Our review uncovers a convergence toward identifying higher complexity during the meditative state when compared to waking, rest, or mind-wandering and decreased baseline complexity as a trait following regular meditation practice.

Meditators’ brains responded to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating acceptance rather than denial, corresponding to increased self-reported well-being. Additionally, degree of death acceptance predicted positively valenced meditation-induced self-dissolution experiences, thus shedding light on possible mechanisms underlying wholesome vs pathological disruptions to self-consciousness. The findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying the human tendency to avoid death are not hard-wired but are amenable to mental training, one which is linked with meditating on the experience of the embodied self’s impermanence. The results also highlight the importance of assessing and addressing mortality concerns when implementing psychopharmacological or contemplative interventions with the potential of inducing radical disruptions to self-consciousness.

The people with dyslexia proved significantly faster at recognizing the impossible figures.

48.5 percent of children in the countries surveyed have blood lead levels above 5 µg/dL.

High lead exposure reduces measured intelligence substantially.

Jhāna practice is deeply embedded within other practices that help with the reemergence—The Noble Eightfold Path, the Saṅgha—so that once you come to these moments of malleability, the momentum of living a certain way will carry you through and allow you to come out of these states more beautifully.

Our results provide firm evidence that implicit and explicit memory have distinct functional neuroanatomies, and that strategic control of retrieval engages brain structures distinct from those involved in both implicit and explicit memory. They have critical implications for theories of memory and consciousness, which often equate consciousness with control.

The brain is estimating how much confidence it has in certain predictions or certain bits of sensory information. This is known as Precision Weighting.

How Bayesian logic explains the brain: its extraordinary successes and surprising failures.

happiness reports were construed as an emotional reactivity to recent rewards and expectations.

the neurophysiological correlates of religious chanting are different from those of meditation and prayer

[The] regional increase in endogenous generation of delta oscillations [is] not due to peripheral cardiac or respiratory activity, nor due to implicit language processing, and is associated with feelings of transcendental bliss and decreased self-oriented cognition.

Neither behavioral nor imaging analyses supported the hypothesis that altruists’ reduced social discounting reflects effortfully overcoming selfishness. Instead, group differences emerged in [brain regions corresponding to] the subjective valuation of others’ welfare

Loving Kindness Meditation training did not result in more generous behavioral or neural patterns, but only greater perceived difficulty during social discounting. Our results indicate extraordinary altruists’ generosity results from the way regions involved in social decision-making encode the subjective value of others’ welfare.

In an attempt to counterbalance the plethora of data demonstrating the relaxing and hypoarousing effects of Buddhist meditation, this interdisciplinary review aims to provide evidence of meditation’s arousing or wake-promoting effects by drawing both from Buddhist textual sources and from scientific studies, including subjective, behavioral, and neuroimaging studies during wakefulness, meditation, and sleep.

The course of meditative progress suggests a nonlinear multiphasic trajectory, such that early phases that are more effortful may produce more fatigue and sleep propensity, while later stages produce greater wakefulness as a result of neuroplastic changes and more efficient processing.

No one asks how the tape worm benefits the host. What if consciousness is like that? What if it’s the cognitive equivalent of ‘junk’ DNA?

A sci-fi author and biologist ponders the significance of brain interface technologies.

Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits.

In a preregistered investigation, we tested this hypothesis by linking historic atmospheric lead data from 269 US counties and 37 European nations to personality questionnaire data from over 1.5 million people who grew up in these areas. Adjusting for age and socioeconomic status, US adults who grew up in counties with higher atmospheric lead levels had less adaptive personality profiles: they were less agreeable and conscientious and, among younger participants, more neurotic.

Next, we utilized a natural experiment, the removal of leaded gasoline because of the 1970 Clean Air Act, to test whether lead exposure caused these personality differences. Participants born after atmospheric lead levels began to decline in their county had more mature, psychologically healthy adult personalities (higher agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism), but these findings were not discriminable from pure cohort effects.

Our findings suggest that further reduction of lead exposure is a critical public health issue.

They were very disoriented, obviously, after flipping. They got out of their seat belts and out of the car and, because I had skidded, my head was bleeding profusely…

A scientist talks about the difficult process of recovery after her traumatic head injury.

Changes in gray matter concentration were investigated using voxel-based morphometry, and compared with a waiting list control group of 17 individuals. Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the MBSR group compared with the controls. The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.

Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate.

Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker-listener coupling, the greater the understanding.

These results suggest a fundamental neural dissociation between two distinct forms of self-awareness that are habitually integrated but can be dissociated through attentional training: the self across time and in the present moment.

It’s not that complex—the idea of agriculture. But because the brain of most animals is not particularly good at linking cause and effect across large periods of time, agriculture wasn’t invented by other animals. So this ability to create the future, this ability to engage in what we call mental time travel, is really, in many ways, the defining cognitive signature of our species.

Symbolic gestures, such as pantomimes that signify actions (e.g., threading a needle) or emblems that facilitate social transactions (e.g., finger to lips indicating “be quiet”), play an important role in human communication. They are autonomous, can fully take the place of words, and function as complete utterances in their own right. The relationship between these gestures and spoken language remains unclear. We used fMRI to investigate whether these two forms of communication are processed by the same system in the human brain.

We suggest that these anterior and posterior perisylvian areas, identified since the mid-19th century as the core of the brain’s language system, are not in fact committed to language processing, but may function as a modality-independent semiotic system that plays a broader role in human communication, linking meaning with symbols whether these are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects.

Consistent with the idea that analytical meditation helps to train concentration, we observed that over the course of the debate, mid-frontal theta oscillations—a correlate of absorption—increased significantly. This increase was stronger for more experienced monks as compared to monks at the beginning of their education. In addition, we found evidence for increases in synchrony in frontal alpha oscillations between paired debaters during moments of agreement as compared to disagreement on a set of premises.

This model proposes four intervals in a cognitive cycle: mind wandering, awareness of mind wandering, shifting of attention, and sustained attention. People who train in this style of meditation cultivate their abilities to monitor cognitive processes related to attention and distraction

Analyses revealed activity in brain regions associated with the default mode during mind wandering, and in salience network regions during awareness of mind wandering. Elements of the executive network were active during shifting and sustained attention. Furthermore, activations during these cognitive phases were modulated by lifetime meditation experience.

To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the neural mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation influences pain in healthy human participants. After 4 d of mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest.

… an integrative theoretical framework and systems-based neurobiological model that explains the mechanisms by which mindfulness reduces biases related to self-processing and creates a sustainable healthy mind.

Mindfulness is described through systematic mental training that develops meta-awareness (self-awareness), an ability to effectively modulate one’s behavior (self-regulation), and a positive relationship between self and other that transcends self-focused needs and increases prosocial characteristics (self-transcendence). This framework of self-awareness, -regulation, and -transcendence (S-ART) illustrates a method for becoming aware of the conditions that cause (and remove) distortions or biases.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (YMR) is a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and renowned meditation practitioner and teacher who has spent an extraordinary number of hours of his life meditating. The brain-aging profile of this expert meditator in comparison to a control population was examined using a machine learning framework, which estimates “brain-age” from brain imaging. YMR’s brain-aging rate appeared slower than that of controls suggesting early maturation and delayed aging. At 41 years, his brain resembled that of a 33-year-old. Specific regional changes did not differentiate YMR from controls, suggesting that the brain-aging differences may arise from coordinated changes spread throughout the gray matter.

The first detailed EEG study of jhāna meditation, with findings radically different to studies of more familiar, less focused forms of meditation. While remaining highly alert and “present” in their subjective experience, a high proportion of subjects display “spindle” activity in their EEG, superficially similar to sleep spindles of stage 2 nREM sleep, while more-experienced subjects display high voltage slow-waves reminiscent, but significantly different, to the slow waves of deeper stage 4 nREM sleep, or even high-voltage delta coma.

Is pollution making us more stupider?

The brain scan image—a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color—has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves.

A powerful lecture and part of the movement to destigmatize mental illness.

… a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of “I-making” that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends

… emotions are not biologically hardwired into our brains but are constructed by our minds

If there’s nothing to see, consciousness turns off

… the subject indicated extremely high magnitude of reward, [yet] the objective activation of the reward system was not extreme.

When most other cortical activity is reduced, a much smaller reward signal can be detected and will be perceived as more intense than when cortical “noise” from other sources is high, as in normal awareness. Indeed, during normal awareness it takes drug-induced hyperstimulation of the dopamine pathways to generate such extreme subjective reports. If this signal-to-noise view is correct, then jhana’s reduced sense awareness is not incidental to achieving extreme pleasure but is a contributing condition.

… you have this young brain that has a lot of what neuroscientists call “plasticity”. It can change really easily, essentially. But it’s not very good at putting on its jacket and getting to preschool

A deeply optimistic and warm view of children as “explorers.”

You don’t care for someone because you love them, you love them because you care

A far-reaching conversation about childhood.

How much evidence do we need of the harmfulness of something before we act?

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

A classic of modern psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the two halves of our brain and how they contribute to our sometimes-less-than-rational behavior.

If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. […] You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

A magisterial and heart-felt survey of neuroscience, psychology, and biology which paints a broad but rigorous picture of how and why humans act the way they do–for better or for worse–and what we (individual meatbags) can do to be our best selves.

The book is based on Sapolsky’s Stanford course, “Human Behavioral Biology”, available for free on YouTube.

I do recommend actually reading this paper. It has a good summary of other research done on meditation and a rather thoughtful analysis section. It’s less dense and jargon-heavy than other papers I’ve reviewed and gives a good window into the state of scientific research on Buddhist meditation circa 2012.