Meditation can help you become smarter. So just breathe..relax and read this article

About meditation
Everyone knows that meditation reduces stress. But with the aid of advanced brain scanning technology, researchers are beginning to show that meditation directly affects the function and structure of the brain, changing it in ways that appear to increase attention span, sharpen focus and improve memory.

One recent study found evidence that the daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain’s cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, attention and memory. Sara Lazar, a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, presented preliminary results last November that showed that the gray matter of 20 men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not. Unlike in previous studies focusing on Buddhist monks, the subjects were Boston-area workers practicing a Western-style of meditation called mindfulness or insight meditation. “We showed for the first time that you don’t have to do it all day for similar results,” says Lazar. What’s more, her research suggests that meditation may slow the natural thinning of that section of the cortex that occurs with age.
The forms of meditation Lazar and other scientists are studying involve focusing on an image or sound or on one’s breathing. Though deceptively simple, the practice seems to exercise the parts of the brain that help us pay attention. “Attention is the key to learning, and meditation helps you voluntarily regulate it,” says Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Since 1992, he has collaborated with the Dalai Lama to study the brains of Tibetan monks, whom he calls “the Olympic athletes of meditation.” Using caps with electrical sensors placed on the monks’ heads, Davidson has picked up unusually powerful gamma waves that are better synchronized in the Tibetans than they are in novice meditators. Studies have linked this gamma-wave synchrony to increased awareness.

A quick nap or meditation?
Many people who meditate claim the practice restores their energy, allowing them to perform better at tasks that require attention and concentration. If so, wouldn’t a midday nap work just as well? No, says Bruce O’Hara, associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky. In a study to be published this year, he had college students either meditate, sleep or watch TV. Then he tested them for what psychologists call psychomotor vigilance, asking them to hit a button when a light flashed on a screen. Those who had been taught to meditate performed 10% better—”a huge jump, statistically speaking,” says O’Hara. Those who snoozed did significantly worse. “What it means,” O’Hara theorizes, “is that meditation may restore synapses, much like sleep but without the initial grogginess.”

Firms jumping on the opportunity
Not surprisingly, given those results, a growing number of corporations—including Deutsche Bank, Google and Hughes Aircraft—offer meditation classes to their workers. Jeffrey Abramson, CEO of Tower Co., a Washington-based development firm, says 75% of his staff attend free classes in transcendental meditation. Making employees sharper is only one benefit; studies say meditation also improves productivity, in large part by preventing stress-related illness and reducing absenteeism.
Another benefit for employers: meditation seems to help regulate emotions, which in turn helps people get along. “One of the most important domains meditation acts upon is emotional intelligence—a set of skills far more consequential for life success than cognitive intelligence,” says Davidson. So, for a New Year’s resolution that can pay big dividends at home and at the office, try this: just breathe.

I have found this study from 2004. I find it worth reading to understand how stress affects our immune system.

We have known for some time that stress affects our immune systems. Many studies have shown that stress can suppress the immune system, but other studies have shown boosts in the immune system under stress. A July 2004 meta-analysis of 293 studies conducted over the past 30 years puts the pieces of the puzzle together.

Psychologists Suzanne Segerstrom, Ph.D., and Gregory Miller, Ph.D. found the following:
-  Stress does indeed affect the immune system in powerful ways.
-  Short-term stressors boost the immune system. It seems that the “fight or flight” response prompts the immune system to ready itself for infections resulting from bites, punctures, scrapes or other challenges to the integrity of the body.
- Chronic, long-term stress suppresses the immune system. The longer the stress, the more the immune system shifted from they adaptive changes seen in the “fight or flight” response to more negative changes, first at the cellular level and later in broader immune function. The most chronic stressors – stress that seems beyond a person’s control or seems endless – resulted in the most global suppression of immunity. Almost all measures of immune system function dropped across the board.
- The immune systems of the elderly or those already sick are more subject to stress-related changes.

In reaching these conclusions the authors looked at the effects of the various stressors on different immune responses, such as “natural” and “specific” immunity. They summarized the results of the studies that looked at each of these types of stress:
- Natural immunity produces quick-acting, all-purpose cells that can attack many pathogens; they bring fever and inflammation.
- The body takes a few days to mount a more specific attack on particular invaders with specific immunity. This response includes lymphocytes (T-cells and B cells). Specific immunity has both cellular responses, which fight pathogens that get inside cells (such as viruses), and humoral responses, which fight pathogens that stay outside cells, such as bacteria and parasites. Segerstrom and Miller were able to assess how different types of immune response correlated with different types of stress because researchers have identified the blood markers of these different immune responses.

They divided stressors into different types:
- Acute time-limited stressors: lab challenges such as public speaking or mental math.
- Brief naturalistic stressors: real-world challenges such as academic tests.
- Stressful event sequences: a focal event such as loss of a spouse or major natural disaster gives rise to a series of related challenges that people know at some point will end.
- Chronic stressors: pervasive demands that force people to restructure their identity or social roles, without any clear end point – such as injury resulting in permanent disability, caring for a spouse with severe dementia, or being a refugee forced from one’s native country by war.
- Distant stressors: traumatic experiences that occurred in the distant past yet can continue modifying the immune system because of their long-lasting emotional and cognitive consequences, such as child abuse, combat trauma or having been a prisoner of war. Much of their analysis goes on to review the similarities and differences among the 293 studies that they examined. These studies included a total of 18,941 subjects. “Stressful event sequences” appeared to be weakly associated with different immune consequences, depending on the type of event. There appeared to be different patterns for grief than for trauma, for example, but the associations weren’t strong enough for the authors to make new claims. They recommended further study.

