Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works
Dear HumanDHS Friends!
COMMENT by Brian Lynch:
This article is posted due to its importance concerning the Neurophysiological effects of humiliation and shaming and what can be done about them.
This study is one of the most important confirming my own work concerning specific biological affect. Affect Psychology teaches that “minding” or applying the positive emotion or “affect” of “interest” to our own “negative” affects will in turn “control” them, this as opposed to a purely “cognitive” approach to problems or of course avoiding the emotion.
The article seems to move to precisely confirm this approach. Now if they could only include the affect of shame it would, I believe, take the whole process a quantum leap forward. Humiliation, shaming, itself causes the neurophysiological phenomena of shame and this needs to be documented. Naming “shame” on the face frees us from the bind of shame and humiliation.
A more critical analysis of such studies will point out many flaws in such approaches such as producing “conclusions form observations”. I say we must start somewhere and as complex as the brain is we need to be on the path of understanding it. Again, I work with a theory that assumes neurophysiological changes happen when humiliation takes place. In the absence of direct research based on that premise this type of finding will have to do.
The start of the article:
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”
Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070630/sc_livescience/brainscansrevealwhymeditationworks