[tt] NS 2794: Mind gym: Putting meditation to the test

NS 2794: Mind gym: Putting meditation to the test
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927940.200-mind-gym-putting-meditation-to-the-test.html
* 11 January 2011 by Michael Bond

Mystics will tell you that meditation transforms the mind and
soothes the soul. But what does science have to say?

MANY people see meditation as an exotic form of daydreaming, or a
quick fix for a stressed-out mind. My advice to them is, try it.
It's difficult, at least to begin with. On my first attempt, instead
of concentrating on my breathing and letting go of anything that
came to mind as instructed by my cheery Tibetan teacher, I got
distracted by a string of troubled thoughts and then fell asleep.
Apparently this is normal for first-timers.

Experienced meditators will assure you that it is worth persisting,
however. "Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome
destructive emotions and to dispel suffering," says Buddhist monk
Matthieu Ricard. "The numerous and profound methods that Buddhism
has developed over the centuries can be used and incorporated by
anyone. What is needed is enthusiasm and perseverance." It all
sounds very rewarding, but what does science have to say on the
subject?

Stories abound in the media about the transformative potential of
meditative practice, but it is only in recent years that empirical
evidence has emerged. In the past decade, researchers have used
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains
of experienced meditators such as Ricard as well as beginners, and
tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition,
behaviour, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity. A
real scientific picture of meditation is now coming together. It
suggests that meditation can indeed change aspects of your
psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways. The
studies are even starting to throw light on how meditation works.

"Time spent earnestly investigating the nature of your mind is bound
to be helpful," says Clifford Saron at the Center for Mind and Brain
at the University of California, Davis. And you don't need a
Buddhist or spiritualist world view to profit from meditation. "One
can be an empiricist [in meditation], just by working with the
nature of your experience." Saron should know--he is leading the
Shamatha project, one of the most comprehensive scientific studies
of meditation ever.

In 2007, Saron and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists
followed 60 experienced meditators over an intensive three-month
meditation retreat in the Colorado Rockies, watching for changes in
their mental abilities, psychological health and physiology. The
participants practised for at least five hours a day using a method
known as focused attention meditation, which involves directing
attention on the tactile sensation of breathing (see "How to
meditate"). The first paper from the project was published in June
2010 (Psychological Science, vol 21, p 829).

Headed by Katherine MacLean at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in Baltimore, the study measured the volunteers' attention
skills by showing them a succession of vertical lines flashed up on
a computer screen. They then had to indicate, by clicking a mouse,
whenever there was a line shorter than the rest. As the retreat
progressed, MacLean and her colleagues noted that the volunteers
became progressively more accurate and found it increasingly easy to
stay focused on the task for long periods.

Other researchers have also linked meditation with improved
attention. Last year a team led by Antoine Lutz at the Waisman
Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, which is part of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, reported that after three months of
training in focused attention meditation, volunteers were quicker at
picking out different tones among a succession of similar ones,
implying their powers of sustained concentration had improved
(Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 13418). In 2007, Lutz's
colleague Heleen Slagter, now at the University of Amsterdam in the
Netherlands, published results from a study involving a combination
of focused attention and "open monitoring" or mindfulness meditation
--which involves the constant monitoring of moment-by-moment
experience. After three months of meditation for between 10 and 12
hours a day her subjects showed a decreased "attentional blink", the
cognitive processing delay, usually lasting about half a second,
that causes people to miss a stimulus such as a number on a screen
when it follows rapidly after another (PLoS Biology, vol 5, p e128).

The suggestion that meditation can improve attention is worth
considering, given that focus is crucial to so much in life, from
the learning and application of skills to everyday judgement and
decision-making, or simply concentrating on your computer screen at
work without thinking about what you will be eating for dinner. But
how does dwelling on your breath for a period each day lead to such
a pronounced cognitive change?

