Researchers Successfully Use Ultrasound Waves on the Brain to Enhance Mindfulness.
Within five minutes, participants reported experiencing the effects of meditation without actually meditating.
Even when you don’t think you’re doing anything, your brain never stops whirling away. When you’re inactive, as in not engaged with a task, your brain takes the opportunity to daydream, ruminate, and contemplate. How a person’s brain experiences this wandering function influences their internal conscious experiences — for better or worse.
Yet, until just 23 years ago, it was a mystery how this mind wandering happens in the brain and which regions are responsible for it. While mysteries remain, scientists have discovered a new way to manipulate this brain function to enhance feelings of mindfulness and the ability to detach from negative thoughts and feelings — all of which are attributes shared with the effects of meditation.
Default Mode Network
In 1929, Hans Berger, the inventor of the electroencephalogram (EEG), was the first to propose that the brain is relentlessly busy. However, it wasn’t until 2001 that researchers from Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, first described the brain network responsible for Berger’s…
