Meditation is the ultimate open source tool. You can do it anywhere and it’s free. It requires only your brain and your body. It’s positive effects are numerous, including increased productivity, better problem-solving and a reduction in overall stress. Learn about long-term effects of mediation on the brain, some meditation techniques and how mediation can help you do your job better.

1. Re-factor Your Brain:
Meditation for Geeks
Christie Koehler
Open Source Bridge
June 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009

2. Part 1:
How I Started
Meditating
Friday, June 19, 2009

3. Mindball in Vancouver
Meditator Non-Meditator
(my partner) (Me)
Lower alpha & theta waves = better (more
focused, more relaxed). I lossed twice!
Friday, June 19, 2009

4. My Conclusions
Huh, maybe there is something
to this mediation thing...
Friday, June 19, 2009

5. So I Started Meditating
• Calmer
• Clearer thinking,
better able to
concentrate
• Less reactive
• Better able to
integrate
Friday, June 19, 2009

6. Part 2:
What is Meditation?
Friday, June 19, 2009

7. Meditation...
• is the settling and focusing of the mind
• has been practiced for thousands of years
• spans many traditions (religious and secular)
• has many forms (insight, transcendental,
mindfulness, etc.)
• has many goals (enlightenment, union with
god, stress reduction, pain management, etc.)
Friday, June 19, 2009

8. Ultimate Goal
to transform the baseline state of
experience such that there is no
distinction between meditative and
non-meditative state
Friday, June 19, 2009

9. How?
through sustained, dedicated
practice over a significant
length of time
Friday, June 19, 2009

10. Part 3:
What Does Science Say
About Meditation and
the Brain?
Friday, June 19, 2009

11. Briefly, it says:
“different types of meditation and
training duration lead to
distinguishable short- and long-term
changes at the neural level”
Friday, June 19, 2009

12. 2 Categories of
Meditators
• Focused Attention (FA) and Open Mind
(OM)
• Many traditions utilize both styles, at once
or over time
Friday, June 19, 2009

13. Focused Attention (FA)
• Maintain attention on a single object (e.g. the
breath sensation)
• Detect thoughts and other distractors through
non-judgmental cognitive appraisal (e.g. “I’m
writing code”)
• Disengage from distractors and re-orient focus
to original object (return to sensation of the
breath)
Friday, June 19, 2009

14. Open Mind (OM)
• No explicit focus on objects (listening to the
room)
• Non-reactive/Non-judging monitoring of
experience (not judging the noise, letting it
arise)
• Non-reactive awareness of automatic
cognitive and emotional interpretations
stimuli (take note of any judgements)
Friday, June 19, 2009

15. How Neuroscientists
Study Meditators
• Subjective tests (perception)
• EEG (electrical activity)
• fMRI (blood flow/area of activity)
• MRI (structural changes)
Friday, June 19, 2009

16. Subjective Tests
• Our brains constantly have to make sense
of incomplete stimuli.
• The way in which we perceive this stimuli
says a lot about how are brain works.
• Long-term meditators are better at
perceptual challenges than non-meditators.
Friday, June 19, 2009

17. Subjective Tests
• Attentional blink
• Binocular Rivalry
• Motion induced blindness
Friday, June 19, 2009

18. EEG: Gamma-Synchrony
• Gamma rhythms: binding of different
populations of neurons together into a
network for the purpose of carrying out a
certain cognitive or motor function
• Gamma function related to neuro-plasticity
(the ability of the brain to change itself)
• Long-term meditators had greater gamma-
synchrony during meditation and at rest
Friday, June 19, 2009

19. fMRI (FA)
• less emotionally responsive when
presented with conflicting stimuli
• suggests a partial de-coupling mental
processes interpret and respond to
perceptual stimuli
Friday, June 19, 2009

20. fMRI (OM)
• Long-term OM practitioners are more adept at
detecting and feeling human emotion (greater
empathy)
• OM meditators showed superior performance
on a sustained attention task in comparison
with FA meditators when the stimulus was
unexpected (more distributed attentional focus)
Friday, June 19, 2009

21. MRI
• Cortical region of the brain thicker in
meditators than in non-mediators.
• Difference was greatest in older meditators
(offsets thinning due to aging).
Friday, June 19, 2009

22. Part 3:
How to Meditate
Friday, June 19, 2009

23. How to Meditate
• Many different forms
• Try a few, pick one that resonates
• Stick with it for a while
• Try a little bit each day
• It’s work, exercise for the mind
Friday, June 19, 2009

24. More Resources
• Attend a local meditation group
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
• Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon-Kabat Zinn
• Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
• Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, Thich Nhat
Hanh
• Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness by Antoine Lutz, John D.
Dunne, Richard J. Davidson (in the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness)
• Train your Mind, Change your Brain by Sharon Begley
Friday, June 19, 2009