Meta-cognition
A recent article in Psychology Today got me back on the meditation bandwagon again. The article talked a lot about “strengthening” the wiring in the brain:
One recent study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 40 minutes of daily meditation appears to thicken parts of the cerebral cortex involved in attention and sensory processing.
and
The mental exercise of meditation strengthens and stabilizes neural networks in the medial prefrontal cortex.
Thicken. Strengthen. If you want to convince people they should begin some questionable practice, say that studies suggest the practice thickens part of the brain. That’s what hooked me. Gotta make those thoughts tough and leathery.
Anyway, I made it to Common Ground Meditation Center tonight and the guy dropped one of those deceptively simple comments that changed the whole way I look at meditation. The idea is this: there are sensations. Traffic, wind, crickets or your own breathing make noise. That would be a sensation. Then, the trick is remembering that the sensation is registering. It is being heard. It would be clearer if I could just say “you hear it”, but you want to stop before you get to “you” and just recognize that the sound being made is being observed. After recognizing it, feel free to pass the information along to the “you”. I find it fascinating to experience the world like this. I can’t do it with visual things.
This creates a space in between perception of a noise and the response you have (which is usually to tune it out). It is difficult to remember that piece in between the sound of milk hitting on the floor and the urge to bounce an apple off the head of Twitchy McElbow.
This reminds me of writing programs that serve web pages. Servlets and applets and portlets have “pre-render” or initialization methods that process stuff before the page is handed to the browser.
October 10th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
You linked programming to meditation. That’s too much for me to comprehend.