'Mindfulness', the process of learning to become more aware of our ongoing experiences, increases well-being in adolescent boys, a new study reports.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed 155 boys from two independent UK schools, Tonbridge and Hampton, before and after a four-week crash course in mindfulness. After the trial period, the 14 and 15 year-old boys were found to have increased well-being, defined as the combination of feeling good (including positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, interest and affection) and functioning well.
"George Gallup, in one of his Gallup Polls surveyed Americans on the topic of Forgiveness. He found that Forgiveness is something virtually all Americans aspire to --94% surveyed in a nationwide Gallup poll said it was important to forgive. But it is not something we frequently are able to do.
Very few places in the world can claim to be pitch black. The only appropriate candidates would be an enclosure where only a handful of photons remain. [Fritz-Albert] Popp possessed such a place, a room so dark that only the barest few photons of light per minute could be detected in it. This was the only fit laboratory in which to measure the light of human beings.
At a certain point I began to recognize, first with wonder and then alarm, that I had trespassed into dangerous new territory, a fledgling science in the very act of its creation. The scientific foundation that we had all believed in, on which all our confident assertions about ourselves and our place in the world presently rested, was disintegrating right in front of me. The book I’d talked myself into writing was going to require no less than redefining our present concept of reality.
- from the Introduction of Lynne McTaggart's ground-breaking book, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
In a 1962 experiment Drs. Harriet Linton and Robert Langs told test subjects they were going to participate in a study on the effects of LSD, but then gave them a placebo instead. Nonetheless, half an hour after taking the placebo, the subjects began to experience the classic symptoms of the actual drug, loss of control, supposed insight into the meaning of existence, and so on. These “placebo trips” lasted several hours.
