How does meditation change the mind? Experimental studies and Network Theory

Date: 

Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 5:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

RCC Conference Room, 26 Trowbridge St., Cambridge MA.

There has been an outburst of meditation studies in the last four decades. Although mindfulness meditation has its origin over 2500 years ago in the ancient Buddhist traditions, the incorporation of several secular practices of meditation in the Western world is quite recent and has generated great interest in the scientific community and the general public alike. Furthermore, several meta‐analysis and a growing body of robust empirical evidence show that Meditation‐Based Interventions are a promising treatment for a variety of mental health problems, including anxiety disorder, stress, depression symptoms and depression relapses, substance abuse, and eating disorders, among others. However, despite the wide range of research on meditation benefits to date, relatively few studies have attempted to examine the action mechanisms through which meditation produces its effects.

meditation

This lecture will provide an explanation of the main action mechanisms underlying the practice of meditation, using experimental studies to analyze whether the practice of meditation modify our cognitive and attentional processes, and employing Network Theory to examine how the practice of meditation change the mind by reorganizing the connections between different psychological variables.

Speaker: Pablo RocaFellow at the School of Psychology at Harvard University; PhD candidate at School of Psychology at Complutense University of Madrid.

Sponsors: RCC.