Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study
Finds
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A05
Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for
something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained
for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change
the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different
levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in
transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical
measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years,
researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan
monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the
scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain
synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left
prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the
place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially
intense.
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain
activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard
Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M.
Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their
mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way
golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates,
he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically
modified in ways few people can imagine.
Scientists used to believe the opposite -- that connections among
brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in
adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade
with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques,
and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing
brain development and "neuroplasticity."
Davidson says his newest results from the meditation study,
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in
November, take the concept of neuroplasticity a step further by
showing that mental training through meditation (and presumably
other disciplines) can itself change the inner workings and
circuitry of the brain.
The new findings are the result of a long, if unlikely,
collaboration between Davidson and Tibet's Dalai Lama, the world's
best-known practitioner of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama first invited
Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning
about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of
emotions. The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive
meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in
having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks'
meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days
visiting Davidson's lab.
The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished
practitioners to Davidson's lab to have them hooked up for
electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The
Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in
the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an
estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40
years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous
meditation experience were also tested after one week of
training.
The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical
sensors and asked to meditate for short periods. Thinking and other
mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts
of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages
to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was
especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the
highest-frequency and most important electrical brain
impulses.
Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional
compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the
heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness
and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that
focus because it does not require concentrating on particular
objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed
state of being.
Davidson said that the results unambiguously showed that meditation
activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different
ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes
picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually
powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of
the waves through the brain was far better organized and
coordinated than in the students. The meditation novices showed
only a slight increase in gamma wave activity while meditating, but
some of the monks produced gamma wave activity more powerful than
any previously reported in a healthy person, Davidson said.
The monks who had spent the most years meditating had the highest
levels of gamma waves, he added. This "dose response" -- where
higher levels of a drug or activity have greater effect than lower
levels -- is what researchers look for to assess cause and
effect.
In previous studies, mental activities such as focus, memory,
learning and consciousness were associated with the kind of
enhanced neural coordination found in the monks. The intense gamma
waves found in the monks have also been associated with knitting
together disparate brain circuits, and so are connected to higher
mental activity and heightened awareness, as well.
Davidson's research is consistent with his earlier work that
pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex as a brain region associated
with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions. Using functional
magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) on the meditating monks,
Davidson found that their brain activity -- as measured by the EEG
-- was especially high in this area.
Davidson concludes from the research that meditation not only
changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite
possibly produces permanent changes. That finding, he said, is
based on the fact that the monks had considerably more gamma wave
activity than the control group even before they started
meditating. A researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Jon
Kabat-Zinn, came to a similar conclusion several years ago.
Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities are now testing
some of the same monks on different aspects of their meditation
practice: their ability to visualize images and control their
thinking. Davidson is also planning further research.
"What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically
different from the untrained one," he said. In time, "we'll be able
to better understand the potential importance of this kind of
mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken
seriously."
