Brian Mockenhaupt reports on the military's experiments with brain training:
[M]editation has been shown to increase gray-matter volume and bolster synapses in the brain’s pre-frontal cortex, which hones attention and helps put an event in context, rather than letting the amygdala, the brain’s fight-or-flight center, hijack the body’s reaction to stressful situations.
Major Jeffrey Davis’s elite Marine unit was trained in meditation before its 2008 Iraq deployment, in one of the first scientific studies of meditation within the military. Davis became a quick believer. "We look at all of these weapons systems around us as necessary for war," he says. "But it’s the human mind that operates all these things. If I can find a better way to train a Marine—if I can teach him to react quicker, to think quicker, to learn quicker, to act wiser in an ambiguous situation—the better off we are."
The Dish 