Richard J. Davidson, "Speed Compassion"
Richard J. Davidson & Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live -- and How You Can Change Them , 2012, Section: "Speed Compassion," pages 220-224. *** Having established that long-term meditation might produce changes in the brain that support greater compassion ("might" reflects the possibility I mentioned at the start of this chapter that a study like this cannot determine whether the monks' brains were like this as a result of meditation, or whether their unusual brains caused them to devote themselves to the contemplative life). I wanted to see whether short experience with meditation could do something similar. In 2007, therefore, we recruited forty-one volunteers for a study that, we told them, would teach them a technique to improve well-being. We randomly assigned everyone to either a meditation group or a group that would learn something called cognitive reappraisal. Derive