Meditation Gives Brain a Charge

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Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds

By Marc KaufmanWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, 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.

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"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."

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