Michael Baime's Articles on Lions Roar

Meditators say their practice fundamentally changes the way they experience life. Michael Baime reports on how modern neuroscience is explaining this in biological terms. Meditators find truth through carefully exploring their inner subjective experience in what some people like to call “first-person investigation.” Science looks to the external material world and relies on third-person investigation and methodologies that lead to discoveries that can be tested and replicated by peers in the scientific world. The ways that these traditions search for truth couldn’t be more different, and yet it shouldn’t surprise us to find that the two truths are actually one. Nevertheless, scientists have traditionally viewed meditators’ assertions with a healthy skepticism, and meditators have often felt the same way about scientists’ requirement for objective proof of meditation’s benefits. More recently, however, there has been an explosion of both popular and scientific interest in the biology and neuroscience of meditation. The National Institutes of Health has funded numerous research projects to explore the effects of meditation, ongoing investigations are exploring the role of meditation and mindfulness on health and healing, and neuroscientists have recorded brain waves and made pictures of brain activity in many thousands of meditators, ranging from novices in urban practice centers to monks in the secluded monasteries of Tibet. There is no question that you can become a perfectly good meditator without any complicated neuroimaging technology. On the other hand, for those of us who are interested in practicing mindfulness and other related forms of meditation, the modern science of meditation offers us a window into some very interesting—and important—areas of our practice and our lives. Can the benefits meditators say they experience—increased calm, decreased stress, better attention, and so forth—be traced to actual neural changes? In the last several decades, the scientific study of meditation has provided increasingly concrete proof of the inseparability of body and mind. It has also demonstrated ways we can literally change ourselves and our world through practice; shown us the observable changes in the systems and subsystems that govern our attention as we progress from the focus of mindfulness to the panorama of awareness; and even given us a glimpse of the biological basis of the illusion of the self. Changes in regions of the brain. One of the most interesting areas of research on the effects of contemplative practices has explored the possibility that the actual structure of the brain is changed by meditation practice. Several neuroscientists have shown that some of the brain regions activated during meditation are actually different in people who meditate regularly, and the most recent evidence suggests that the changes can occur in as little as eight weeks. This finding is at odds with what we think we know about brain structure in adults. We used to believe that sometime shortly after twenty-five or thirty years of age the brain was finished with growth and development. From then on, the brain became progressively impaired by age and injury, and it was all downhill from there. But recent meditation research suggests that this glum outcome may not be inevitable. Meditation practice is associated with changes of specific brain areas that are essential for attention, learning, and the regulation of emotion. Maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise. When you exercise your muscles in the gym, they become larger as well as stronger. Their structure changes. In fact, almost any structure of the body changes when it is used more often. It now seems that this is also true for the brain. For instance, we know that when you learn to juggle, the part of the brain involved with tracking objects in space becomes larger. Meditation shouldn’t be any different. Like all cutting-edge research, this work on brain size is controversial, but it has already become an area for deeper investigation by more researchers. The first researcher to report the effect of meditation on brain structure was Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar, a researcher in the psychiatry department at Massachusetts General Hospital. She performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to obtain highly detailed pictures of the brains of twenty meditators recruited from meditation practice centers near Boston, and compared them with images obtained from a control group of twenty nonmeditators. The meditators were experienced practitioners, but they were not monks, nuns, or full-time retreatants. They had practiced for an average of about nine years, and spent, on average, a little less than an hour a day meditating. All were Westerners, living in the United States and working in typical jobs. The nonmeditators were local volunteers, matched to the meditators for characteristics like age and gender, but with no experience in yoga or meditation. Lazar was looking at the brain’s cortex—the outermost surface of the brain. This is the most evolutionarily recent part of the brain. When the brain images of the two groups were compared, she found that some cortical areas in the brains of the meditators were significantly thicker than the same areas in nonmeditators. The cortex atrophies with age; in Lazar’s meditating subjects, however, these enlarged areas were the same thickness as what was measured in nonpractitioners twenty years younger. Previous work had already shown that these areas were more active during meditation practice. One of the areas was in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is farthest forward inside the skull, closest to the forehead. The other area identified by Lazar was in a different region of the cortex called the insula. Although it is extremely difficult to isolate a specific mental function to a particular brain region (and the results of efforts to do so are controversial in the scientific community), the particular areas that Lazar identified in the frontal cortex are essential for a variety of critically important capabilities. The prefrontal cortex manages higher cognitive ‘executive” functions like planning, decision making, and judgment, and keeps us out of trouble by facilitating socially appropriate behavior. It allows us to hold two concepts or experiences in mind simultaneously so that we can compare and evaluate plans, ideas, and memories. It also helps us to link memory with sensory input so we can connect what we have learned from the past with what is happening in the present moment. The other major region identified by Lazar, the insula, seems to integrate sensation and emotion, and to process social emotions—such as empathy and love. It is thought to be essential for the capacity for self-awareness. Although no region of the brain is unimportant, the activities supported by these brain areas are especially crucial for our effective functioning in the world. This research is still viewed as preliminary, partly because it contradicts a lot of what we thought we knew, and partly because it studied only twenty meditators. Lazar says that among her scientific peers, some are enthusiastic while others are skeptical. Subsequently, however, Lazar’s work was confirmed by a researcher in Germany, Britta Holzel, who also found additional regions, hidden more deeply within the brain, that had increased gray matter density in meditators. Gray matter is the part of the brain that holds most of the actual brain cells; its increased density may reflect an increase in connectivity between the cells. Holzel, who is a meditation practitioner as well as a researcher, now works with Lazar in Boston. The regions that Holzel and Lazar identified are areas that are associated with the kinds of psychological and behavioral changes reported by meditators for millennia. One of these regions allows us to shift perspective, an ability that supports a variety of skills and behaviors, including empathy (when we take the perspective of another) and the management of emotional upheavals (when we step out of our reactivity). This is completely in keeping with what actually happens during mindfulness practice. The shift of perspective from automatic-pilot reactivity to a more aware and observant witness is a central component of meditation training. Over and over, you practice shifting from a dreamy nonawareness into the vividness of the present moment. Lazar and Holzel have also recently reported that the region of the brain most associated with emotional reactivity and fear—the amygdala—has decreased gray matter density in meditators who experience less stress. The most surprising finding was that both of these types of structural brain changes were seen after only eight weeks of practice in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Holzel says her neuroscience research has been extremely helpful in her own mindfulness practice. “It helps me to refine my practice, to be more aware of the processes that are going on while I’m practicing,” Holzel says. “It also helps me to cultivate patience and acceptance. You might think that it should be easy to quiet your mind, but I know that neural systems take time to change, and wandering is built into the system. That knowledge allows me to accept how it is right now for me. It’s not my fault or my problem. It is simply the way that the brain is built and how the system functions.” The benefit of this information for practitioners is confirmed by Lazar. “The thing that surprised me most about this research,” Lazar says, “is how many senior practitioners and meditation teachers say that it motivates them to practice during the times when their meditation seems to be going nowhere.” She says meditators often tell her, “I used to think that I was wasting my time because my mind was all over the place. This helps to keep me on the cushion because I remember how significant these changes are.”...

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