NEW: Scientific American Article on Meditation and the Brain
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meditation-on-demand&SID=mail&sc=emailfriend
Deepak Chopra Says Meditation Improves Health
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/deepak-chopra-says-medita_n_328436.html
US News and World Report
Posted December 29, 2008:
How to Beat Stress and Angst Through Meditation
There's nothing like economic calamity to focus the mind. But instead of obsessing over your job security or declining 401(k) balance, try diminishing your stress with a new assist from a very old tool: meditation.
Your choices are extensive—mindfulness meditation, transcendental meditation, and the latest trend, compassion meditation, are three of many approaches, each with a slightly different intent. Compassion meditation aims to foster a feeling of lovingkindness toward others, for example, while mindfulness meditation focuses on awareness and acceptance of the present moment.
Whatever the variation, certain basic elements are common to all forms of meditation. Comfortably seated, lying down, or even walking around, you focus your mind on your breath, a word, a mantra, an object—something specific—possibly for a few minutes but perhaps much longer, gently pushing away distracting thoughts. As you learn to stay focused, you experience a sense of calm. Your body relaxes. Your breathing slows. Your heart rate drops.
Many of those who practice meditation turn to it to help them deal with emotional stumbling blocks like stress and anxiety. It can also be used to change unhealthful eating habits or to battle substance abuse. And studies continue to add to the ways in which meditation might be able to play a therapeutic role—for example, it has been shown to bolster HIV patients' immune systems, ease chronic pain, and reduce blood pressure.
Gene control. New research has been taking these discoveries to a deeper level, revealing how meditation and other relaxation techniques work in cells, turning on and off genes that are associated with inflammation, cell aging, and free radicals, all of which are associated with damage to cells and tissues. French philosopher René Descartes famously believed that the mind and body were separate entities, but emerging evidence is proving him wrong.
"What this shows is that you can actually change the brain with the mind," says Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a coauthor of a study demonstrating such genetic changes that was published in July in the online journal PLoS One.
Meditation's psychological and physical effects both are tied to the "fight or flight" response. When we are under stress, the brain sends hormones and other substances racing through our system to ready us for action. We become hyperalert, our heart rate and breathing speed up, our muscles tense, and our digestive processes shut down. While modern Americans are less likely to face physical danger than were our prehistoric, mastodon-hunting ancestors, there's no shortage of other sources of stress. High-pressure, overbusy lives, coupled with the unrelenting economic uncertainty of much of the past year, can put the body in a constant state of hypervigilance. That's not good. An ongoing state of revved-up alertness can damage tissues and organs, suppress the immune system, and cause anxiety and depression.
Mental workout. The calm that meditation engenders produces physical and emotional changes that represent the flip side of fight-or-flight. For those with overtaxed lives, a bonus of meditation is that a little of it apparently goes a long way. One study of individuals who were new to meditating showed measurable brain and behavior differences after just two weeks of daily 30-minute sessions, says Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But meditation is like any other workout: To reap the benefits, don't stop. "This is mental exercise," says Davidson. "If one wants [benefits] to continue, you have to continue."
Experts and practice centers that can serve as sources of meditation training are becoming easier to find. One of the best known and most studied programs is the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, which started at the University of Massachusetts Medical School nearly 30 years ago and is now offered by certified instructors at centers around the world. (You can see if there is one in your area at umassmed.edu/cfm/mbsr.) The program brings together a group of people once a week for eight weeks to learn sitting and walking meditation practices and gentle yoga stretches. For those who would rather learn on their own, books, tapes, and CDs are available from Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts and creator of the MBSR program, at mindfulnesstapes.com. They can help do-it-yourselfers learn the ropes.
No amount of meditating can magically erase the stress of losing a job or a loved one. But it can help people cope. "It can transform the emotional brain in ways that promote higher levels of resilience [and] less vulnerability and affect the body in ways that can improve health," says Davidson. All that for just minutes a day? Even a shellshocked investor would have to admit: That sounds like a good deal.
From O Magazine; March, 2008:
http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/News/OprahMar2008.pdf.
March 26, 2008 in Mind & Brain
Scientific American:
Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate
A new study shows that meditation opens the gateway to compassion
By David Biello
LEARNED COMPASSION: Meditation may help enhance the ability to feel compassion toward others.
©ALDO MURILLO/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one's family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy.
"There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence," says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. "That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion."
Lutz and his colleagues, including neuroscientist Richard Davidson, director of the university's Waisman Center for Brain Imaging where the study was conducted, took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators as well as 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations.
When engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another's emotional state.)
And when these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another's emotion.
"The way you are going to understand the emotion of someone else is by somehow simulating, experiencing the emotion. It makes sense that we found some activation of the brain region which is critical for the experience of an emotion," Lutz says. Similarly, "sometimes you can understand someone but not necessarily experience the emotion … it makes sense that you get activation in a brain region that is more contemplative."
Although the research does not prove that compassion can be learned, it does suggest that possibility—and that could have implications for treating a range of issues. "Can this type of training be used for depression?" Lutz asks. "Another question is whether this form of mental training and empathy can have an impact for education. We don't know yet."
The researchers have already begun a long-term study to see if and how the brain can be trained as well as to compare how different forms of meditation, such as simple concentration versus focusing on compassion, affect the brain differently. In the meantime, compassionate meditation is as simple as visualizing someone you care about, holding that feeling of loving kindness in your mind, and then extending it to others—even people you don't like.
"It primes the mind for some form of readiness to act with compassion or loving kindness," Lutz adds. "You can build on this very basic, natural feeling that you have for close relatives and extend that to a stranger.”
