Evening Keynote: Common-Sense Contemplation

In this evening keynote Dr. Clifford Saron will present findings from the study of intensive meditation and their relevance in daily life. An Associate Research Scientist at the University of California Davis Center for Mind and Brain, Dr. Saron has had a long‐standing interest in the effects of mindfulness on physiology and behavior. He makes the science approachable and the results tangible.

Dr. Saron is Principal Investigator of the Shamatha Project, the most comprehensive study to date investigating the effects of long‐term intensive meditation practice on physiological and psychological processes central to well‐being, attention, emotion regulation and health.

At the Center for Mind and Brain, Dr. Saron's work centers on two broad areas. The first is the training of attention and emotion regulation through contemplative practice, and the second concerns sensory processing, multisensory integration, and interhemispheric communication in children with autism spectrum disorders.

The Center's “Shamatha Project” is a large-scale collaborative and multi-method longitudinal study of the effects of intensive meditation training. They use qualitative, self-report, behavioral, electrophysiological, and biochemical measures to begin to elucidate the many levels of personal and physiological change that accompany such training. His research focuses on sensory processing, multisensory integration, and interhemispheric communication in children with autism spectrum disorders. In collaboration with colleagues at the CMB and M.I.N.D. Institute they are using sensitive behavioral measures, eye tracking, and dense channel array event-related potentials to investigate possible deficits in these low-level processes which likely contribute to the complex phenotype of autism.