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CAN MEDITATION ALTER THE
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BRAIN ?
Continuing with what is becoming a series
on brain neuroplasticity and what it
means for those of us, who have beentold we can never recover. I suggest that
proclamation is hogwash!
Taken from the Dalai Lamas website for
educational purposes:
Dalai Lama helps scientists show thepower of the mind to sculpt our gray
matter.
Although science and religion are often in
conflict, the Dalai Lama takes a different
approach. Every year or so the head of
Tibetan Buddhism, invites a group of
scientists to his home in Dharamsala, in
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electrical impulses zip through our visual
cortex, for instance, we see; when
neurochemicals course through the limbicsystem we feel.
But something had always bothered him
about this explanation, the Dalai Lama
said. Could it work the other way around?
That is, in addition to the brain giving riseto thoughts and hopes and beliefs and
emotions, that add up to this thing we call
the mind, maybe the mind also acts back
on the brain, to cause physical changes,
in the very matter that created it. If so,then pure thought would change the
brains activity, its circuits or even its
structure.
One brain surgeon hardly paused.
Physical states give rise to mental states,he asserted; downward causation from
the mental to the physical is not possible.
The Dalai Lama let the matter drop. This
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wasnt the first time a man of science had
dismissed the possibility, that the mind
can change the brain. But I thought thenand still think ,that there is yet no
scientific basis for such a categorical
claim, he later explained. I am
interested in the extent to which the mind
itself, and specific subtle thoughts, may
have an influence upon the brain.
The Dalai Lama had put his finger on an
emerging revolution in brain research. In
the last decade of the 20th century,neuroscientists overthrew the dogma,
that the adult brain cant change. To the
contrary, its structure and activity can
morph in response to experience, an
ability called neuroplasticity. Thediscovery has led to promising new
treatments for children with dyslexia and
for stroke patients, among others.
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But the brain changes that were
discovered in the first rounds of the
neuroplasticity revolution, reflected inputfrom the outside world. For instance,
certain synthesized speech can alter the
auditory cortex of dyslexic kids, in a way
that lets their brains hear previously
garbled syllables; intensely practiced
movements can alter the motor cortex of
stroke patients and allow them to move
once paralyzed arms or legs.
The kind of change the Dalai Lama asked
about was different. It would come frominside. Something as intangible and
insubstantial as a thought would rewire
the brain. To the mandarins of
neuroscience, the very idea seemed as
likely as the wings of a butterfly, leaving
a dent on an armored tank.
Neuroscientist Helen Mayberg had not
endeared herself to the pharmaceutical
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industry by discovering, in 2002, that
inert pills placebos work the same
way on the brains of depressed people asantidepressants do. Activity in the frontal
cortex, the seat of higher thought,
increased; activity in limbic regions,
which specialize in emotions, fell. She
figured that cognitive-behavioral therapy,
in which patients learn to think about
their thoughts differently, would act by
the same mechanism.
At the University of Toronto, Dr. Mayberg,
Zindel Segal and their colleagues firstused brain imaging to measure activity in
the brains of depressed adults. Some of
these volunteers then received
paroxetine (the generic name of the
antidepressant Paxil), while others
underwent 15 to 20 sessions of cognitive-
behavior therapy, learning not to
catastrophize. That is, they were taught
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to break their habit of interpreting every
little setback as a calamity, as when they
conclude from a lousy date that no onewill ever love them.
All the patients depression lifted,
regardless of whether their brains were
infused with a powerful drug or with a
different way of thinking. Yet the onlydrugs that the cognitive-therapy group
received were their own thoughts.
The scientists scanned their patients
brains again, expecting that the changes
would be the same no matter which
treatment they received, as Dr. Mayberg
had found in her placebo study. But no.
We were totally dead wrong, she says.
Cognitive-behavior therapy mutedoveractivity in the frontal cortex, the seat
of reasoning, logic, analysis and higher
thought. The antidepressant raised
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activity there. Cognitive-behavior
therapy, raised activity in the limbic
system, the brains emotion center. Thedrug lowered activity there.
With cognitive therapy, says Dr. Mayberg,the brain is rewired to adopt differentthinking circuits.Such discoveries of how the mind can
change the brain, have a spooky quality
that makes you want to cue the Twilight
Zone theme, but they rest on a solid
foundation of animal studies. Attention,
for instance, seems like one of those
ephemeral things that comes and goes in
the mind, but has no real physical
presence. Yet attention can alter the
layout of the brain, as powerfully as a
sculptors knife can alter a slab of stone.
That was shown dramatically in an
experiment with monkeys in 1993.
