What have I found in our research? Um...we've been doing a bit of work at Yale now that's been really rewarding in the sense, we started doing some clinical trials with people with addictions and we found that it was helpful for alcohol, for cocaine and even helped people quit smoking. It did as well as the best, even better, than the best treatments out there. We also found that the more people practiced the better they did, so you know your mom was right, "do your homework" [laughs] um... but even more recently we have gone back and said "okay this seems to work clinically, well let's look and see what's going on in the brain", so with the help of some experienced meditator volunteers we actually had people meditate in our fMRI scanner, you know where we can study their brain activity while they were meditating and found some really remarkable things that we're very excited about. There's this part of your, there's this network that seems to fire all the time - we called it the 'Default mode network' because that's what we default to. This happens about fifty percent of the day's work thinking about this or that, regretting things we did and worrying about things we haven't done and that's the Default mode network firing. Well what we found was with experienced meditators when they are meditating this default mode got dampened - it quietened down and was less active. Remarkably it was less active during three different types of meditations. So whether they were paying attention to an object like the bread or paying attention to whatever was coming into their awareness or even doing a practice we call 'love and kindness' where they intentionally wish well to others, that this this area got the activated. Better than that it seems that even when they're meditating this network of regions, which is typically just firing kind of on its own, started to get linked with other networks that haven't been shown to be linked before. So other networks that they're involved in such as self-monitoring, cognitive control and so this was happening during meditation and it was happening at baseline when w'ren't telling them to do anything in particular. So they may be monitoring for self related stuff for mind wandering all the time and then whenever they notice that their wind is wondering they say "Hey" and get back to the present moment. So it's been a very fun ride. Has Meditation been shown to help us physically? Uh... well certainly there's a big connection between the brain and body, so when there's less stress it's been shown to help with a number of physiological things, whether it's blood pressure, demian system. In Mindfulness itself actually there was a study done by Richard Davidson's Group in Wisconsin in the US where they taught people mindfulness and actually show that they can boost their immune system just through practicing Mindfulness.