For decades, open-minded Westerners – patients and doctors alike – have been touting the medical benefits of meditation, an ancient Eastern practice that comes in hundreds if not thousands of different flavors but consists basically of quieting the mind through moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness.
Considerable research suggests that regular meditation, or even just 10-20 minutes a day practising the “relaxation response” long promoted by Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, can reverse many of the ill effects of stress.
Meditation, or the relaxation response, has been shown to lower blood pressure, heart rate and respiration; to reduce anxiety, anger, hostility and mild to moderate depression; to help alleviate insomnia, premenstrual syndrome, hot flashes and infertility; and to relieve some types of pain, most notably tension headaches.
What nobody, until now, has even come close to explaining is how meditation may work. That is, what mechanisms within the brain might explain why changing one’s mental focus can have such large effects on mood and metabolism. Nor has there been until now, much collaboration between experts in meditation such as Buddhist monks and neuroscientists.
All that is changing – fast.
A new study, accepted for publication soon in Psychosomatic Medicine, is a significant first step in understanding what goes on in the brain during meditation. The study was led by Richard Davidson, director of the laboratory for affective neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The underlying theory is that in people who are stressed, anxious or depressed, the right frontal cortex of the brain is overactive and the left frontal cortex, underactive. Such people also show heightened activation of the amygdala, a key center for processing fear.
By contrast, people who are habitually calm and happy typically show greater activity in the left frontal cortex relative to the right. These lucky folks pump out less of the stress hormone cortisol, recover faster from negative events and have higher levels of natural killer cells, a measure of immune system function.
Each person has a natural “set point,” a baseline frontal cortex activity level that is characteristically tipped left or right and around which daily fluctuations of mood swirl. What meditation may do is nudge this balance in the favorable direction.
To find out, they recruited stressed-out volunteers from the Promega Corp, a high tech firm in Madison, Wisc. At the outset, all volunteers were tested with EEGs (electro-encephalographs), in which electrodes were placed on the scalp to collect brain wave information. The volunteers were then randomized into one of two groups – 25 in the meditation group and 16 into the control group.
The meditators took an 8-week course developed by Kabat-Zinn. At the end of 8 weeks, both meditators and controls were again given EEG tests and a flu shot. They also got blood tests to check for antibody response to the flu shots. Four months later, all got EEG tests again.
By the end of the study, the meditators’ brains showed a pronounced shift toward the left frontal lobe, while the nonmeditators’ brains did not, suggesting that meditation may have shifted the “set point” to the left. (The nonmeditators actually got slightly worse, perhaps because they were cranky from making several trips to the lab without the payoff of learning to meditate.) The meditators also had more robust responses to the flu shots. Indeed, the bigger the mood effect, the bigger the immune response.
The Wisconsin study fits with a smaller study published in May, 2000 by Sara Lazar, a neurobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Benson and others that looked at 5 Sikh meditators using a brain scanning technique called functional MRI. It found a shift in blood flow in the brain during meditation.
The new meditation work also fits with data suggesting that certain drugs produce meditation-like effects on the brain, says Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Synder. “It’s reasonable to assume,”: he says, that meditation may increase serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter, in the brain.
No one has been more fascinated by this kind of research than the Dalai Lama himself, the leader (in exile) of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Dalai Lama spent 5 days in March, 2000 meeting with other Buddhis monks, philosophers and Western neuroscientists at a retreat in Daramsala, India that is chronicled in a new book called “Destructive Emotions” by Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence.”
In addition to lots of esoteric debate, the conference had a practice outcome. One participant, Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, went on to study several monks in his California lab.
Ekman had previously developed a way to measure the facial expression of emotions and found that most people don’t do well when asked to decipher rapid changes in facial expression. But the monks were near-perfect decoders of facial expression. And one meditator, a 60-year old French intellectual who has been a monk for nearly 30 years
Appeared able to suppress the startle reflex while meditating – a stunning display of control over a basic, biological response.
None of this, of course, means that meditation is a cure-all. As Barrie Cassileth, chief of the integrative medical service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, puts it, meditation is a wonderful tool “but it’s not going to let you fly to Europe on your own without a plane.”
But it is, as Ekman says cautiously, “an exercise for the brain that could be of some benefit.”
So, what does it all mean? Obviously, a few studies on several dozen amateur meditators and a handful of pros is not the final answer on how meditation acts on the brain to produce changes in mood and basic, biological functions.
Though it’s “a wonderful tool,” no one should expect meditation to work miracles, cautions psychologist-medical sociologist Barrie Cassileth, chief of the integrative medicine service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It “cannot bring about levitation. It cannot control cellular activity in the sense of getting rid of disease. …It’s not going to let you fly to Europe on your own without a plane.”
But what these very preliminary studies do suggest is that, at long last, the subtleties of mind long known subjectively to proficient meditators may prove capable of being understood objectively as well.