Changing your mind
This month’s roundup of brain plasticity and mindfulness research features adolescents in young offenders institutions, women who have survived breast cancer, and a brain-training game for older people. For a complete list of mindfulness research published last month, check out the wonderful Mindfulness Research Guide. Continue reading “Research roundup: mindfulness for young offenders and breast cancer survivors, and brain-training for the elderly”
Driving a stifling taxi cab on clogged city streets for hour after hour – scared half to death by careless pedestrians stepping into the road, harangued by passengers late for their lunch appointments, exasperated by the incompetence of your fellow drivers – would tax the patience of Mahatma Gandhi.
These men and women deserve our sympathy. They need our help to get through their shift without winding down the window and shouting obscenities at the next person who annoys them. Or worse. Quite apart from the danger to other road users, there is also ample evidence that anger can lead to a heart attack and raises the risk of heart disease.
Psychologists have investigated the causes and consequences of aggressive, angry driving, but much less attention has been paid to strategies for preventing it. There have been a few attempts to measure how good cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) are at changing the attitudes and responses of angry drivers to certain cues, but now researchers in Iran have conducted the first study to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches. Continue reading “Mindfulness monthly: irate taxi drivers, craving and paranoia”
Life is so unfair. Trying to give up something you’re addicted to just makes you crave that thing even more, whether it’s cigarettes, alcohol or sugar. You’re caught in a Catch-22: you want to quit, but the more you try, the harder it gets to resist temptation. Perhaps the key is not to try so damn hard, but instead improve your brain’s capacity for self-control.
It might just work… Continue reading “Cigarettes and cupcakes: mindfulness meditation reduces craving”
The Dalai Lama wants every cognitive scientist to learn how to meditate. He believes this will give them insights into the mind and consciousness that plastering electrodes on scalps or scanning brains with powerful magnetic fields never could.
Whereas a scientist looks at the mind from the outside, he says, an experienced meditator examines it from within. Neither sees the whole picture and so we could learn a great deal by combining the two perspectives. Continue reading “The Universe in a Single Atom by His Holiness the Dalai Lama – review”
Every month I’m going to round up the latest research about the potential applications of mindfulness. I’ll pick out only four or five nuggets (writing in detail about one, and writing a very brief summary of the others) but link to the awesome Mindfulness Research Monthly newsletter, which provides a much more comprehensive review of the field than I could ever do. Continue reading “Mindfulness monthly: bipolar disorder, time perception, older people, and eating disorders”
Plastic Brain 