Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain

7/31/2019 Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain

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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


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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


30/36

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


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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


34/36

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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Can Meditation Alter the Characteristics of the Brain

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