Why I'm Not a Buddhist
The Contemplative Science Podcast
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Meditation Meditation - Concepts Versus Conceptual Experience
In certain forms of meditation that are not so much concentration practices but more open awareness practices seem to have very powerful effects both behaviorally and early on the perception and experience of pain. The idea basically being that there's a kind of open, you might say, non-grasping that is neither desiring nor being aversively oriented towards the pain stimulus without then superimposing onto it all the affective cognitive elaboration. And that goes along with actually a very accurate ability to discriminate the sensory intensity of pain with a reduced report of unpleasantness or reduction in brain areas associated with kind of affective appraisal. So that's a case where I think there is some very good scientific research
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