CNMB Lab, Nashville, TN
dvago@bwh.harvard.edu

Category: peer-reviewed journal articles

Brigham and Women's Hospital

Buddhist Deity Meditation Temporarily Augments Visuospatial Abilities, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2009) — Meditation has been practiced for centuries, as a way to calm the soul and bring about inner peace. According to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there is now evidence that a specific method of meditation may temporarily boost our visuospatial abilities…
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Zen Meditators Show faster return to resting state

Giuseppe Pagnoni, a Neuroscientist in the dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University just recently published a study on Zen Meditators and fMRI. Using fMRI and a simplified meditative condition interspersed with a lexical decision task, they investigated the neural correlates of conceptual processing during meditation in regular Zen practitioners and matched control…
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Measures of Mindfulness

In order of personal preference: 1. Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) [Link] – The FFMQ, revised from the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills, is used to assess the construct of mindfulness. Previous research on assessment of mindfulness by self-report suggests that it may include five component skills: observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging of inner…
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The effects of Meditation on Fibromyalgia

Meditation has been shown to have benefits in many clinical disorders. An 8-week course in which women diagnosed with fibromyaliga are practicing mindfulness and meditation skills 5 days/week and meeting once/week for 2 hours, along with 1 full-day retreat at week 6 have shown benefits in attention, stress reduction, and emotion regulation. David Vago and…
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Meditation May Increase Empathy

Here are a few links for research supporting the claim that Meditation increases empathy. 1. NCCAM report citing Antoine Lutz’s 2008 PLosOne article. NCCAM site; Lutz article HERE 2. Tania Singer: a. The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: Review of literature and implications for future research; NaBR, 2006 article HERE; b.…
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