Does meditation make people act more rationally? : Thoughts from Kansas - 1 views
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people who meditate frequently behave in a more rational manner than non-meditators, and they do so because different parts of their brain take charge of certain kinds of decisions.
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in the Ultimatum Game, you only get one shot, and the smart move is to take the free money. Punishing greed serves no purpose there, but people do it consistently.
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Meditators began rejecting offers at the same point, but the rate of their decline leveled off around 50% for very poor offers (18:2 and 19:1), while the control group kept dropping. In other words, they were less willing to punish greedy behavior, and more willing to behave rationally by accepting unfair offers.
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Comparing the networks of brain regions activated by unfair offers, they found that the control group matched previous studies' findings, while "In sharp contrast, meditators showed activity in an entirely separate network"
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Surprisingly, given that they were behaving more rationally, the meditators "did not draw upon ... regions typically seen for mathematical and logical reasoning. Instead, they drew upon ... areas usually linked to visceral, emotional rather than rational, deliberative functions." Their brain patterns were not those associated with an abstract analysis of the game's logic, but rather matched patterns seen in people contemplating altruistic actions.
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If meditation is retraining the brain, then it's entirely possible that we'd find similar effects from prayer, as other research has found comparable effects on the brain between prayer and meditation. If the trend holds, it may suggest that people who decide to pray or meditate may wind up behaving more rationally than those who reject prayer and meditation as irrational.