Revenant
Aug 7, 2005, 23:23
This is a long read. The research began, when neuroscientists found that the brain was plastic. It was malleable, even past the age of physical growth. Neuro-connections could be strengthened, new connections made, and even new tissues grown. The scientists then wondered, if the Buddhist practice of meditation would have a real impact on the brain, and the early research indicates meditations have a very positive impact on the brain, and well-being.
Excerpts taken from Daniel Goleman's book, Destructive Emotions: And How We Can Overcome Them.
Lama Oser strikes anyone who meets him as resplendent--not because of his maroon and gold Tibetan monk's robes, but because of his radiant smile. Oser, a European-born convert to Buddhism, has trained as a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas for more than three decades, including many years at one of Tibet's greatest spiritual masters.
But today Oser (whose name has been changed here to protect his privacy) is about to take a revulationary step in history of the spiritual lineage he has become a part of: He will engage in meditation while having his brain scanned by state-of-the-art brain imaging devices. To be sure, there have been sporadic attempts to study brain activity in meditators, and decades of tests with monks and yogis in Western labs, some revealing remarkable abilities to control respiration, brain waves, or core body temperature. But this--the first experiments with someone at Osers level of training, using sophistacted measures--will take that research to an entirely new level, deeper than ever in charting the specific links between highly disciplined mental strategies and their impact on brain function. And this research agenda has a pragmatic focus: to access meditation as mind training, a practical answer to the perennial human conundrum of how we can better handle our emotions.
While modern science has focused on formulating ingenious chemical compounds to help us overcome toxic emotions, Buddhism offers a different, albeit far more labor-intensive, route: methods for training the mind, largely through meditation practice. Indeed, Buddhism explicitly explains the training Oser has undergone as an antidote to the mind's vulnerability to toxic emotions. If destructive emotions marks one extreme in human proclivities, this research seeks to map their antipode, the extent to which the brain can be trained to dwell in a constructive range, contentment instead of craving, calm rather than agitation, compassion instead of hatred.
Medicines are the leading modality in the west for addressing disturbing emotions, and for better or for worse, there is no doubt that mood-altering pills have brought solace to millions. But one compelling question the research with Oser raises is whether a person, through his or her own efforts, can bring about lasting positive changes in brain fuction that are even more far-reaching than meditation in their impact on emotions,. And that question, in turn, raises others: For instance, if in fact people can train their minds to overcome destructive emotions, could practical, nonreligious aspects of such training be part of every child's education? Or could such training in emotional self-manangement be offered to adults, whether or not they were spiritual seekers?
.................................................. .................................................. ................
Oser had spent several months at a stretch in intensive, solitary retreat. All told, those retreat add up to about two and a half years. But beyond that, during several years as the personal attendant to a Tibetan master, the reminders to practice even in the midst of his busy daily activities were almost constant. Now, here at the laboratory, the question was what difference any of that training had made.
The collaboration began before Oser went near the MRI, with a meeting to design the research protocol. As the eight-person research team briefed Oser, everyone in the room was acutely aware that they were in a bit of a race against time. The Dalai Lama himself would visit the lab the very next day, and they hoped by then to have harvested at least some preliminary results to share with him.
With Oser's consultation, the research team agreed on a protocol where he would rotate from a resting, everyday state of mind through a sequence of several specific meditative states. To overhear that conversation would have been eye-opening for anyone who thinks of meditation as a single, vaguely defined Zen-like mental exercise. Such an assumption is akin to thinking of all cooking as the same, ignoring the vast variation in cousine, recipes, and ingredients throughout the world of food. Likewise, there are dozens and dozens of distinct, highly detailed varieties of mental training--too loosely lumped together in English under the term "meditation"--each with it's own instructions and specific effects on experience and, the research team hoped to show, on brain activity.
To be sure, there is a great deal of overlap among the different kinds of meditation employed across differing spiritual traditions: A Trappist monk reciting the Prayer of the Heart, "Kyrie eleison," has much in common with a Tibetan nun chanting "Om mani padme hum"." But beyond these large commonalities, there is a very wide variety of specific meditation practices, each unique in the attentional, cognitive, and affective strategies they employ, and so in their results.
Tibetan Buddhism may well offer the widest menu of meditation methods, and it was from this rich offering that the team in Madison began to choose what to study. The initial suggestions from the research team were for three meditative states: a visualization, one-pointedness concentration, and generating compassion. The three methods involved distinct enough mental strategies that the team was fairly sure they would reveal different underlying configurations of brain activity. Indeed, Oser was able to give precise descriptions of each.
