The Effects of Mindfulness on the Brain

Long-term practitioners get the tone and almost nothing changes in the MRI. The auditory cortex gets activated because they hurt the tone, but the pain matrix stays quiet. Then during the actual pain, sensory regions of the brain show significantly more activation than controls. It's as if their sensory channels are totally open. And then during the recovery period, they come right back down to baseline really quickly. So mindfulness is a mental workout. Think about it. Anybody do mindfulness of breathing? You bring your mind to your breath, it wanders off, you notice it wandered and you bring it back. That's like the equivalent in a mental gym of lifting weights, of doing repetitions with the