Meditation and mindfulness practices have and continue to change my life for the better. Frankly, I consider this the most important skill we can teach people. Yet, we don't. Yet.
In the last few years, the human quest for self-optimization has collided with improving mobile technology to birth more than 100,000 health apps for smartphones. The mobile market research firm Research2Guidance estimates that mHealth apps, as they’re called, will be a $26 billion industry by 2017.
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In theory, having more real-time data about our bodies means we can better mold them according to our will. But in practice, it may not be working out that way. Dr. Des Spence, a general practitioner in Glasgow, Scotland, argued in the British Medical Journal last year that constant self-tracking turns healthy people into “neurotics.”
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But all these interventions are temporary and rely on devices and paid services. They are also relatively unproven. What if the ultimate neuroenhancing biohack is 2,500 years old, requires no equipment and costs nothing?
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A few years ago, a computer scientist and a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona enrolled 45 human-resource managers in a trial: One-third of them took eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, one-third took eight weeks of body relaxation training and one-third had no training at all. All three groups were given “stressful multitasking” tests before and after the eight-week period; those in the mindful-meditation group were able to sustain their focus longer than both other groups and reported feeling less stressed during the test.
The brain changes functionally and structurally all the time, taking in lessons from and responding to the stimulus of daily life. Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity. But what if you could determine the way your brain changes?