NYT article on mindfulness meditation...

So, in the heady mix of articles about meditation, here is the latest one from the NYT["When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head"]that reports that mindfulness meditation("Sati") that Buddhism recommends has actual effects in the brain: cortical thickening, they find, a bulking up of a region "involved in attention and sensory processing."

Wel, well, well..this so soon after another NYT article which mentioned that scientists (neurologists, specifically)were "bridled" at the efforts to give meditation legitimacy.

Also, came across another related article over at digg, which was references a Dalai Lama essay in the online magazine Seed, entitled "What Buddhism Offers," and let me quote some relevant passages:

"The experience of consciousness is entirely subjective."
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"Neuroscience, which employs an objective perspective—looking at the brain as an object of study—has made strikingly little headway in this understanding,..."
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"A comprehensive scientific study of consciousness must therefore embrace both objective and subjective methods: It cannot ignore the reality of first-person experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor."
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"I am aware that there is a deep suspicion of first-person methods in modern science. I have been told that, given the problem inherent in developing objective criteria to adjudicate between competing first-person claims of different individuals, introspection as a method for the study of the mind in psychology has been abandoned in the West."
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"However, a disciplined use of introspection would be most suited to probe the psychological and phenomenological aspects of our cognitive and emotional states."
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"In the context of Buddhism, introspection is employed with careful attention to the dangers of extreme subjectivism—such as fantasies and delusions—and with the cultivation of a disciplined state of mind. Refinement of attention, in terms of stability and vividness, is a crucial preparation for the utilization of rigorous introspection, much as a telescope is crucial for the detailed examination of celestial phenomena."





I really never realized that it was because the methods of introspection were considered unreliable by modern science that it looked down upon meditation as a trustowrthy means of acquiring insight. And suddenly this seems to explain better the West's dismissal of Eastern philosophy...