short periods of time typically less than one second they also don't have such large amplitude and when McGee rinpoche was meditating these signals were large they were highly synchronized and they lasted for many many minutes they last for the entire time that the meditation session was in progress and that's what made them very visible so that

was really a very important moment because we knew that from a scientific perspective there was that they are there we can see that a person who meditates for even just two weeks 30 minutes a day is shows a different pattern of brain activity than when they started two weeks before and that is really important because it suggests that the brain really is plastic that we really can make these changes and that it actually doesn't take that much total of seven hours of practice was sufficient to change the brain in very objective measurable ways well-being and

warm-heartedness can be cultivated we can think of them almost as skills which can be enhanced through certain kinds of practice