The authors did find that the most chronic stressors – those which change people’s identities or social roles, are more beyond their control and seem endless – were associated with the most global suppression of immunity. In such situations almost all measures of immune function dropped across the board. The longer the stress, the more the immune system shifted from potentially adaptive changes (such as those in the acute “fight or flight” response) to potentially detrimental changes, at first in cellular immunity and then in broader immune function. This analysis suggests that stressors that turn a person’s world upside down and appear to offer no hope for the future probably have the greatest psychological and physiological impact.

The authors also found that age and disease status affected a person’s vulnerability to stress-related decreases in immune function. It seems that illness and age make it harder for the body to regulate itself.

This is a ground-breaking meta-analysis that helps us understand the complex relationship between stress and the immune system. It should lead to new treatments and to better stress management programs, especially for patients with HIV or other disorders that compromise immunity.

A child’s never-ending “why’s” aren’t meant to exasperate parents, scientists say. Rather, the kiddy queries are genuine attempts at getting at the truth, and tots respond better to some answers than others.
This new finding, based on a two-part study involving children ages 2 to 5, also suggests they are much more active about their knowledge-gathering than previously thought.

Kids are good at fact finding
“Even from really early on when they start asking these how and why questions, they are asking them in order to get explanations,” lead researcher Brandy Frazier of the University of Michigan told LiveScience.
When explanations came their way, the little ones probed further, they found. “Kids are playing more of an active role in learning about the world around them than we may have expected,” Frazier said.
The new findings, which are detailed in the November/December issue of the journal Child Development, can’t be generalized to all children since the sample sizes were small.

Curious chatter
Past research from the early to mid 1900s on child development had suggested that young children were only aware of temporal relationships between two events and couldn’t differentiate cause from effect until about 7 or 8 years of age. More recent work has suggested otherwise, that as early as age 3 children get causality.
Lacking from such studies are kids’ reactions to the information they get to their causal questions.
To figure out kids’ responses to different questions, Frazier and her colleagues examined transcripts from everyday conversations of six kids, ages 2 to 4, who were speaking with parents, siblings and visitors at home. With just six kids, the researchers analyzed the transcripts, more than 580 of them, as their unit of analysis. Overall, there were more than 3,100 causal how and why questions such as, “Why my tummy so big, mom?” “Why not keep a light on?” and “How can snakes hear if they don’t have ears?”

Fact seeking
Results showed kids were more than twice as likely to re-ask their question after a non-explanation compared with a real answer. And when they did get an explanation, which was about 37 percent of the time, they were more than four times as likely to reply with a follow-up inquiry as if they had received a non-explanatory response.
Preliminary results from a separate new study of Frazier’s suggest there is such a thing as too much information in a response. “It seems like kids might have an optimal level of detail they’re interested in,” Frazier said.

Odd items
The next part of the new study was lab-based and involved 42 preschoolers, ages 3 to 5, who chatted when prompted with toys, storybooks and videos. The items were designed to create surprising, question-provoking situations. For instance, kids were shown a box of all-red crayons, a puzzle with a piece that didn’t fit, and a storybook describing a child who poured orange juice on his cereal.
The adults who showed kids each item had certain explanatory and non-explanatory responses. So as expected, kids asked about the orange-juice scenario: “Why did he do that?” The adult would then respond with the explanation, “He thought it was milk in the pitcher,” or the non-explanation, “I like to put milk on my cereal.”
They found significant differences in types of reactions to the explanatory answers versus the non-explanatory ones. Nearly 30 percent of the time kids would agree, nod or say “oh” after getting a true explanation, compared with just under 13 percent of the time for non-explanations.
For such non-answers, more than 20 percent of the time kids re-asked the original question. Just 1 percent of kids receiving an explanation did the same.
The newly published study was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Conclusion
If you want your kids to learn you have to make a genuine effort to explain them how the world is.

The Government has announced that patients who wait too long on the NHS will have the right to free private care for the first time,
The new legal right will apply to all those forced to wait more than 18 weeks for treatment and cancer sufferers not seen by a specialist within a fortnight.

Ministers plan to launch a consultation on the finer details of the scheme but insist that the new laws will come into force by the start of April next year.
The Government will also consult on other potential new rights, such as the right to die at home or to access NHS dentistry

Around 400,000 people wait more than 18 weeks for treatment every year in Britain, although ministers insist that many of these delay their own treatment for a wide variety of reasons.

The new waiting times rights will be announced by Gordon Brown during his monthly press conference.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, has already declared that the legal right will be a “key battleground” for the next general election.
He said: “Turning targets into legal rights will empower patients and guarantee them the same high standards of care, regardless of where they live.”

But doctors’ leaders have warned that some patients could be forced to wait longer for treatment because of the new right.
Opposition parties also accused the Government of making an “unaffordable and uncosted pledge” that had more to do with the prospect of an upcoming General Election than with improving the health service.

The NHS has seen substantial cuts in waiting times in recent years and 93.7 per cent of hospital patients are now treated within 18 weeks.
That figure is even higher for urgent cancer referrals, with 94.1 per cent being seen by a specialist within two weeks.

Some NHS organisations already outsource some patients to private health care providers but this will be the first time that patients have the right to demand the treatment.

The Government insists that it can bring in the new right under the Health Bill already going through parliament, which will also enshrine the NHS constitution in law, and will not have to bring forward any extra legislation.

Opposition politicians accused the Government of not knowing how much the move would cost.
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: “This is the latest in a series of unaffordable and uncosted pledges that have more to do with electioneering than improving the NHS.”

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee, said: “Many doctors remain frustrated by examples of political targets being prioritised over the needs of individual patients.
“If one group of patients gains a legal right by virtue of how long they have waited, there is a risk that others with more serious conditions will wait longer.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health insisted that the proposals would be “largely cost-neutral”, and that increased costs would be offset by efficient use of extra capacity.