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Advancing Wellbeing Seminar Series

Speaker: Judson Brewer MD, PhD
Speaker Affiliation: University of Massachusetts Medical School
Date: Thursday, 2/15/2014

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in how contemplative practices such as meditation can inform science and how science can inform these practices. Recent advances have begun to unravel the mysteries of how mindfulness practice can affect learning processes leading to positive habit change. Using evidence from clinical trials of smoking cessation, this presentation will first map out how mindfulness targets key components of operant conditioning pathways. It will then detail neuroscientific findings from novice and expert meditators using traditional and real-time fMRI to link the subjective experience of effortless awareness that may be a key aspect of mindfulness, to regional brain activity in the default mode network. It will conclude with a discussion of how targeted neurofeedback may provide a “mental mirror” for augmenting mindfulness training.

More talks in this series can be found online at:
http://wellbeing.media.mit.edu