Residential Scholar Events Fall 2009

Residential scholar events occur most Friday nights. The events are organized by the Simmons Hall Residential Scholars, Graduate Resident Tutors, Residential Life Associate, and Associate Housemaster. Most events are open to the MIT community. Some smaller events, such as cooking events, are open to Simmons Hall residents only.

The diversity of the events is impressive, and limited only by the imagination of the Residential Scholars. The events for the Fall 2008 term are listed below; you can also see events from the Spring 2009 term. You can click on the the poster for each event to see a full-sized image.

The Attention Revolution: a Multimethod Inquiry into Meditation, Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation

Friday, September 11, 2009
6:00 PM

Organizers: Tenzin Priyadarshi, Danielle Hinton

Speakers: Cilfford Saron and B. Alan Wallace

Recent studies of the effects of meditation practices on stress management and emotional stability and of meditation as a therapeutic agent have produced exciting results. But the studies conducted to date have been short-term and have generally used nonintensive interventions. The Shamatha Project includes a team of talented neuroscientists and psychologists in a longer-term study, with state-of-the-art methods, to examine the effects of intensive meditation training on attention, cognitive performance, emotion regulation, and health. The expected benefits included greater attentional control and increased ability to regulate emotions and apply prosocial values and motives.