The Martinos Center’s Gaelle Desbordes and colleagues have shown that meditation can have lasting impact on brain function, even outside periods of formal meditation.
Their research focused on a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in the processing of emotional stimuli. Functional MRI scans showed decreased activity in the amygdala in response to images with emotional content after eight weeks of meditation training.
Alok Jha of the Observer recently spoke with Martinos Center researcher Van Wedeen about his work with the connectome. Read what he had to say in "My life as a guinea pig for science."
Members of the Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging (LCN) at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging are exploring new ways to conduct basic, clinical, and cognitive neuroscience research through the use of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging technologies.
Though diacritics are a central feature of Arabic reading, their cognitive and neural effects remain less well understood. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate differences between brain activation patterns associated with real words with versus without diacritics in adult Arabic readers using a lexical decision task. We found no significant difference in accuracy between real words with and without diacritics.
