Despite the common myth, alcohol and narcotics are the least effective means to spark creativity, researchers report. Instead, complex training, meditation, and cultural exposure add a boost to your creative flow.
Regularly practicing meditation helps regulate the gut microbiome and has the potential to lower anxiety, depression, and heart disease, a new study reports.
Study identifies a different class of meditative practices that seek to employ and regulate the state of stress an individual experiences, rather than reduce it, to achieve a more heightened state of focus and attention.
Mindfulness meditation interrupted communication between brain areas involved in processing pain sensations and areas that produce the sense of self. This resulted in reduced pain as individuals lost ownership of the sensation.
Study finds no evidence of structural brain changes associated with short-term mindfulness training.
Mindful meditation may help people cope when faced with action crises, researchers say.
"Orgasmic meditation" produces a distinct pattern of brain activity, researchers report. The practice alters activity in the frontal lobe and temporal lobe, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing.
Many people claim meditation helps to relieve their daily stresses. A new study provides objective evidence which supports the claims. Researchers found cortisol levels from hair samples decreased by 25% following a six-month meditation training program.
Mindfulness and meditation may offer small but significant benefits to cognition, especially in older adults.
Eight weeks of meditation training enhanced brain connectivity between the default mode network and the dorsal attention network, allowing participants to quickly switch between mind wandering states and focused attention.
People who practice meditation often report feeling "pure awareness" in which they say they experience consciousness itself. The state encompasses specific sensations and non-specific feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Researchers say their findings will help explain "pure consciousness," and work to generate a prototypical minimal model for human conscious perception.
Mindful meditation causes those who consider themselves to be more "independent-minded" or egocentric to become less generous and more selfish, researchers report.
