Davidson Medicine

For listeners of Kristine Barnett's The Spark, Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree, and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, here is a heartfelt, funny, and surprising memoir about one year spent driving a bus full of children with special needs.

by Errol R. Norwitz (Author), George R. Saade (Author), Hugh Miller (Author), Christina M. Davidson (Author)

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman with Richard Davidson. The neurological foundation of emotional intelligence - Understand the brain systems involved in: self-awareness, motivation, and emotional recovery.

"The best way to activate positive-emotion circuits in the brain is through generosity," Davidson, who founded the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "This is really a kind of exciting neuroscientific finding because there are pearls of wisdom in the contemplative tradition - the Dalai Lama frequently talks about this - that the best way for us to be happy is to be generous to others. And in fact the scientific evidence is in many ways bearing this out, and showing that there are systematic changes in the brain that are associated with acts of generosity."

More than forty years ago, two friends and collaborators at Harvard, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson were unusual in arguing for the benefits of meditation. Now, as mindfulness and other brands of meditation become ever more popular, promising to fix everything from our weight to our relationship to our professional career, these two bestselling authors sweep away the misconceptions around these practices and show how smart practice can change our personal traits and even our genome for the better.

The score is written for a 60 piece orchestra, piano, percussion and electronics. It was recorded in Studio 22, Hungarian Radio in Budapest and was conducted by Peter Pejtsik. The film follows a group of veterans from the war in Afghanistan suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who undergo treatment involving yoga and meditation, overseen by the world-renowned psychiatrist, Richard Davidson. By studying Buddhist monks, Davidson has found that it is possible to rewire your brain through meditation. Some of the effects are that you become more altruistic, compassionate and happy. Davidson also wants to study how early in life you can start, using the same methods of meditation and yoga in an experiment with children with ADHD. Through the film, we experience what meditation does to human beings and we investigate, if we, by using other methods than taking medicine to ease our pain, can lead less stressful and happier lives.