Center for Healthy Minds

This year's The World We Make event is free and open to the public, from October 5 - 9, 2020. The nightly virtual events  will explore science of well-being and feature new insights from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

In a recent collaborative study across institutions, researchers developed a new framework to identify mental states during meditation. This included the focus-on-breath state and mind wandering, and estimates of how much time meditators spend in each state.

Researchers at the Center for Healthy Minds found that people who took part in the most common and widely available secular mindfulness program did not experience psychological harm at a rate higher compared to people in control groups who did not take part in the program.

In a recent study, the brain of monk and long-time meditator Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, who was 41 years old at the time, looked eight years younger than his actual age. The possibility that a person’s “brain-age” might be affected by meditation adds to a growing list of how mental training may yield lasting changes.

A recent paper published by researchers at the Center for Healthy Minds shows that mindfulness training for preservice teachers leads to improvements in effective classroom teacher practices.

A new study shows that the young children of parents who take part in a compassion-based training program develop lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol over time.