Meditating for a better brain

From the June edition of Men's Journal:

"In a University of Wisconsin study of Buddhist monks, researcher Richard Davidson used electroencephalograph readings to prove that monks can generate gamma waves, which are associated with attention and learning, for minutes at a time; mere mortals can sustain a few seconds of gamma activity at best. The same monks also showed an unusual amount of activity in the left side of their prefrontal cortices, which are associated with positive feelings. Sure enough, the monks were startlingly alert and happy....

"When Harvard researcher Sara Lazar recently compared the brains of American meditators to a control group, she found that parts of the cortex responsible for attention were on average 5 percent thicker...."