Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left: “All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.
To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation’s singular ability to soothe.” — Dan Goleman, NY Times Another in the series of remarkable findings emerging from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. [I happened to have been Dan Goleman’s research assistant on the study he writes about above, BTW. -FmH]