Scientists at the University of California,
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San Francisco, rigged up a device that
tapped monkeys fingers 100 minutes a
day every day. As this bizarre dance wasplaying on their fingers, the monkeys
heard sounds through headphones. Some
of the monkeys were taught: Ignore the
sounds and pay attention to what you feel
on your fingers, because when you tell us
it changes ,well reward you with a sip of
juice. Other monkeys were taught: Pay
attention to the sound, and if you indicate
when it changes youll get juice.
After six weeks, the scientists comparedthe monkeys brains. Usually, when a spot
on the skin receives unusual amounts of
stimulation, the amount of cortex that
processes touch expands. That was what
the scientists found in the monkeys that
paid attention to the taps: The
somatosensory region that processes
information from the fingers doubled or
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tripled. But when the monkeys paid
attention to the sounds, there was no
such expansion. Instead, the region oftheir auditory cortex that processes the
frequency they heard increased.
Through attention, UCSFs Michael
Merzenich and a colleague wrote, Wechoose and sculpt how our ever-changing
minds will work, we choose who we will
be the next moment in a very real sense,
and these choices are left embossed in
physical form on our material selves.
The discovery that neuroplasticity cannot
occur without attention has important
implications. If a skill becomes so routine
you can do it on autopilot, practicing it
will no longer change the brain. And if youtake up mental exercises to keep your
brain young, they will not be as effective
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if you become able to do them without
paying much attention.
Since the 1990s, the Dalai Lama hadbeen lending monks and lamas to
neuroscientists for studies of how
meditation alters activity in the brain. The
idea was not to document brain changes
during meditation but to see whethersuch mental training produces enduring
changes in the brain.
All the Buddhist adepts experienced
meditators who lent their brains to
science had practiced meditation for atleast 10,000 hours. One by one, they
made their way to the basement lab of
Richard Davidson at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He and his
colleagues wired them up like latter-dayMedusas, a tangle of wires snaking from
their scalps to the lectroencephalograph
that would record their brain waves.
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Eight Buddhist adepts and 10 volunteers
who had had a crash course in meditation
engaged in the form of meditation, callednonreferential compassion. In this state,
the meditator focuses on unlimited
compassion and loving kindness, toward
all living beings.
As the volunteers began meditating, one
kind of brain wave grew exceptionally
strong: gamma waves. These, scientists
believe, are a signature of neuronal
activity, that knits together far-flungcircuits consciousness, in a sense.
Gamma waves appear when the brain
brings together different features of an
object, such as look, feel, sound and other
attributes that lead the brain to its ahamoment of, yup, thats an armadillo.
Some of the novices showed a slight but
significant increase in the gamma signal,
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Prof. Davidson explained to the Dalai
Lama. But at the moment the monks
switched on compassion meditation, thegamma signal began rising and kept
rising. On its own, that is hardly
astounding: Everything the mind does has
a physical correlate, so the gamma waves
(much more intense than in the novice
meditators) might just have been the
mark of compassion meditation.
Except for one thing. In between
meditations, the gamma signal in the
monks never died down. Even when theywere not meditating, their brains were
different from the novices brains, marked
by waves associated with perception,
problem solving and consciousness.
Moreover, the more hours of meditation
training a monk had had, the stronger
and more enduring the gamma signal.
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It was something Prof. Davidson had been
seeking since he trekked into the hills
above Dharamsala to study lamas andmonks: evidence that mental training can
create an enduring brain trait.
Prof. Davidson then used fMRI imaging to
detect which regions of the monks and
novices brains became active duringcompassion meditation. The brains of all
the subjects showed activity in regions
that monitor ones emotions, plan
movements, and generate positive
feelings such as happiness. Regions thatkeep track of what is self and what is
other became quieter, as if during
compassion meditation the subjects
opened their minds and hearts to others.
More interesting were the differencesbetween the monks and the novices. The
monks had much greater activation in
brain regions called the right insula and
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caudate, a network that underlies
empathy and maternal love. They also
had stronger connections from the frontalregions to the emotion regions, which is
the pathway by which higher thought can
control emotions.
In each case, monks with the most hoursof meditation showed the most dramatic
brain changes. That was a strong hint
that mental training makes it easier for
the brain to turn on circuits that underlie
compassion and empathy.
This positive state is a skill that can be
trained, Prof. Davidson says. Our
findings clearly indicate that meditation
can change the function of the brain in an
enduring way.
For two stories of healing from mental
illness through meditation see Janes
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story here and read Sally Clays story
here.
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Contemplating Oneness: The Neuroscience of
Meditation
Neuroscientists at New York University, study
longtime meditators to glean insight into how
our brains work.
