The Neuroscience of Meditation

As we learn more about neuroplasticity, it's increasingly clear that the brain is continuously being shaped by experience. So we really have a choice as human beings, whether we wish to have our brains shaped willy-nilly by the forces that impact upon us or take a more active responsibility for shaping our own brains in ways to promote more positive kinds of qualities. The current neuroscience-oriented research indicates that we can indeed take more responsibility and actively promote the more positive shaping of our brains through the explicit cultivation of positive mental states and challenging negative mental states. Doing so leads to systematic changes in the brain which can be enduring and may be important not just for our emotional well-being, but for our physical well-being, as well.--Richie Davidson

The effect of meditation on the brain is a hot topic of research right now, and I wanted to devote a post on this blog to the topic. The brain waves of Zen meditators were actually studied in Japan before WWII, but as brain imaging techniques have become progressively more sophisticated, research in this area has really taken off.

A leader in this research and a pioneer in the fields of affective neuroscience (the study of neural mechanisms of emotion) and of neuroplasticity is Dr. Richie Davidson. Richie is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging & Behavior, and the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.

Richie talks about the work being done in his laboratories in a podcast and in the Google Talks video below.

Highlights from the podcast:
Subjects in the studies in his laboratories range from very long-term practitioners who have been practicing for tens of thousands of hours across their lifetime to novice practitioners who are new to meditation.

Three general conclusions that can be made from this research include:

1. Even really short amounts of practice in novice practitioners has discernible effects
2. More practice leads to greater improvements, on a number of different indices
3. The relationship between amount of practice and the magnitude of change is not a strictly linear one. In some cases, the magnitude of change may actually be greater because there is more room to see improvement, at least on certain measures.

Big questions that remain in relation to the neuroscience of meditation:

1. How can we better understand an individual's unique cognitive and emotional style and make predictions about what specific types of practice might be most efficacious for an individual with a given style?
2. How can we develop or optimize methods of meditation training for children in a way that is developmentally appropriate?
3. How meditation might induce changes in gene expression?

What's currently hot in your lab?

A major issue front and center is to better understand the nature of emotion regulation. We believe the capacity to regulate emotion, both consciously and unconsciously (or we might say through voluntary means vs. more automatic means), is something that lies at the heart of individual differences in emotional style and emotional reactivity and it is also central to understanding why certain individuals may be vulnerable to particular kinds of psychiatric disorders in the face of adversity and why other individuals may be resilient and be relatively immune to the development of such disorders. So we have been very interested in better understanding the neural bases of emotion regulation and also how individual differences in emotion regulation relate to peripheral biology, health, and so forth.

Richie on the links between meditation and neuroscience:

We have within each of us the capacity to change our own mind and brain through systematic mental training. The contemplative traditions have much to offer in delineating specific methods and procedures for training the mind and cultivating certain positive qualities. I also believe that positive qualities like happiness and kindness and compassion are all best regarded as the skills that can be enhanced through training. All of that meshes very well with modern understandings from neuroscience of plasticity and the fact that circuits in the brain can be shaped through experience and training. So all of this really makes a lot of sense from both the contemplative perspectives as well as from scientific perspectives.

Dr. Sara Lazar, neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, is another leader in meditation brain research. One main focus of her work is looking at how meditation influences brain structure.

When asked what sorts of brain meditation studies are needed in the future in this podcast, she says:

There's a lot to be done. Certainly, it has been shown that meditation reduces stress and promotes attention, but that's just the beginning. ... When you think about it, it's really amazing, because all you're doing is sitting there and watching your breath, and then that leads to emotion regulation and stress reduction, but also spirituality, changes in interpersonal relationships, better physical health, better mental health. So we need a better understanding of how you go from that really simple practice of watching the breath to this wide range of benefits...

If you have the chance, check out Richie Davidson's presentation on Google Talks:



There's really so much fascinating material here. I may come back later to do a recap, but for now I'll just encourage you to watch it.

