"Mention contemplation to a lot of people, and all they think of is some kind of (wacky) spiritualism, people sitting around a darkened room with candles, chanting," says Raz, a McGill University professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention.
"Our ideas are shaped by Hollywood movies. So you talk about hypnosis, and people see something out of a Woody Allen movie, a guy in a turban with bushy eyebrows who wants to put you to sleep."
But "trim away the folkloric fat," and Raz, a cognitive psychologist who worked his way through graduate school doing magic tricks, sees mindfulness training as a valuable, drug-free tool in the struggle to foster attention skills, with positive spinoffs for controlling our emotions and even making us smarter.
"We live in a time when modern medicine is weighted heavily toward pharmaceuticals.
"Everyone wants a magic bullet that will help them lose 40 pounds, or a surgical procedure that will cure all our ills," says Raz, who will be speaking Wednesday about the chemical benefits of brain science and chicken soup as part of McGill's Mini-Science lecture series. (MORE)
Source: montreal Gazzette
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