Far from the proverbial mountain top or a quietshrine, one group of meditators is attempting
the ancient practice inside a brain-scanning
machine. It is as narrow as a coffin, and they
lie inside with foam cubes packed around their
heads so that they dont shift. And even
though they wear ear buds to block out noise
from the machine, the steady thumping seems
to set the mood more for disco dancing than
meditating.
This is the unnatural setting in which Zoran
Josipovic and David Heeger at New York
University, have been scanning monks and
secular meditators with functional magnetic
7/31/2019 Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain
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resonance imaging or fMRI. The fMRI
machine allows the scientists to track the
monks brain activity based on blood flow, as
they try to enter a meditative state. The
researchers are interested in a special type of
meditation, in which the practitioners access a
subtle self-reflexive awareness ,that is free of
dualities such as those of self vs. other and
internal vs. external, explains Josipovic, who isa Tibetan Buddhist as well as research
associate in Heegers neuroscience lab. Since
2008, the pair has been working to identify if
there is a pattern of brain activity, that
accompanies the experience of oneness.
What they find could help illuminate poorly
understood brain disorders such as stress,
depression and even Alzheimers and autism.
These diseases are very different from each
other, but they share a common feature: Inthose afflicted, brain scans reveal strange
behavior in the same region of the brain.
Josipovic and Heeger believe this part of the
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brain is associated with internal thoughts, a
poorly understood area referred to as the
default network. It is called default because
it seems to activate, when people are not
doing any particular task.
Average people are conscious of either the
external world or their personal world, and
they alternate their attention between the two.
These worlds push us into and pull us out of
our awareness. Imagine how concentrating on
a situation in the present, like listening to a
friends story or solving a math problem, can
make you less self-aware that is the pull ofthe external world. But then a lapse of focus
creeps in, and you begin to wonder if you
missed your doctors appointment this
morning, or what you want to do on vacation
next week and you have felt the push into
your inner world.
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While neuroscientists have made strides
toward understanding the brain activity
associated with external tasks, the areas that
control self-related thoughts, remain shrouded
in mystery. Roughly speaking, external or goal-
oriented tasks activate regions around the
outer part of the brain known as the external
network. The default network, on the other
hand, is about one-third of the brain nestledinside the external networks crown. These
areas are quiet when the external network is
active, and active when the external network
sits idle. While scientists first thought these
areas might just be active, when the brain had
no task to focus on, a growing camp of brainresearchers, including Josipovic and Heeger,
believes that they are involved in self-
referential processes.
To learn about this mysterious network, theyare probing the brains of people who practice a
type of meditation called nondualism. Unlike
common meditation approaches, such as
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focusing on an external or imaginary object for
a prolonged stretch of time, nondualism trains
meditators to watch their own minds, while
they remain fully aware of their surroundings.
In nondual meditation, practitioners are
cognizant of awareness, which is both the
nature of mind and the context of internal and
external experiences. What I think is
important here is the use of trained meditatorsto get at a subjective mental state, Heeger
explains. Because these meditators can control
whether they are reflecting on themselves or
on external issues, or on both, they can
describe their experiences to the researchers
after their fMRI. If they achieved a sense ofoneness, the researchers can look to see if
the machine recorded any unique brain
activity, that could be associated with this
mental state.
Stumbling upon the brains resting network
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Dr. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the
Washington University School of Medicine in
St. Louis, Mo, served up the game-changing
idea of the default network, in 2001 in a study
he published in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. By scanning the brains
of control subjects ,who were awake but had
no task to do, he noticed areas of the brain
that crackled with activity, which he dubbedthe default network. His critics rushed to point
out that his taskless subjects, could be thinking
about anything during the scan but, to Raichle,
it was exciting just to discover that there was
an area of the brain, that waxed as the
external networks waned.
Experiments in the laboratory of Rafael
Malach, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel, first raised the
suspicion that the default network did morethan oppose the external network, that it
might control self-related thoughts. Malachs
team made the surprising discovery that
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peoples brains responded in identical ways ,to
certain dramatic scenes in films such as The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and movies by
Alfred Hitchcock. But, during other parts of the
movies, each viewer had his or her own
pattern of brain activity. Malach believes that,
during less intense scenes, with less gunshots
and bloodshed, people began comparing the
action to their own personal experiences,letting their thoughts turn inward. Their brain
activity spiked upward in the areas known then
as the default network. Now, five years after
this neurocinematics study, which was
published in Science in 2004, Malach says that,
We are [still] very much in the dark about thissystem.
