[Buddha-l] Volume 54 Issue 52

[S. A. Feite]

On Aug 20, 2009, at 10:58 AM, Gary Gach wrote:

> Dear Rahula, Dr Herbert Benson was one of the first, i believe, to  
> explore
> the brains of meditators,

Benson recently spoke at the meditation and psychotherapy conference  
at Harvard with HHDL and shared his early experiences with meditation  
research. He was, in fact, at first researching TMers, but soon lost  
interest, and TM researchers from the TM org didn't have exactly a  
good reputation. They were more interested in what it took to sell  
mantras. But this early research was before there was fMRI, Brain  
SPECT  or PET. It was basic physiological research, with some  
research on EEG.

More recently he's explored Tibetan Buddhist contemplative, esp.  
gtummo or chandali meditation. He also has recorded the lowest drop  
in metabolic rate ever recorded, a whopping 64%. Some impressive  
findings.


> (the heresy of the "subjective"), slipping his meditators in to his  
> office
> for experiments, after hours, at night,
> surreptitiously.  They were, I believe, TM (Transcendental  
> Meditators),
> whose brains — as later studies
> would reveal — have certain different responses than Buddhists, in  
> some
> ways.

TM is basically a relaxation response style of meditation in terms of  
it's physiological attributes. Benson listed 8 major forms of  
meditation that illicit this "opposite" of the 'stress response' and  
it included vipassana and other meditation forms as well.

More recently the cutting edge research seems to be coming out of  
Richie Davidson's lab at the Univ. of Wisconsin, who also spoke at  
the conference. They've actually identified two important, basic  
forms in Buddhist meditation--and mapped the neural circuitry that  
goes along with them. These two forms they have named "Fixed  
Attention" (FA) which is more a  "shamatha with an object" style of  
meditation and Open Presence or Open Monitoring (OM) meditation.  
They're of course also the lab that first replicated samadhi in a  
western Buddhist contemplative. I understand that research has now  
been independently replicated, several times, at different labs.

-Steve Feite