Dr. Richard Davidson

and there is discipline involved in that, but it's kind of what is the minimum level of discipline to begin to get these networks going?

And that's kind of the question that we've asked.

could be done while you're walking, while you're commuting.

Yeah.

Just to be transparently honest, there's been very little imaging work on the five minutes per day.

We've done some.

And what we've seen in the work we've done is the biggest, and in general I think this is true, the biggest changes that you see, particularly in the early stages of practice, are in measures of connectivity.

and it could be functional connectivity which has to do with the functional integration across different networks or it could be in measures of actual structural connectivity that we can image with diffusion weighted imaging and looking at white matter connectivity.

And what we've actually seen with the five minutes a day is changes in diffusion weighted imaging looking

I mean, the biggest change we see is in the superior longitudinal fasciculus which, as you know, Andrew, connects the prefrontal and the parietal regions and it's basically a major pathway through which the central executive network is interacting with the default mode.

And that's what we see with just five minutes a day of practice.

We can see measurable changes in

diffusion weighted parameters with just five minutes a day for a month.

I love that.

I think that's beautiful.

And I'd love to see a study done with pre-sleep prayer and see how it affects sleep.

Yeah, I love that.

And I feel exactly the same way in my consistent practice.

I think that's so important.

I wanted to mention one thing about sleepiness, because you mentioned that sometimes when you're doing the nightly prayer, you're sleepy.