One of the methods chosen, one-pointedness--a fully focused concentration on a single object of attention--may be the most basic and universal of all practices, found in one form or another in every spiritual tradition that employs meditation. Focusing on one point requires letting go of the ten thousand other thoughts and desires that flit through the mind as distractions; as the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, "Purity of heart is to want one thing only."
In the Tibetan system (as in many others) cultivating concentration is a beginner's method, a prerequisite for moving on to the more intricate approaches. In a sense, concentration is the most generic form of mind training, with many nonspiritual applications as well. Indeed, for the test, Oser simply picked a spot (a small bolt above him on the MRI, it turned out) to focus his gaze on and held it there, bringing his focus back whenever his mind wandered off.
Oser proposed three more approaches that he thought would usefully expand the data yield: meditations on devotion and fearlessness, and what he called the"open state." The last refers to a thought-free wakefulness where the mind, as Oser described it, "is open, vast, and aware, with no intentional mental activity. The mind is not focused on anything, yet totally present--not in a focused way, just very open and undistracted. Thoughts may start to arise weakly, but they don't chain into longer thoughts--they just fade away."
Perhaps the most intriguing was Oser's explanation of the meditation on fearlessness, which involves "bringing to mind a fearless certainty, a deep confidence that nothing can unsettle--decisive and firm, without hesitating, where you're not averse to anything. You enter into a state where you feel, no matter what happens, 'I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose.'" One aid to this meditation, he added, is bringing to mind these same qualities in his teachers. A similar focus on his teachers plays a key role in the meditation on devotion, he said, in which he holds in mind a deep appreciation of and gratitude toward his teachers and, most especially, the spiritual qualities they embody.
That strategy also operates in the meditation on compassion, with his teachers' kindness offering a model. Oser explained that in generating love and compassion, bringing to mind the suffering of living beings and the fact that they all apsire to achieve happiness and be free from suffering is a vital part of the training. So does the idea to "let there be only compassion and love in the mind for all beings--friends and loved ones, strangers and enemies alike. It's a compassion with no agenda, that excludes no one. You generate this quality of loving, and let it soak the mind."
Finally the visualization entailed constructing in the mind's eye a fully detailed image of the elaborately intricate details of a Tibetan Buddhist diety. As Oser described the process, you start with the details and build the whole picture from top to bottom. Ideally, you should be able to keep in mind a clear and complete picture." As those familiar with Tibetan thangkas (the wall hangings depicing such dieties) will know, such images are highly complex patterns.
Oser confidently assumed that each of these meditation practices should show distinct brain configurations. For the scientists, there are clear distinctions in cognitive activity between, say, visualization, and one-pointedness. But the meditations on compassion, devotion, and fearlessness, do not seem that different in the mental processes involved, though they differ clearly in content. From a scientific view, if Oser could demonstrate shaper, consistent brain signatures for any of these meditative states, it would be a first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oser's testing started with the functional MRI, the current gold standard of research on the brain's role in behavior. Before the advent of the functional MRI (or fMRI), researchers had been handicapped in observing in a fine-grained way the sequence of activity in various parts of the brain during a given mental activity. The standard MRI, in wide use in hospitals, offers a graphically detailed snapshot of the structure of the brain. But fMRI offers all that in video--an ongoing record of how zones of the brain dynamically change their level of activity from moment to moment. The conventional MRI lays bare the brain structures, while the fMRI reveals how those structures interact as they function.
The fMRI could give Davidson a crystal-clear set of images of Oser's brain, cross-cutting slices at one millimeter--slimmer than a fingernail. These images could then be ananlyzed in any dimension to track precisely what happens during a mental act, tracing paths of activity through the brain.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even in the broad first swipe at the MRI data that Davidson could report the next day, there were strong signs that Oser had been able to voluntarily regulate his brain activity through purely mental processes. By contrast, most untrained subjects given a mental task are unable to focus exclusively on the task--and consequently have considerable noise added to the signals that reflect their voluntary mental strategies.
