[Buddha-l] Volume 54 Issue 52

[jkirk]

Dear Steve,

Thanks for this contribution--most interesting. I wonder however,
if it helps to list types of meditation (as in 8 major forms),
that is, if the distinctions are all that clear. 
The forms Davidson's lab came up with seem more relevant--in that
they match  distinctions made by the tradition. Do you have any
links to open source articles on this from his lab?

I think you meant to write 'elicit' instead of 'illicit'?  Alas,
spell-check doesn't always work with some of our typos. It has
completely stopped correcting my misspellings of 'adn'.

Cheers, Joanna
====================

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
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