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By Scott Coulter Years ago, I heard about a study measuring the sensory responses of Zen monks compared to the responses of everyday people. The results of this study were incredibly interesting and have far-reaching lessons for the rest of us. Here's the study, in a nutshell (as my mother would say): Researchers gathered a group of Zen monks in a room with a television monitor. After giving each monk a biomed sensor to monitor their reactions, they began showing random images on the screen. These images were, for the most part, violent images, shocking images, or very sexual images. In other words, they were the kind of images designed to excite. The hypothesis going into the study was that the spike in biological activity (heart rate, adrenaline, brain-wave activity, etc.) would be much lower than the spike for everyday people off the street. It wasn't. You see, here's where it gets really interesting. The spike was almost identical for the monks and for the control group. The difference was in how quickly that spike came back down. For people in the control group, an image of a naked man or woman would cause a spike, and the activity would then REMAIN heightened for an extended period of time. It was generally measured in minutes. When the monks were shown the same image, the spike lasted mere seconds before returning to its baseline. What this means for us One of the themes that first occurred to me when I heard about this was the idea of forgiveness. Working as a therap...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs