After tripping over my luggage to find my computer (which was buried under a pile of books), I flipped it open and started thinking about perception and how I could use a recent experience in my life to help with my blog post (because I haven’t left Spring Break behind yet). What I came upon was the idea of meditation and relaxation. As I was laying on the ship this past week, I had a lot of time to myself to muse and meditate on a variety of subjects. Following this notion, I wandered if a meditation is correctly executed, is the perception of that idea or object enhanced? I then found an article relating meditation to an increase in EEG waves, specifically within the area of high-amplitude gamma synchrony. While the article goes into great about the specific frequencies the EEG emits, the part I found most interesting was the study that was actually done. The psychologists took two pools of participants–a group of students who had been meditating for a week, and a group of Tibetan monks who had up to forty years of meditation. What the results show is that proper meditation yielded a much higher brain activity and that the perception of the feeling of compassion was much higher. Now while the scientific results were astounding, the idea still intrigues me. The thought that one can clear his or her own mind in order to fully feel an emotion or perceive an object is bewildering. The reports even referenced a state of mind called the “fundamental state of luminosity” in which the perceiver transcends the typical confines of perception and is immersed in the meditation on a universal level. This idea, although I can’t get a full grasp on it, is uniquely soothing. I mean that it is comforting that the typical confines of discursive thought can be broken and that my perception of an object/idea is only at the base of its offering. Through a thorough study of meditation, I could achieve a consciousness and awareness that would supersede my currently muddled view of the world.
Overall, while the scientific results of the EEG study are impressive, my own musings lie within the idea that current view and study of perception could be be expanded even further to include the heightened state of awareness that is achieved through meditation.
-b
