Liz mentions a study from The New York Times about a team of neurologists who had tested a volunteer monks brain activity during meditation. I wanted to see what this was all about so I looked the article up. It turns out it's very real and very true. They were trying to see what affects meditation has when it comes to stress and anxiety. They took a few volunteer employees who had been practicing meditation for a few months, and they took a few volunteer monks who had been practicing for over twenty years. They proceeded to hook them up to the brain scanning machine and showed each subject a series of horrifying photos. A mutilated body, severed had, and a snake cocked back ready to strike. They recorded the intense brain activity and then asked them to meditate. The employees had a much harder time calming them selves down, and had a lot more red brain activity- which is frequent and shows up normally when people think a lot. On the other hand, the brain scans were very different for the highly trained monks. Their scans were virtually blank. Which seems impossible to a neurologist to have absolutely no brain activity when it comes to thinking. After watching the man meditate for well over an hour a blue light began to appear. Liz mentioned in the book about feeling a blue light grow up inside of her and work its way through her body during meditation. Just like she had described, a blue light was growing in the monks brain. I just find it very interesting that someone could have the capacity to do that, that a brain could have the capacity to do that. I mean it has so much ability that we don't even know about. Like meditation for instance, later in the article they proved that it could seriously help with stress and anxiety issues. They even said it helped someone create for anti-bodies to fight off the flu.
Article Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/14BUDDHISM.html?pagewanted=all
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