>>Bob Roth: Every experience changes the brain.
There's a part of the brain -- and I'm talking
to a lot of people who know this -- called
the prefrontal cortex.
The frontal lobes.
It's about the size of your fist.
It's behind your forehead here, and what it
does is it's the executive functioning.
It's the higher self.
It governs decision-making, judgment, planning,
problem solving, sense of self, intuition.
And you know what takes it offline?
Stress.
Anxiety, fatigue.
Does a stressed person -- Does a stressed
person make good decisions?
Does an anxious person have good judgment?
No.
And what they found is that when -- and I'm
going to explain it, and I see my time there.
What they found is that when we sit and meditate,
when the active thinking mind settles down
and the body takes a profound state of rest,
you can see on an EEG machine and you can
see it on the brain scans, the neural pathways,
the connections between the front of the brain
and the back of the brain, and the connections
between the left and right hemispheres of
the brain, those connections, those neurons
fire together.
And they say when the neurons fire together,
they wire together.
And because of the neural plasticity of the
brain, when we sit and meditate and the brain
makes those connections, they last in activity.
We maintain it and make better decisions,
better judgment, better planning.
We're more ourselves.
