[Buddha-l] Volume 54 Issue 52

[S. A. Feite]

On Aug 21, 2009, at 12:21 PM, Weng-Fai Wong wrote:

> I showed the stuff to a medical doctor/researcher and a Buddhist  
> friend of
> mine. Here is his response:
>
>> fMRI is in widespread use, being the new toy of neurological  
>> sciences,
>> with a broad range of correlates with outcomes (i.e. male brain/ 
>> female
>> brain, sleep deprivation etc ), but in these studies of meditators, I
>> wonder if confounding has been adequately accounted for i.e. expert
>> meditators are fundamentally different from novice meditators not  
>> just in
>> meditation practice, but in multiple other aspects of
>> character/personality etc which may account for the differences in  
>> brain
>> pathway activation. (i.e. the changes are due to expert meditators  
>> being
>> on average inherently more focused etc, rather than attributing the
>> differences to meditation). Multiple testing has also not  
>> apparently been
>> accounted for.
>>
>> So without a serial assessment (pre- and post-10,000 hours of  
>> meditation
>> practice), some of these so-called correlates may not be entirely
>> generalizable, but of course I am open to being corrected.


There are comparisons between novices and experts in meditation, and  
it's now well known that the longer you meditate, the more profound  
the neural changes. But positive changes can be seen in novices just  
meditating a couple of months. They've actually developed a scale for  
this, based on laterality and have created a standard bell-curve  
distribution from which you can compare extraordinary cases: someone  
who is horribly depressed or someone who has meditated 20,000 hours,  
etc.

It is also known, via fMRI, that cortical brain thickening, due to  
meditation practice *is proportional to hours of meditation  
practice*. So there already is an established basis for all this.  
Quite literally, every hour of meditation you put in creates more  
change.