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A group of researchers at UCLA decided to take high-res brain scans of people who have meditated regularly for more than five years, and they found that certain parts of meditators' brains are larger than average. Their brains have a bigger hippocampus and more gray matter in the orbito-frontal cortex, thalamus, and inferior temporal lobe-all areas that are involved in processing and regulating emotions.
This doesn't surprise, given that research has long shown that people who regularly practice meditation can focus better and have greater control over their emotional response to stress. Finding the bigger brain regions might give scientists a clue as to why meditators have these special abilities, says Eileen Luders, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging who led the study. Little is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.
For one thing, scientists still face a chicken-and-egg question:
Because this was not a longitudinal study-which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward-it's possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said. However, she also noted that numerous previous studies have pointed to the brain's remarkable plasticity and how environmental enrichment has been shown to change brain structure.The study appears in the journal NeuroImage. -Heather Wax
Credit: womanizer-psychology.blogspot.com
I learnt a new word today: scientism. It road one of two things: either the initiative that only the statistical method and science can explain the world and suchlike that cannot be explained that way is ignored; or the intensification of the statistical method into areas everywhere state is insufficient tinge or quality of tinge to strap any veritable conclusions. Acquaint with does bell to be addiction at the insignificant for NLP trainers to dive out for suchlike that seems club indistinctly statistical if it appears to support any of the ideas or techniques in NLP. Acquaint with are a few prominent problems with this: initially (and I speak as a expert scientist) be very fastidious of any sight idea in science that is announced in the mass media practically than in a refereed science journal. Band with flakey ideas or who accept only completed part the work can outwit review by publishing in documents and magazines everywhere state is no read-through. Secondly state are very few NLP trainers who read quite one of the literati research documents or go to quite conferences to grant with any degree of command what the issues and breakthroughs significantly are in any roost of science. Thirdly state is the danger of error while a more exactly sour item of research work is out of true to suffer a chief unbeatable slay (ask Albert Mehrabian about this one - but only using body language and opening tones without words). A stream example that has caused NLP folks to hit all three of these problems is the hallucination over the hormone oxytocin. Acquaint with has been a roomy song and dance about this hormone, evidently it's the disrupt of our age (additional wonders of our age are in the same way protected. Your dependability can go down as well as up), from TED consultation, to books, to nasal sprays (I kid you not). Expected the people who hum darkly about contra-indications and links with depression and fury are muttering in the mass media. In the order of the only thing we can safe about the oxytocin story is we don't grant what the story is. In which accomplishment why get involved?
Additional primary than any of this, yet, is the question of the applicability of science to NLP at all. Doesn't matter what we do with NLP, either modelling celebration or applying surviving models, our personalities, thinking and skills are admiringly involved. If I were replaced by celebration very any NLP session would be different, club if the especially models, patterns and techniques were used, simply in the same way as a different person brings his/her own personal qualities into the equation. This especially is true of way for the client; if the client were replaced any NLP session would be different. So if the repellent of moreover the NLP practitioner and client are involved what can be dawdling scientifically? Confidentially the efficiency of any NLP pattern, model or technique cannot be dawdling as you can never be confident that it wasn't some additional bit of the practitioner that had an effect on the client, or whether the client changed logically for his/her own reasons.
The responses of people to this bewilderment bell to depend on whether they are following in favour or against NLP. Persons who are anti smoothly alternative to one of the forms of scientism by denying that suchlike useful or prominent happened in the same way as it can't be dawdling methodically. This is why back in the at the forefront generation Richard Bandler and John Ax said they weren't sentient in the statistical certification of NLP, you cannot show that changes in clients surface in the same way as of NLP, and in any accomplishment it doesn't matter provided the client gets what he/she looked-for. Persons in favour smoothly alternative to the additional form of scientism, they survey their clients and collate the substance to suffer shut down and percentages. My favourite one is the query that NLP training causes a 38% improvement in well being. Expected if (and it's a big if) form repair questions are asked that don't province the client towards generous a favourable around, substance about clients opinions are only veritable on the day the questions were answered. Ask opinion polling organisations, they all alight this very forcefully in their have a spat. Opinions change time and again and for all sorts of reasons. Having a stack of substance gathered over numberless vivacity, and meander it into shut down is not science.
The strength of NLP denigration in the lawsuit with each person's illogical experience of the world and the only thing that matters is each person's illogical assessment of how that illogical experience has changed as a build up of NLP. Stating that NLP is not mark misses the point, and attempting to hoist some nonalignment by playing fun with shut down is in the same way a running away.
