Episode 60 :: Fadel Zeidan & John McHaffie :: Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation

By Ted Meissner | April 15, 2011

Dr. Fadel Zeidan

Dr. Fadel Zeidan and Dr. John McHaffie join us to speak about their neurological study, Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.

Hi, everyone. One of the things we secular types are often faced with is that we want to see evidence. We may be a bit skeptical of mystical explanations of what happens in our minds during meditation, for example. Happily, modern science is providing an increasingly robust body of knowledge, as brain scans provide the hard evidence that supports the expectation that our experiences, in addition to being wonderful and transformative, are perfectly natural biological events.

Dr. Fadel Zeidan is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, having gotten his Doctorate of Philosophy in Experimental Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte. He was awarded the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute Research Fellowship in 2009, and has a number of studies published on the effects of meditation on the experience of pain.

Dr. John McHaffie

Dr. John McHaffie is Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, and has been a meditator for many years. His previous contributions to the field includes interactions between the midbrain superior colliculus and the basal ganglia, cross-modal rehabilitative training with auditory-visual cues ameliorates visual hemineglect in visual cortex lesioned cats, and of course my favorite, anterior ectosylvian subregions send converging inputs with multiple morphologies to multisensory superior colliculus neurons.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Evening in Missoula.