Adonis Diaries

Emotional Intelligence? And Performance criteria in Meditation research…

Mindfulness is the ability to voluntarily bring back a wandering attention, over and over again…

This ability is the very root of judgment, character and will.

And this ability to improve mindfulness requires education and training par excellence … (William James, father of modern psychology)

Before I mention the performance criteria in meditation research, it is good to describe what the book objectives in “Search Inside Yourself” by Chade-Meng Tan are:

Emotional Intelligence: Like what?

1. Self-awareness for knowing your internal emotional states, preferences, resources, and kinds of intuitions…

2. Self-regulating your internal emotional states, impulses and resources…

3. Motivating your emotional tendencies that guide and facilitate reaching a few of your goals

4. Empathy and awareness of other’s feelings, needs and concerns. For example, your first intuition on meeting anybody is to say to yourself “I wish for this person to be happy”

5. Building social skills and getting adept at including desirable responses in others…

Performance criteria in meditation research:

1. High-amplitude gamma brain waves: Associated with high effectiveness in memory, learning and perception

2. Healing of psoriasis: a skin condition characterized by red spots that grow larger as the disease worsens

3. Thicker cortex in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing.

4. Lowering anxiety level:  Increased electrical activity in the brain regions associated with positive emotion…

5. Increased immunity to illnesses: Subjects in meditation group injected with flu shots develop more antibodies to the influenza vaccine

6. Attention- blink span: The normal attention-blink time for processing two successive stimuli is about 50 milliseconds. Meditation exercises reduce the span and permit to attend to two stimuli. Consequently, improvement in the ability to pay attention to information for a prolonged period of time…

Mindfulness permit the self-discovery in a scientific inquiry process.

Training the attention has for objective to improve and develop insight into the mind.

Thus, attention is a powerful torchlight that can spot what we are searching for in a dark room…