Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Fadel Zeidan, David R. Vago
304 citations
Pain is a multidimensional experience that involves interacting sensory, cognitive, and affective factors, rendering the treatment of chronic pain challenging and financially burdensome. Further, the widespread use of opioids to treat chronic pain has led to an opioid epidemic characterized by exponential growth in opioid misuse and addiction. The staggering statistics related to opioid use...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
David R. Vago, Fadel Zeidan
165 citations
Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Zoran Josipovic
33 citations
This paper discusses meditation from the unique perspective of the nondual approach and explores the possible relevance of this approach to applications of love and compassion meditation in clinical settings. It contrasts the nondual approach with the better known gradual or goal-oriented, dualistic view of meditation. This paper also introduces one of the central ideas of the nondual...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Frederick Travis
This paper draws from three different bodies of research to discuss the hypothesis that age-appropriate experiences enhance brain and cognitive development throughout the life span. These age-appropriate experiences could be considered as the drivers of development at each age, including drivers to foster development beyond adult abstract thinking, as described in Piaget's formal operational...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Joseph J. Loizzo
Meditation research has begun to clarify the brain effects and mechanisms of contemplative practices while generating a range of typologies and explanatory models to guide further study. This comparative review explores a neglected area relevant to current research: the validity of a traditional central nervous system (CNS) model that coevolved with the practices most studied today and that...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
January 21, 2016
David S. Black, George M. Slavich
Mindfulness meditation represents a mental training framework for cultivating the state of mindful awareness in daily life. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in how mindfulness meditation improves human health and well‐being. Although studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can improve self‐reported measures of disease symptomatology, the effect that mindfulness meditation has...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
February 27, 2015
Chadi G. Abdallah, Lynnette A. Averill, John H. Krystal
117 citations
The discovery of ketamine's rapid and robust antidepressant effects opened a window into a new generation of antidepressants. Multiple controlled trials and open-label studies have demonstrated these effects across a variety of patient populations known to often achieve little to no response from traditional antidepressants. Ketamine has been generally well tolerated across patient groups, with...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
November 1, 2014
Kevin R. Nelson
Brain activity explains the essential features of near-death experience, including the perceptions of envelopment by light, out-of-body, and meeting deceased loved ones or spiritual beings. To achieve their fullest expression, such near-death experiences require a confluence of events and draw upon more than a single physiological or biochemical system, or one anatomical structure. During...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Zoran Josipovic
231 citations
Dualities such as self versus other, good versus bad, and in-group versus out-group are pervasive features of human experience, structuring the majority of cognitive and affective processes. Yet, an entirely different way of experiencing, one in which such dualities are relaxed rather than fortified, is also available. It depends on recognizing, within the stream of our consciousness, the...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Willoughby B. Britton, Jared R. Lindahl, B Rael Cahn et al.
Buddhist meditation practices have become a topic of widespread interest in both science and medicine. Traditional Buddhist formulations describe meditation as a state of relaxed alertness that must guard against both excessive hyperarousal (restlessness) and excessive hypoarousal (drowsiness, sleep). Modern applications of meditation have emphasized the hypoarousing and relaxing effects...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Joshua A Grant
Since the first demonstrations that mindfulness-based therapies could have a positive influence on chronic pain patients, numerous studies have been conducted with healthy individuals in an attempt to understand meditative analgesia. This review focuses explicitly on experimental pain studies of meditation and attempts to draw preliminary conclusions based on the work completed in this new...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Joseph J. Loizzo
This article offers an overview of meditation research: its history, recent developments, and future directions. As the number and scope of studies grow, the field has converged with cognitive and affective neuroscience, and spawned many clinical applications. Recent work has shed light on the mechanisms and effects of diverse practices, and is entering a new phase where consensus and coherent...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Judson A. Brewer, Kathleen A Garrison
There has been an increased interest in mindfulness and meditation training over the past decade. As evidenced by exponential growth in the number of publications since the beginning of the 21st century, progressively more is becoming known about both the clinical efficacy and underlying neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness training. This paper briefly highlights psychological models of...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Frederick Travis
This article explores transcendental experiences during meditation practice and the integration of transcendental experiences and the unfolding of higher states of consciousness with waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The subject/object relationship during transcendental experiences is characterized by the absence of time, space, and body sense--the framework that gives meaning to waking...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
November 1, 2013
Steve Paulson, Richard J. Davidson, Amishi P. Jha et al.
