Is it surprising that extended, intensive mental practice (in this case, mindfulness style meditation) can reshape how our brains work? As babies, we form our

Is it surprising that extended, intensive mental practice (in this case, mindfulness style meditation) can reshape how our brains work? As babies, we form our sense of being - from what touch "feels" like to what food tastes like - from our experiences. And we tend to go through life adding and slightly modifying those fundamental neural pathways we've built. But if you then do a 180 and start practicing and reinforcing very different pathways, where will you end up? In the article, where he ended up seems bad indeed, but that is relative to where he started (and where most of us live). Probably many of us here have at one time or other spent way too much time and focus on one obsession. Take chess, for example. If you spend hours a day focused on chess, it will absolutely reshape the way you think, and that will bleed over to non-chess moments. You may find yourself sitting at a restaurant, mentally playing out the possibilities and scenarios of an impending conversation with the server where you will attempt to avoid having to buy dessert (because you don't want it, or whatever your reason). Or you may find that in the middle of a meeting, you suddenly only exist on a chessboard, stuck in a game problem you have been trying to find a good answer to. But with this mindfulness meditation, especially since it also explicitly closes off external reality, you will be building some very strange new paths in your mind. Stay there too long, and perhaps you get lost. The old wisdom is probably worth heeding here: all things in moderation.