Tools for Well-Being (MAS S64)

I virtually attended this year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference. The defining question the organizers put to attendees was How can we live with wisdom, awareness, and compassion in the digital age? Speakers on the main stage included people Noah Shachtman profiled for Wired magazine last year in his piece Enlightenment Engineers, like Arturo Bejar, Director of Engineering at Facebook, and Meng Tan, an in-house Google guru, along with cultural and political luminaries like Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, and Alanis Morissette (“Conscious Communication in the Digital Age” in case you were wondering). Since this is a short blog post, I’ll focus…

I remember when I was in elementary school, a teacher tried to teach us meditation. She told us that would be very helpful for our mind and would facilitate our learning. She asked us to do a 3-minute meditation before or after class ( I can’t remember, it was too long ago). We did it like a whole semester, however, I guess I was too young to get it then. All I was thinking during the meditation was to leave the classroom and very I was usually distracted by the train ran by our classroom. I’ve never try meditation since…

Richard Davidson’s research, conducted at his Center for Investigating Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin, focuses on the numerous ways in which contemplative practices can produce measurable changes in the human brain and body. The center is striving to find ways to teach the public about optimizing the health of each individual’s mind. Currently, much of the research is focusing on altruism and generosity, and its effect on positive thinking and feeling. In one of the notable examples – Davidson’s group brought people into the lab early into the morning, measured their happiness, and gave them $100. They told half the…

There are a lot of Mindfulness apps out there. A quick search reveals many meditation apps. I like meditation, but I don’t feel like I need an app to meditate. I think a good alternative to meditation could be interactions with strangers.  Having a conversation with a stranger on a subway ride, or on a flight, is often a mind opening experience that reveals a part of the world that we otherwise don’t think of or experience. It changes how we see others and in the best cases helps us become more mindful of others in the world by building…

My mindfulness and neurofeedback study focused on the placebo effect and the impact of expectations and rituals on wellness. The centerpiece of my research is a 2014 study by a group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical called “Altered Placebo and Drug Labeling Changes the Outcome of Episodic Migraine Attacks.” It was published in Science Translational Medicine (6:218ra5) in January 2014. Led by Slavenka Kam-Hansen, the research team planned to examine a series of questions related to the influence of context on the efficacy of the treatment for migraine, which, as a disorder with…

              Meditation has been used since as early as 1500 BCE [1]. However, it seems recently we have started to rediscover the benefits of meditation. Davidson’s paper titled “Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation” describes their research study involving twenty-five subjects over an 8-week period. The study reported increased left-sided anterior neurological activity and an increase in antibody tiers. These results suggested a correlation between meditation and positive brain and immune functions. As meditation practices have become more mainstream, research has been done on the effects of meditation during the meditation period. This paper, however,…

For the topic of sleep research, I chose to highlight and expand on a 2013 study showing a link between pink noise, memory, and sleep. (For the record: “Pink noise” sounds like radio or television fuzz, it is multiple octaves of frequency at a consistent volume) The exact relationship between deep, “slow-wave” sleep and memory is still unclear but recent breakthroughs have underlined the two’s direct connection. A 2006 German study showed that “gentle electric current” can aid the brain falling into deep sleep, which improves sleep quality and increases overnight memory retention.[1] Now, researchers have shown the first evidence…