I particularly love Richie's closing thoughts on envisioning the future. He says:

I believe, in 2050, mental exercise will be accepted and practiced in the same way physical exercise is today. Also, in 2050, we will have a science of virtuous qualities. In 2050, we will incorporate the mind back into medicine and better understand how the brain can modulate peripheral biology in ways that affect our health, and I think this will lead us to more collectively take responsibility for our own health. We will also develop a secular approach to provide methods and practices from contemplative traditions to:

Teach teachers and children ways to better regulate emotions and attention and cultivate qualities like kindness and compassion, and regard these qualities as the product of skills that can be trained

Transform corrections so that forgiveness can be cultivated in victims and emotion regulation and stress reduction in offenders

Increase awareness of our interdependence upon others and upon the planet and be more responsible caretakers of our precious environment

Promote more widespread adoption of these practices into the major institutions of our culture. This will help to restore civility, humility, gratitude, and other virtues in our culture

Best of the West + Best of the East

For this post, I want to look further at the ideas of Shinzen Young. I think this guy is brilliant, and as long as I've been exposed to mindfulness and Buddhist teachings, I've never heard a perspective as unique as his. The following excerpts are from the Buddhist Geeks Podcast interview with him, which you can listen to here.

Shinzen, remember, defines mindfulness as a three-fold attentional skill-set, involving the gradual development of concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Concentration power here is defined as the ability to focus on what is deemed relevant. Sensory clarity is the ability to keep the components in your sensory experience separate in awareness. So when you have an emotion, you can break it down into a visual component (mental images), auditory component (internal talk), and somatic component (emotional feel). Equanimity is the ability to allow sensory experience to well up and subside, without supressing it as it wells up and without inappropriately latching on as it subsides.



So basically, says Shinzen, with mindfulness, you develop concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and "the more that you have concentration, clarity and equanimity, the more you will happy independent of conditions." He relates the attentional skill components to the following:

A. Your ability to experience physical discomfort without suffering
B. Your ability to experience emotional discomfort without suffering
C. Your ability to experience physical pleasure with enhanced fulfillment
D. Your ability to experience emotional pleasure with enhanced fulfillment
E. Your ability to understand who you are
F. Your ability to make behavior changes you need to make in your life

I think this is why mindfulness is appropriate for virtually everyone. Indeed, decades of research have explored how mindfulness can be helpful for individuals dealing with physical and/or psychological issues, as well as for healthy people seeking to live at their optimum.

According to Shinzen, mindfulness can be taught systematically and even as an algorithm. So, for instance: Do S. Then, X, Y, or Z will happen. If X happens, do A.. if Y happens, do B... if Z happens, do C until D happens. This means teachers "can loop and branch and optimize people's experience with [mindfulness practice]". Learning mindfulness with this sort of systematic guidance may be a personal preference for some. It also aligns more with the "doing" with which Westerners are accustomed, as opposed to just paying attention and "being".

Shinzen really gets you thinking with this next one. Using an analogy involving the history of mathmatics, he notes that, prior to the 17th century, math consisted of two branches: arithmetic (the study of numbers) and geometry (the study of space). When coordinate geometry was discovered as a link between the two, it paved the way for an entirely new branch: calculus. Shinzen proposes that if the greatest achievements of the Eastern and Western civilizations were brought together, "it could give birth to a completely new direction in human knowing, a direction difficult to even imagine at this time" (from his article, "Applications of Mindfulness Meditation in the Study of Human Consciousness").




In the podcast, he describes the best of the East as the "technology of internal psycho-spiritual exploration through meditation." In Shinzen's words: "Once you really appreciate how systematic, and in a sense, proto-scientific, Asian meditation is in general, and most specifically, early Buddhism--mindfulness, and you realize what an achievement this is, it's like you're standing on this pinnacle that is a high point of human achievement relative to all of humanity, the whole world, and our entire species' history."

There is another peak comparable in depth and power, as Shinzen sees it: "The mixture of physical reasoning, logical reasoning, skepticism, and experimentation. The West put that all together, plus a group cooperative culture, where information must be shared."

Shinzen goes on, "So there's this eastern science of understanding who we are at the psychological and deep spiritual level and achieving happiness independent of conditions, and then there's this western science that understands how the natural world works and is able to manipulate conditions to achieve happiness dependent on conditions but a much more powerful way than anyone ever achieved before. What if these could get together? What if they mated? Is that possible? If the best of the East and the best of the West were able to produce a hybrid child, of some sort..."

What are your thoughts on this? Any imaginative, dreamer folks out there? Shinzen really stretches me here, so I don't know quite what such a hybrid would look like. However, I love his teachings and the way he lays a broad framework and then breaks things down sequentially. It is my thinking that this sort of approach to teaching mindfulness has the greatest potential to be received by Westerners.