Meditation - From a Scientific Perspective

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Sally Kohn: The benefits of meditation come because you're looking in quotes like under the hood of your own experience. You're taking things that are outside of the explicit conscious awareness that you have every day and beginning to expose these implicit unconscious processes to conscious awareness. She says once you can actually observe it happening real time, it becomes much more of a,. I mean, just obviously it's so much more explicit and you can see it happening and begin to deal with it head on.

You have the power to wield neuroplasticity to your advantage.

Just as you can change your body at the atomic level by lifting weights, you can willfully alter your brain by...thinking in a certain way. In this episode we explore using your brain to change your brain at the level of neurons and synapses beyond what is possible through other methods like learning a new language or earning a degree in chemistry. With mindfulness meditation, the evidence seems to suggest that one can achieve a level of change that would be impossible otherwise. The more you attempt to focus, the better you get at focusing on command, and so a real change begins taking place - you slowly become able to think differently, to hold thoughts differently and to dismiss thoughts that before led to attention difficulties or what feels like unwanted thoughts or clutter - and that’s not magical or the result of shaking hands with a deity, it’s biological. Listen as author and meditation teacher Michael Taft explains the benefits of secular, scientific practice of modern mindfulness meditation

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