15:49 minutes (3.63 MB)
Listen to Tina's interview with Sharon Begley, Science Columnist for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and the author of the ground-breaking book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. They discuss the extraordinary collaboration between neuroscience and Buddhism.

Scientists have recently found special neurons in the brainstem of rats which focus exclusively on new, novel sounds and help them ignore predictable and ongoing noises. These novelty detector neurons, as researchers call them, quickly stop firing if a sound or sound pattern is repeated. They will briefly resume firing if some aspect of the sound changes. The implications are, as usual, that we humans may be like rats.

Reports about scientific studies that provide clues to links between the brain, the mind, and meditation are surfacing around the web, spawned in particular by the Dalai Lama’s appearance this past weekend at Investigating the Mind, a round of talks on the science and clinical application of meditation. Here’s a survey of the top stories on the subject: