[Buddha-l] Volume 54 Issue 52

[S.A. Feite]

On Aug 21, 2009, at 12:55 PM, S. A. Feite wrote:

>
> On Aug 21, 2009, at 12:21 PM, Weng-Fai Wong wrote:
>
>> I showed the stuff to a medical doctor/researcher and a Buddhist
>> friend of
>> mine. Here is his response:
>>
>>> fMRI is in widespread use, being the new toy of neurological
>>> sciences,
>>> with a broad range of correlates with outcomes (i.e. male brain/
>>> female
>>> brain, sleep deprivation etc ), but in these studies of  
>>> meditators, I
>>> wonder if confounding has been adequately accounted for i.e. expert
>>> meditators are fundamentally different from novice meditators not
>>> just in
>>> meditation practice, but in multiple other aspects of
>>> character/personality etc which may account for the differences in
>>> brain
>>> pathway activation. (i.e. the changes are due to expert meditators
>>> being
>>> on average inherently more focused etc, rather than attributing the
>>> differences to meditation). Multiple testing has also not
>>> apparently been
>>> accounted for.
>>>
>>> So without a serial assessment (pre- and post-10,000 hours of
>>> meditation
>>> practice), some of these so-called correlates may not be entirely
>>> generalizable, but of course I am open to being corrected.
>
>
> There are comparisons between novices and experts in meditation, and
> it's now well known that the longer you meditate, the more profound
> the neural changes. But positive changes can be seen in novices just
> meditating a couple of months. They've actually developed a scale for
> this, based on laterality and have created a standard bell-curve
> distribution from which you can compare extraordinary cases: someone
> who is horribly depressed or someone who has meditated 20,000 hours,
> etc.
>
> It is also known, via fMRI, that cortical brain thickening, due to
> meditation practice *is proportional to hours of meditation
> practice*. So there already is an established basis for all this.
> Quite literally, every hour of meditation you put in creates more
> change.


BTW, I'm curious, could you pass on the geographical location of the  
person (physician?) who originally asked the question Weng-Fai?

Thanks in advance. I hope that is not too unusual a question.