108 citations
Many of us go through our daily lives on autopilot, not fully aware of our conscious experiences. In a discussion moderated by Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, neuroscientists Richard Davidson and Amishi Jha and clinical mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn explore the role of consciousness in mental and physical health, how we can train our minds to be...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
October 1, 2013
David R. Vago
68 citations
To better understand the neurobiological mechanisms by which mindfulness-based practices function in a psychotherapeutic context, this article details the definition, techniques, and purposes ascribed to mindfulness training as described by its Buddhist tradition of origin and by contemporary neurocognitive models. Included is theory of how maladaptive mental processes become habitual and...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
October 1, 2011
Pim van Lommel
124 citations
Because the publication of several prospective studies on near-death experience (NDE) in survivors of cardiac arrest have shown strikingly similar results and conclusions, the phenomenon of the NDE can no longer be scientifically ignored. The NDE is an authentic experience that cannot be simply reduced to imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, the use of drugs, or oxygen...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
October 1, 2011
Lisa Miller, Kenneth Miller, John Haught et al.
Moderated by Lisa Miller from Newsweek, evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller (Brown University) and theologians John Haught (Georgetown University) and Nancey Murphy (Fuller Theological Seminary) discuss the questions Are we immortal? Do our souls exist beyond our bodies? and What scientific evidence is there for mystical experience? from a cultural, historical, and scientific perspective. The...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
January 8, 2010
Bryan K. Yamamoto, Anna Moszczyńska, Gary A. Gudelsky
280 citations
The drugs of abuse, methamphetamine and MDMA, produce long‐term decreases in markers of biogenic amine neurotransmission. These decreases have been traditionally linked to nerve terminals and are evident in a variety of species, including rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans. Recent studies indicate that the damage produced by these drugs may be more widespread than originally believed....
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
August 1, 2009
Elissa S Epel, Jennifer Daubenmier, Judith T. Moskowitz et al.
324 citations
Understanding the malleable determinants of cellular aging is critical to understanding human longevity. Telomeres may provide a pathway for exploring this question. Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. The length of telomeres offers insight into mitotic cell and possibly organismal longevity. Telomere length has now been linked to chronic stress exposure and...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
August 1, 2009
Richard P. Brown, Patricia L. Gerbarg
278 citations
Yoga breathing is an important part of health and spiritual practices in Indo-Tibetan traditions. Considered fundamental for the development of physical well-being, meditation, awareness, and enlightenment, it is both a form of meditation in itself and a preparation for deep meditation. Yoga breathing (pranayama) can rapidly bring the mind to the present moment and reduce stress. In this paper,...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
August 1, 2009
Lobsang Rapgay, Alexander Bystrisky
168 citations
Among the modern versions of mindfulness, mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) has played the key role in introducing mindfulness practice to the field of psychology and medicine. In fact, the efforts to integrate mindfulness into psychology have resulted in further adaptation of MBSR into more secular and psychological forms as well as the creation of a number of mindfulness measures such...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
August 1, 2009
Glen L Xiong, P Murali Doraiswamy
Meditation practices have various health benefits including the possibility of preserving cognition and preventing dementia. While the mechanisms remain investigational, studies show that meditation may affect multiple pathways that could play a role in brain aging and mental fitness. For example, meditation may reduce stress-induced cortisol secretion and this could have neuroprotective...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
August 1, 2009
Joseph J. Loizzo
This overview surveys the new optimism about the aging mind/brain, focusing on the potential for self-regulation practices to advance research in stress-protection and optimal health. It reviews recent findings and offers a research framework. The review links the age-related biology of stress and regeneration to the variability of mind/brain function found under a range of conditions from...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
March 1, 2009
Athena Demertzi, Charlene Liew, Didier Ledoux et al.
125 citations
The relationship between mind and brain has philosophical, scientific, and practical implications. Two separate but related surveys from the University of Edinburgh (University students, n= 250) and the University of Liège (health-care workers, lay public, n= 1858) were performed to probe attitudes toward the mind-brain relationship and the variables that account for differences in views. Four...