But for Oser, it seemed from the preliminary analysis that his mental strategies were accompanied by strong, demonstrable shifts in the MRI signals These signals suggested that large networks in the brain changed with each distinct mental state he generated. Ordinarily, such a clear shift in brain activity between states of mind is the exception, except for the grossest shifts in consciousness--from wakefulness to sleep, for instance. But Oser's brain showed clear distinctions among each of the six meditations.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While the fMRI findings were quite preliminary, the EEG analysis had already borne rich fruit in the comparison between Oser at rest and while meditating on compassion. Most striking was a dramatic increase in key electrical acitivity known as gamma in the middle frontal gyrus, a zone of the brain Davidson's previous research had pinpointed as a locus for the positive emotions. In research with close to two hundred people. Davidson's lab had found that when people have high levels of such brain activity in that specific site of the left prefrontal cortex, they simultaneously report feelings such as happiness, enthusiasm, joy, high energy, and alertness.
On the other hand, Davidson's research had also found that high activity in a parallel site on the other side of the brain--in the prefrontal area--correlate with reports of distressing emotions. People with a higher level of activity in the right prefrontal site and a lower level in the left are more prone to feelings such as sadness, anxiety, and worry. Indeed, an extreme rightward tilt in the ratio of activity in these perfrontal areas predicts high likelihood that a person will succumb to clinical depression or an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. People in the grip of depression who also report intense anxiety have the highest levels of activation in those right prefrontal areas.
The implications of these findings for our emotional balance are profound. We each have a characteristic ratio right-to-left activation in the prefrontal areas that offers a barometer of the moods we are likely to feel day to day. That ratio represents what amounts to an emotional set point, the mean around which our daily moods swing.
Each of us has the capacity to shift out moods, at least a bit, and thus change this ratio. The further to the left that ratio tilts, the better our frame of mind tends to be, and experiences that lift our mood cause such a leftward tilt, at least temporarily. For instance, most people show small positive changes in the ratio when they are asked to recall pleasant memories of events from their past, or when they watch amusing or heartwarming film clips.
Though usually such changes from the baseline set point are modest, at the Madison meeting Davidson reported to the Dalai Lama some striking data from the tests the day before with Oser. While Oser was generating a state of compassion during meditation, he showed a remarkable leftward shift in this parameter of prefrontal function, one that was extraordinarily unlikely to occur by chance alone.
In short, Oser's brain shift during compassion seemed to reflect an extremely pleasant mood. The very act of concern for others' well-being, it seems, creates a greater sense of well-being within oneself. The findings lends scientific support to an observation often made by the Dalai Lama: that the person doing a meditation on compassion for all beings is the immediate beneficiary. (among other benefits of cultivating compassion, as described in classic Buddhist texts, are being loved by people and animals, having a serene mind, sleeping and waking peacefully, and having pleasant dreams).
Excerpts taken from Daniel Goleman's book, Destructive Emotions: And How We Can Overcome Them.
Lama Oser strikes anyone who meets him as resplendent--not because of his maroon and gold Tibetan monk's robes, but because of his radiant smile. Oser, a European-born convert to Buddhism, has trained as a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas for more than three decades, including many years at one of Tibet's greatest spiritual masters.
But today Oser (whose name has been changed here to protect his privacy) is about to take a revulationary step in history of the spiritual lineage he has become a part of: He will engage in meditation while having his brain scanned by state-of-the-art brain imaging devices. To be sure, there have been sporadic attempts to study brain activity in meditators, and decades of tests with monks and yogis in Western labs, some revealing remarkable abilities to control respiration, brain waves, or core body temperature. But this--the first experiments with someone at Osers level of training, using sophistacted measures--will take that research to an entirely new level, deeper than ever in charting the specific links between highly disciplined mental strategies and their impact on brain function. And this research agenda has a pragmatic focus: to access meditation as mind training, a practical answer to the perennial human conundrum of how we can better handle our emotions.
While modern science has focused on formulating ingenious chemical compounds to help us overcome toxic emotions, Buddhism offers a different, albeit far more labor-intensive, route: methods for training the mind, largely through meditation practice. Indeed, Buddhism explicitly explains the training Oser has undergone as an antidote to the mind's vulnerability to toxic emotions. If destructive emotions marks one extreme in human proclivities, this research seeks to map their antipode, the extent to which the brain can be trained to dwell in a constructive range, contentment instead of craving, calm rather than agitation, compassion instead of hatred.
Medicines are the leading modality in the west for addressing disturbing emotions, and for better or for worse, there is no doubt that mood-altering pills have brought solace to millions. But one compelling question the research with Oser raises is whether a person, through his or her own efforts, can bring about lasting positive changes in brain fuction that are even more far-reaching than meditation in their impact on emotions,. And that question, in turn, raises others: For instance, if in fact people can train their minds to overcome destructive emotions, could practical, nonreligious aspects of such training be part of every child's education? Or could such training in emotional self-manangement be offered to adults, whether or not they were spiritual seekers?
.................................................. .................................................. ................
Oser had spent several months at a stretch in intensive, solitary retreat. All told, those retreat add up to about two and a half years. But beyond that, during several years as the personal attendant to a Tibetan master, the reminders to practice even in the midst of his busy daily activities were almost constant. Now, here at the laboratory, the question was what difference any of that training had made.
The collaboration began before Oser went near the MRI, with a meeting to design the research protocol. As the eight-person research team briefed Oser, everyone in the room was acutely aware that they were in a bit of a race against time. The Dalai Lama himself would visit the lab the very next day, and they hoped by then to have harvested at least some preliminary results to share with him.
With Oser's consultation, the research team agreed on a protocol where he would rotate from a resting, everyday state of mind through a sequence of several specific meditative states. To overhear that conversation would have been eye-opening for anyone who thinks of meditation as a single, vaguely defined Zen-like mental exercise. Such an assumption is akin to thinking of all cooking as the same, ignoring the vast variation in cousine, recipes, and ingredients throughout the world of food. Likewise, there are dozens and dozens of distinct, highly detailed varieties of mental training--too loosely lumped together in English under the term "meditation"--each with it's own instructions and specific effects on experience and, the research team hoped to show, on brain activity.
To be sure, there is a great deal of overlap among the different kinds of meditation employed across differing spiritual traditions: A Trappist monk reciting the Prayer of the Heart, "Kyrie eleison," has much in common with a Tibetan nun chanting "Om mani padme hum"." But beyond these large commonalities, there is a very wide variety of specific meditation practices, each unique in the attentional, cognitive, and affective strategies they employ, and so in their results.
Tibetan Buddhism may well offer the widest menu of meditation methods, and it was from this rich offering that the team in Madison began to choose what to study. The initial suggestions from the research team were for three meditative states: a visualization, one-pointedness concentration, and generating compassion. The three methods involved distinct enough mental strategies that the team was fairly sure they would reveal different underlying configurations of brain activity. Indeed, Oser was able to give precise descriptions of each.
One of the methods chosen, one-pointedness--a fully focused concentration on a single object of attention--may be the most basic and universal of all practices, found in one form or another in every spiritual tradition that employs meditation. Focusing on one point requires letting go of the ten thousand other thoughts and desires that flit through the mind as distractions; as the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, "Purity of heart is to want one thing only."
In the Tibetan system (as in many others) cultivating concentration is a beginner's method, a prerequisite for moving on to the more intricate approaches. In a sense, concentration is the most generic form of mind training, with many nonspiritual applications as well. Indeed, for the test, Oser simply picked a spot (a small bolt above him on the MRI, it turned out) to focus his gaze on and held it there, bringing his focus back whenever his mind wandered off.
Oser proposed three more approaches that he thought would usefully expand the data yield: meditations on devotion and fearlessness, and what he called the"open state." The last refers to a thought-free wakefulness where the mind, as Oser described it, "is open, vast, and aware, with no intentional mental activity. The mind is not focused on anything, yet totally present--not in a focused way, just very open and undistracted. Thoughts may start to arise weakly, but they don't chain into longer thoughts--they just fade away."
Perhaps the most intriguing was Oser's explanation of the meditation on fearlessness, which involves "bringing to mind a fearless certainty, a deep confidence that nothing can unsettle--decisive and firm, without hesitating, where you're not averse to anything. You enter into a state where you feel, no matter what happens, 'I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose.'" One aid to this meditation, he added, is bringing to mind these same qualities in his teachers. A similar focus on his teachers plays a key role in the meditation on devotion, he said, in which he holds in mind a deep appreciation of and gratitude toward his teachers and, most especially, the spiritual qualities they embody.
That strategy also operates in the meditation on compassion, with his teachers' kindness offering a model. Oser explained that in generating love and compassion, bringing to mind the suffering of living beings and the fact that they all apsire to achieve happiness and be free from suffering is a vital part of the training. So does the idea to "let there be only compassion and love in the mind for all beings--friends and loved ones, strangers and enemies alike. It's a compassion with no agenda, that excludes no one. You generate this quality of loving, and let it soak the mind."
Finally the visualization entailed constructing in the mind's eye a fully detailed image of the elaborately intricate details of a Tibetan Buddhist diety. As Oser described the process, you start with the details and build the whole picture from top to bottom. Ideally, you should be able to keep in mind a clear and complete picture." As those familiar with Tibetan thangkas (the wall hangings depicing such dieties) will know, such images are highly complex patterns.
Oser confidently assumed that each of these meditation practices should show distinct brain configurations. For the scientists, there are clear distinctions in cognitive activity between, say, visualization, and one-pointedness. But the meditations on compassion, devotion, and fearlessness, do not seem that different in the mental processes involved, though they differ clearly in content. From a scientific view, if Oser could demonstrate shaper, consistent brain signatures for any of these meditative states, it would be a first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oser's testing started with the functional MRI, the current gold standard of research on the brain's role in behavior. Before the advent of the functional MRI (or fMRI), researchers had been handicapped in observing in a fine-grained way the sequence of activity in various parts of the brain during a given mental activity. The standard MRI, in wide use in hospitals, offers a graphically detailed snapshot of the structure of the brain. But fMRI offers all that in video--an ongoing record of how zones of the brain dynamically change their level of activity from moment to moment. The conventional MRI lays bare the brain structures, while the fMRI reveals how those structures interact as they function.
The fMRI could give Davidson a crystal-clear set of images of Oser's brain, cross-cutting slices at one millimeter--slimmer than a fingernail. These images could then be ananlyzed in any dimension to track precisely what happens during a mental act, tracing paths of activity through the brain.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even in the broad first swipe at the MRI data that Davidson could report the next day, there were strong signs that Oser had been able to voluntarily regulate his brain activity through purely mental processes. By contrast, most untrained subjects given a mental task are unable to focus exclusively on the task--and consequently have considerable noise added to the signals that reflect their voluntary mental strategies.
But for Oser, it seemed from the preliminary analysis that his mental strategies were accompanied by strong, demonstrable shifts in the MRI signals These signals suggested that large networks in the brain changed with each distinct mental state he generated. Ordinarily, such a clear shift in brain activity between states of mind is the exception, except for the grossest shifts in consciousness--from wakefulness to sleep, for instance. But Oser's brain showed clear distinctions among each of the six meditations.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While the fMRI findings were quite preliminary, the EEG analysis had already borne rich fruit in the comparison between Oser at rest and while meditating on compassion. Most striking was a dramatic increase in key electrical acitivity known as gamma in the middle frontal gyrus, a zone of the brain Davidson's previous research had pinpointed as a locus for the positive emotions. In research with close to two hundred people. Davidson's lab had found that when people have high levels of such brain activity in that specific site of the left prefrontal cortex, they simultaneously report feelings such as happiness, enthusiasm, joy, high energy, and alertness.
On the other hand, Davidson's research had also found that high activity in a parallel site on the other side of the brain--in the prefrontal area--correlate with reports of distressing emotions. People with a higher level of activity in the right prefrontal site and a lower level in the left are more prone to feelings such as sadness, anxiety, and worry. Indeed, an extreme rightward tilt in the ratio of activity in these perfrontal areas predicts high likelihood that a person will succumb to clinical depression or an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. People in the grip of depression who also report intense anxiety have the highest levels of activation in those right prefrontal areas.
The implications of these findings for our emotional balance are profound. We each have a characteristic ratio right-to-left activation in the prefrontal areas that offers a barometer of the moods we are likely to feel day to day. That ratio represents what amounts to an emotional set point, the mean around which our daily moods swing.
Each of us has the capacity to shift out moods, at least a bit, and thus change this ratio. The further to the left that ratio tilts, the better our frame of mind tends to be, and experiences that lift our mood cause such a leftward tilt, at least temporarily. For instance, most people show small positive changes in the ratio when they are asked to recall pleasant memories of events from their past, or when they watch amusing or heartwarming film clips.
Though usually such changes from the baseline set point are modest, at the Madison meeting Davidson reported to the Dalai Lama some striking data from the tests the day before with Oser. While Oser was generating a state of compassion during meditation, he showed a remarkable leftward shift in this parameter of prefrontal function, one that was extraordinarily unlikely to occur by chance alone.
In short, Oser's brain shift during compassion seemed to reflect an extremely pleasant mood. The very act of concern for others' well-being, it seems, creates a greater sense of well-being within oneself. The findings lends scientific support to an observation often made by the Dalai Lama: that the person doing a meditation on compassion for all beings is the immediate beneficiary. (among other benefits of cultivating compassion, as described in classic Buddhist texts, are being loved by people and animals, having a serene mind, sleeping and waking peacefully, and having pleasant dreams).