While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional literacy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.

But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.

There are a host of surprises among longer-term meditators, like a boost in the immune system from a day of practice, which is not seen in beginners, and a rapid recovery from stress or pain. At the "Olympic level" we find there is no anticipatory anxiety when the stress of pain is certain to come, and no lingering aftereffects - unlike the stress reactions in ordinary folk.

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.