Positive Technology Journal

Awareness of subtle emotional feelings: a comparison of long-term meditators and nonmeditators.

Emotion. 2006 Aug;6(3):392-405

Authors: Nielsen L, Kaszniak AW

Neuroimaging of meditation's effect on brain reactivity to pain.

Neuroreport. 2006 Aug 21;17(12):1359-63

Authors: Orme-Johnson DW, Schneider RH, Son YD, Nidich S, Cho ZH

Some meditation techniques reduce pain, but there have been no studies on how meditation affects the brain's response to pain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the response to thermally induced pain applied outside the meditation period found that long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation technique showed 40-50% fewer voxels responding to pain in the thalamus and total brain than in healthy matched controls interested in learning the technique. After the controls learned the technique and practiced it for 5 months, their response decreased by 40-50% in the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, total brain, and marginally in the anterior cingulate cortex. The results suggest that the Transcendental Meditation technique longitudinally reduces the affective/motivational dimension of the brain's response to pain.

Via the Neurophilosopher's blog 

Alexander Pines and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working on a new laser-based MRI technique which may lead to the development of a cheap and compact scanning device.

The experimental technique is based on a method called atomic magnetometry, which allows to detect the magnetic signals produced by water molecules without the large magnets or complex cooling systems used in conventional fMRI.

From the LBNL website:

Alexander Pines and colleagues at Berkeley Lab have developed a method to improve NMR/MRI resolution either inside of poorly shimmed magnets or outside of portable one-sided magnet systems, which accommodate arbitrarily sized samples.  This technique will enable for the first time the collection of multidimensional NMR/ MRI information in cases where on-the-spot medical diagnosis is critical, where samples cannot be moved to or placed inside of a superconducting magnet, or where inexpensive, highly inhomogeneous magnets are being used.  Other ex situ systems give relaxation data and sometimes slice-selective images, but not spectra and true 3D images.

Via Neuroguy 

MIT’s Technology Review has an interesting article that describes the development of silicon nanowires to measure small electrical signals on the same neuron: