[Buddha-l] neuroscience: neural plasticity

[S.A. Feite]

On May 30, 2007, at 2:47 PM, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> Maybe the description of the experiment is not complete, but the  
> way it looks from here it does not  seem very scientific. First of  
> all one case is not conclusive (maybe this monk is the only one in  
> the world) and secondly it doesn't say what the EEG would have been  
> if the monk had meditated on a bag of potatoes or a soccermatch. I  
> remember that the effectiveness of transcendental meditational  
> mantras was proved this way.

It's a brief publishers review. There was more than one person if  
this is the study I'm thinking of and it was quite groundbreaking for  
a couple of reasons. One, the EEG signature most often associated  
with samadhi, high amplitude gamma waves, had not been observed in a  
lab setting in a long time (since the 50's). It was observed  
repeatedly in this study. And two, the long term meditators in the  
study actually had signs of samadhi occurring in the post-meditation  
state indicating that they were essentially in a continuous state of  
altered consciousness.

BTW, such signatures and coherence has not occurred in TM research in  
longtime practitioners, so this is a "first" in a way.

> From a day to day point of view some of the brain experiments are  
> very disappointing. All people know the feeling of contentment that  
> arises from having performed a good deed. Nobody needs a  
> brainspecialist to tell her that (if you do maybe then you need  
> one). And the drive to help members from the same group even exists  
> in some animals. It's an instinct and it helps survival of the  
> tribe. So where's the compassion?
> Or does it mean that compassion doesn't exist and we act like we  
> care because it feels so good?