FMRI-based experiments usually monitor the
brain activity of subjects as they respond to
stimuli, whereas the default network tends toactivate in the absence of external stimuli. This
means that fMRI is an unlikely tool for studying
the default network. There are no tests to
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study the wide range of internal thoughts, that
could come from this network, such as
reflections on the past (do I like the shirt I just
bought?), or the future (where will I wear that
shirt?) or anticipating other peoples opinions
(will my friend think that shirt looks good?).
These thoughts often pop into our heads
seemingly out of nowhere.
Good luck studying spontaneous thought, says
Malach. Still, he commends this approach for
illuminating the network, saying that the
Western-style studies using fMRI scanning fit
like a glove on Eastern meditation.
Eastern practices meet Western studies
To learn about the default network and its
interplay with the external, Josipovic and
Heeger are beginning to piece together a slew
of images collected from scanning the brains
of Buddhist monks as well as secular
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meditators from around the Tri-State area. The
pair is planning to extend their study to
Christian monks, nuns and Jewish
contemplatives.
One of the practitioners of nondualism, or
oneness meditation, in the study is 31-year-
old Karma Drodhul. He became a Lama, or
trained Tibetan Buddhist, through spending
about seven years in meditation retreats. The
brain scans do not prevent Lama Drodhul from
entering a state of oneness. In Buddhism, we
are used to meditating through distractions,
he says after a recent fMRI session. It wasfun.
For each scan session, participants lie with
their heads in the fMRI machine, which emits a
magnetic field about twice as strong as ahospital MRI. As blood flows to active areas of
the brain, it carries oxygen that changes the
magnetism of that area. A computer attached
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to the machine captures a picture of the brain,
based on differences in magnetism, about
every two seconds. After scanning a
participants brain, Josipovic typically ends up
with hundreds of images. Some of the images
reflect the brain activity as subjects see
flashing photos of a face or houses or a
landscape on a projector screen viewed on a
mirror in front of their faces. Each of thesetypes of objects is associated with activation of
a different, precise area of the brain, so the
resulting images serve as a point of reference
for the rest of the images.
Josipovic already has some early revelations
about the networks. For normal nonmeditators,
Josipovics saw the same interplay as other
scientists: When the activity of the external
network is up, the default is down and vice
versa. But the story is different when it comesto experienced meditators. The activity of the
two networks for them is not as sharply
opposed, perhaps indicating that there is brain
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activity accompanying the experience of
harmony between internal and external
perspectives in nondualism meditation.
The default networks broader implications
Understanding the default network may
eventually elucidate information about themental diseases that seem to target it,
including Alzheimers, autism and depression.
While the activity of the external network is
sometimes also affected in these diseases, it is
not nearly as broken, saysJessica Andrews-
Hanna, who recently completed her graduate
studies in the laboratory of Randy Buckner at
Harvard University on the default networks of
aging people.
The diseases that involve the default network
are varied but, for all of them, the network
does not seem to turn off when it should.
Perhaps because it loses that push-pull
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relationship with the external network in
patients with severe Alzheimers and other
cognitive problems, it remains perpetually
on. Within the default network, activity is
disorganized and connections are deteriorated.
Its activity also does not seem to wane in
studies of autistic people when they perform
goal-related tasks, or of depressed people
during rest.
All these studies suggest that there could be a
striking similarity between the brains of
meditators and those of people with dementia
or depression. According to Andrews-Hanna, ifits true that meditators maintain their two
networks operating at the same time, their
brain scans would be reminiscent of those of
the mentally ill. Presumably, in the
meditators case, maybe its all cognitive;
maybe they have the ability to say, Now Iwant to control these two [networks]
together, says Andrews-Hanna. If you can
7/31/2019 Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain
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turn the brain regions on and off when you
want, thats great.
For now, neuroscientists are waiting to learn
what Josipovic and Heeger find from their
studies of meditators, which they hope will
offer unique insight about the default network.
The first step is to see if nondual
contemplation combining the external and
subjective experiences does correspond to
differences in the default network. If it does,
these studies will open up a new way to
explore what was before a completely elusive
network.
*Correction (August 17, 2009): This sentence
originally read: The researchers are interested
in a special type of meditation in which the
practitioners try to merge the external worldwith their own internal, personal thoughts,
explains Josipovic, who is a Tibetan Buddhist
7/31/2019 Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain
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as well as research associate in Heegers
neuroscience lab.
**Correction (August 17, 2009): This sentence
originally read: While scientists first thought
this area might just be active when the brain
had no task to focus on, a growing camp of
brain researchers, including Josipovic and
Heeger, believe that it is the seat of self-
related thinking.
***Correction (August 17, 2009): Sentence
added: In nondual meditation, practitioners
are cognizant of awareness which is both the
nature of mind and the context of internal and
external experiences.
Scienceline.org
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