Though neuroscience will never peer inside of Luke Skywalker or Yoda's head to find the brain region responsible for feeling the Force
, a new study
Trained Zen Buddhists return to a state of inner calm faster
than people who don't practice meditation, according to neuroscientist Giuseppe Pagnoni and his colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta.
The researchers scanned the brains of 12 Buddhists, who were experienced in Zen meditation, and 12 controls, while the subjects focused on breathing. Unlike other forms of mediation that focus on withdrawal, Zen meditation
calls for vigilance and attention.
At random intervals, a string of letters appeared on a computer screen inside the functional-MRI scanner, and each subject had to decide whether the string represented a real word or gibberish, and then press a button.
The control subjects proved as fast and accurate as the Buddhists at determining that "fiddle" and "moose" were real words, while "calake" and "mobble" were fakes. When Pagnoni's team took snapshots of each subject's brain while meditating before each word appeared, Zen Buddhists returned to their meditative state noticeably faster than control subjects.
Since their test measured responses to words, most of the areas that changed during the task are related to language and located in the brain’s left hemisphere.
These areas represent the internal chatter of an idle brain, Pagnoni speculates. A mentally demanding task snaps our brains to action and out of this state, which he called the default network. "If you are driving and there are a lot of cars coming, your mind cannot wander," he says.
With Zen meditation, "you may be able to interrupt this spontaneous brain chatter more effectively
," says Pagnoni, whose team published their results online in a paper titled: "Thinking about Not-Thinking. Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation".
Now it's just a matter of finding the neural correlate of Jedi mind tricks.
Ewen Callaway, online reporter