One possibility is that it involves working memory, the capacity to
hold in mind information needed for short-term reasoning and
comprehension. The link with meditation was established recently by
Amishi Jha at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. She trained a
group of American marines to focus their attention using mindfulness
meditation and found that this increased their working memory
(Emotion, vol 10, p 54). MacLean points out that meditation is
partly about observing how our sensory experiences change from
moment to moment, which requires us to hold information about
decaying sensory traces in working memory.

MacLean and others also believe that meditation training enhances
some central cognitive faculty--as yet unknown--that is used in
all basic perception tasks. "It's like a muscle that can be used in
lots of different ways," she says. Then, once perception becomes
less effortful, the brain can direct more of its limited resources
to concentration. Backing up this idea, Slagter's measurements of
electrical activity in the brain during the attentional blink task
revealed that as meditation training progressed, volunteers used
fewer resources when processing the first stimulus, meaning they
were less likely to get "stuck" on it and miss the second stimulus.

Feeling better

Along with enhancing cognitive performance, meditation seems to have
an effect on emotional well-being. A second study from researchers
with the Shamatha project, to appear in the journal Emotion,
concluded that meditation improves general social and emotional
functioning, making study participants less anxious, and more aware
of and better able to manage their emotions.

A clue about how this might work comes from the finding that the
volunteers also got better at a task in which they had to look at a
screen and click a mouse whenever a long line appeared but resist
the urge to click at the appearance of shorter lines. This is harder
than it sounds, especially as the shorter lines appear infrequently.
Lead author Baljinder Sahdra, at the University of California,
Davis, reasons that meditation training teaches people to "withhold
impulsive reactions to a lot of internal stimuli, some of which can
be emotionally intense in nature", adding that this kind of
restraint seems to be a key feature of healthy emotion regulation.

The notion that by practising meditation people become less
emotionally reactive is also reinforced by brain imaging work. A
team led by Julie Brefczynski-Lewis at West Virginia University in
Morgantown used fMRI to study meditators "in action" and found that
the amygdala--which plays a crucial role in processing emotions and
emotional memories--was far less active in expert meditators than
in novices (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol
104, p 11483).

The ability to manage one's emotions could also be key to why
meditation can improve physical health. Studies have shown it to be
an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse,
psoriasis and in particular for recurrent depression and chronic
pain. Last year, psychologist Fadel Zeidan, at Wake Forest
University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, reported that his
volunteers noticed a decreased sensitivity to pain after just a few
sessions of mindfulness meditation (Journal of Pain, vol 11, p 199).
He believes meditation doesn't remove the sensation of pain so much
as teach sufferers to control their emotional reaction to it and
reduce the stress response. He is now using fMRI in an attempt to
understand why that helps. "There's something very empowering about
knowing you can alleviate some of these things yourself," he says.

The positive effect of meditation on psychological well-being could
also explain recent findings from the Shamatha project that regular
meditation practice can lead to a significant increase in the
activity of telomerase, an enzyme that protects against cellular
ageing and which is suppressed in response to psychological stress.
The work will appear in Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Emotions may also be at the heart of another benefit of meditation.
One of the hottest areas in meditation research is whether the
practice can enhance feelings towards others. This arose partly
because fMRI studies by Lutz and his team showed that brain circuits
linked to empathy and the sharing of emotions--such as the insula
and the anterior cingulate cortex--are much more active in
long-term meditators than in novices (NeuroImage, vol 47, p 1038).

Compassion is a complicated construct that probably involves a host
of emotional skills according to Margaret Kemeny at the University
of California, San Francisco. "To be compassionate with someone,
first you have to recognise that they are experiencing a negative
reaction. Then you have to consider what a beneficial response might
be. Then you have to have the motivation to do something about it."
In other words, you are unlikely to increase someone's capacity for
compassion without improving their emotional balance.

