BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works Melinda Wenner Special to LiveScience.com 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. UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment. They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearf...

Religion And The Brain In the new field of "Neurotheology," scientists seek the biological basis of sprituality. Is God all in our heads? by: Sharon Begley with Anne Underwood One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist--who was spending a sabbatical year in England--saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are," he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense...

HITBODEDUT Translated by Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum S et aside time each day to meditate and pray alone in a room or some meadow and express your innermost thoughts and feelings and personal prayers to God. Use every kind of appeal and argument. Use words that will endear you to God and win His favor. Plead with God to draw you closer and let you truly serve Him. This is Hitbodedut. You should hold these conversations in whatever language you speak best. Our set prayers are said in Hebrew, but if this is not one's native language, it is difficult to use it to give expression to all one's innermost thoughts and feelings and the heart is less drawn after the words. It is easier to pour out your heart and say everything you need in your own language. You should tell God everything you feel, be it contrition and longing to repent over the past or requests and supplications to come truly close to God from now on, each person according to his level. Be very careful to get into the habit...

Nuns Go Under the Brain Scanner Imaging study shows that godly experiences trigger a network within the brain. by Helen Pearson Neuroscientists have identified a network of brain regions activated when nuns feel that they are at one with God. Artificially stimulating the brain in this way, they say, might allow people to have mystical experiences without believing in God themselves. Lead author Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal, Canada, says that he wanted to know what was going on in the brain during spiritual, mystical or religious episodes because of his own personal experiences. During such moments, people feel that they are in union with God and feel peace, joy and love. Beauregard and his colleague Vincent Paquette recruited 15 nuns from Carmelite monasteries, slid them into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and asked them to fully relive the most mystical moment in their lives. They didn't scan the subjects when actually praying, because the...