HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
COURTESY OF PROMEGA CORP.
CORPORATE ZEN
those of other employees by an
average of $2,000 a year. Last
year, Aetna reduced its health care
costs by 7 percent — a savings the
CEO pegs in part to limiting stress
through meditation and yoga.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has emerged as an
authority in the nascent field of
studying the effects of Asian-inspired meditation practices on the
traditionally un-Zen-like domain
of the business world. In the summer of 1997, he led a research project that studied the impacts of a
limited meditation program on the
brain and immune system functions of workers at Promega.
One team of workers engaged
in a weekly meditation class led
by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the medical
professor celebrated as a pioneer
of mindfulness training. A control
group went about their lives as
usual, without meditation. Following the eight-week class, Davidson’s researchers hooked up the
participants’ to an EEG machine
to record their brain activity. The
team gave participants flu shots
and then took blood samples. The
people who got the meditation
showed “changes in their brain
function toward ways associated
with well-being and resilience,”
Davidson says. They also showed
“improved response to vaccine.”
For Linton, Promega’s CEO,
those findings merely reinforced
what he accepted as truth. “It affirmed for me the value of mindfulness and meditation,” he says.
Promega
employees
have a variety
of yoga
classes at
their disposal
throughout
the week, no
matter their
experience.