A gym for your mind

In 2009, an institute dedicated to studying the neurobiological
roots of empathy and compassion opened at Stanford University in
California. The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and
Education, which is funded by a range of interest groups including
neuroscientists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the Dalai Lama,
has already instigated a clutch of studies. They aim to discover how
a special kind of meditation training in which the practitioner
focuses on enhancing their altruistic love for others affects the
brain, and the extent to which it can cultivate empathic and
compassionate feelings and behaviour.

The suggestion that people can become more empathic and
compassionate through meditation practice has prompted psychologist
Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace, a Buddhist teacher and president of the
Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, to float the idea
of mental training "gymnasiums". Like physical exercise gyms, but
for the mind, these would allow people to drop in and learn to
improve their emotional balance, develop their capacity for
compassion and even measure their stress levels.

Others have suggested that meditation could become an alternative to
medication. Although this seems like a good idea, Saron is dubious.
He worries that thinking of meditation as a quick fix will smother
some of the subtleties that are integral to successful practice.
"When you are returning your mind to the object in hand, you have to
do it with a sense of gentleness and authority, rather than develop
a sense of failure when your mind wanders."

But the great thing about meditation is that anyone can practise it
anywhere. What's more you don't have to be an expert or spend five
hours a day at it to reap the benefits. The novices in Zeidan's pain
experiment reported improvements after meditating for just 20
minutes a day for three days. In a second experiment he found that
similarly brief sessions can improve cognitive performance on tasks
that demand continuous attention, such as remembering and reciting a
series of digits (Consciousness and Cognition, vol 19, p 597). "It
is possible to produce substantial changes in brain function through
short-term practice of meditation," says Richard Davidson, director
of the Waisman Laboratory. He says data from a new unpublished study
by his lab shows "demonstrable changes in brain function" in novice
meditators after just two weeks of training for 30 minutes a day.
"Even small amounts of practice can make a discernible difference."

That is good news for beginners like me. Still, it does seem that
the more you meditate, the greater the impact on your brain.
Research by Brefczynski-Lewis, for example, revealed changes in
brain activity indicating that expert meditators require minimal
cognitive effort to stay focused. But this particular effect was
only evident in people who had spent around 44,000 hours meditating
--that's the equivalent of working for 25 years at a full-time job.
Most of us will probably never achieve that level of transcendence
but it's certainly something to aim for.

Bibliography

1. Mind in the Balance by Alan Wallace (Columbia University Press,
2009)
2. The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard (Atlantic Books, 2010)

How to meditate

There are numerous meditation styles, but the two most commonly
studied by researchers are focused attention meditation, in which
the aim is to stay focused on a chosen thing such as an icon, a
mantra or the breath, and mindfulness or open monitoring meditation,
where practitioners try to become aware of everything that comes
into their moment-by-moment experience without reacting to it.

For focused attention meditation, start by sitting on a cushion or
chair with your back straight and your hands in your lap and eyes
closed. Then concentrate your mind on your chosen object--say your
breathing, or more particularly the sensation of your breath leaving
your mouth or nostrils. Try to keep it there. Probably your mind
will quickly wander away, to an itch on your leg, perhaps, or to
thoughts of what you will be doing later. Keep bringing it back to
the breath. In time this will train the mind in three essential
skills: to watch out for distractions, to "let go" of them once the
mind has wandered, and to re-engage with the object of meditation.
With practice, you should find it becomes increasingly easy to stay
focused.

In mindfulness meditation the aim is to monitor all the various
experiences of your mind--thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations -
and simply observe them, rather than trying to focus on any one of
them. Instead of grasping at whatever comes to mind, which is what
most of us do most of the time, the idea is to maintain a detached
awareness. Those who develop this skill find it easier to manage
emotions in day-to-day life.

The more you practise, the deeper the changes will be. As Buddhist
teacher Alan Wallace puts it: "You have now set out on one of the
greatest expeditions as you explore the hidden recesses of your
mind."

Michael Bond is a consultant for New Scientist
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