Altered Traits Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body Chapter 5. A Mind Undisturbed

← Altered Traits Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

Altered Traits Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body Chapter 5. A Mind Undisturbed

Author: Daniel Goleman, Richard A. Davidson Publisher: Garden City, NY: Avery. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2023-1-13 Status:📚

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Our vulnerability to stress-worsened diseases like diabetes or hypertension reflects the downside in our brain’s design. The upside reflects the glories of the human cortex, which has built civilizations (and the computer this is being written on). But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.

In a study at Emory, people who had never meditated previously were randomly assigned to practice Mindful Attention Training or a compassion meditation. A third group, an active control, went through a series of discussions on health.9 The participants were scanned before and after they underwent eight weeks of training. While in the scanner they viewed a set of images—standard in emotion research—which includes a few upsetting ones, such as a burn victim. The Mindful Attention group showed reduced amygdala activity in response to the disturbing pictures. The changes in amygdala function occurred in the ordinary baseline state in this study, suggesting the seeds of a trait effect.

A word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala circuitry triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.

The amygdala connects strongly to brain circuitry for both focusing our attention and for intense emotional reactions. This dual role explains why, when we are in the grip of anxiety, we are also very distracted, especially by whatever is making us anxious. As the brain’s radar for threat, the amygdala rivets our attention on what it finds troubling. So when something worries or upsets us, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of fixation—

About the same time as Alan’s findings that mindfulness calms the amygdala, other researchers had volunteers who had never meditated before practice mindfulness for just twenty minutes a day over one week, and then have an fMRI scan.10 During the scan they saw images ranging from gruesome burn victims to cute bunnies. They watched these images in their everyday state of mind, and then while practicing mindfulness. During mindful attention their amygdala response was significantly lower (compared to nonmeditators) to all the images. This sign of being less disturbed, tellingly, was greatest in the amygdala on the brain’s right side (there are amygdalae in both right and left hemispheres), which often has a stronger response to whatever upsets us than the one on the left. In this second study, lessened amygdala reactivity was found only during mindful attention and not during ordinary awareness, indicating a state effect, not an altered trait. A trait change, remember, is the “before,” not the “after.”

If you give the back of your hand a hard pinch, different brain systems mobilize, some for the pure sensation of pain and others for our dislike of that pain. The brain unifies them into a visceral, instant Ouch! But that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of the body, spending hours noticing our bodily sensations in great detail. As we sustain this focus, our awareness morphs. What had been a painful pinch transforms, breaking down into its constituents: the intensity of the pinch and the painful sensation, and the emotional feeling tone—we don’t want the pain; we urgently want the pain to stop. But if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinch becomes an experience to unpack with interest, even equanimity. We can see our aversion fall away, and the “pain” break down into subtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.

meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional hijacking. The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts. This connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotional reactivity: the stronger the link, the less reactive. Indeed, that relationship is so strong that a person’s reactivity level can be predicted by the connectivity. So, when these high-lifetime-hour meditators saw an image of a gruesome-looking burn victim, they had little amygdala reactivity. Age-matched volunteers did not show either the heightened connectivity or the equanimity on viewing the disturbing images.

While MBSR training did reduce the reactivity of the amygdala, the long-term meditator group showed both this reduced reactivity in the amygdala plus strengthening of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. This pattern implies that when the going gets tough—for example, in response to a major life challenge such as losing a job—the ability to manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators

Among those who show the most short-lived amygdala response, emotions come and go, adaptive and appropriate. Richie’s lab put this idea to the test with brain scans of 31 highly seasoned meditators (lifetime average was 8,800 hours of meditation practice, ranging from just 1,200 to more than 30,000). They saw the usual pictures ranging from people in extreme suffering (burn victims) to cute bunnies. On first analysis of the expert meditators’ amygdalae, there was no difference in how they reacted from the responses of matched volunteers who had never meditated. But when Richie’s group divided the seasoned meditators into those with the least hours of practice (lifetime average 1,849 hours) and the most (lifetime average 7,118), the results showed that the more hours of practice, the more quickly the amygdala recovered from distress.22 This rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience.

BEYOND CORRELATION

When Dan taught the psychology of consciousness course in 1975 at Harvard, Richie, then in his last year of graduate school, was, as mentioned, a teaching assistant. Among the students he met with weekly was Cliff Saron, then a senior at Harvard. Cliff had a knack for the technical end of research, including the electronics (perhaps a legacy of his father, Bob Saron, who had managed the sound equipment at NBC). Cliff’s adeptness soon made him a coauthor on research papers with Richie.

And when Richie got his first teaching post at the State University of New York at Purchase, he took Cliff along to manage the laboratory. After a stint there—and coauthoring a slew of scientific papers with Richie—Cliff got his own PhD in neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He now directs a lab at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis, and has often been on the faculty at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute.

Cliff’s astute sense of methodological issues no doubt helped him design and run a crucial bit of research, one of the few longitudinal studies of meditation to date.17 With Alan Wallace as retreat leader, Cliff put together a rigorous battery of assessments for students going through a three-month training in a range of classic meditation styles, including some, like mindfulness of breathing, meant to increase focus and others to cultivate positive states like loving-kindness and equanimity. While the “yogis” pursued their demanding schedule of meditating six or more hours a day for ninety days, Cliff had them take a battery of tests at the beginning, middle, and end of the retreat, and five months after the retreat had concluded.18

The comparison group was people who had signed up for the three-month retreat but who did not start until the first group finished. Such a “wait-list” control eliminates worries about expectation demand and similar psychological confounds (but does not add an active control like HEP—which would be a logistic and financial burden in a study like this). A stickler for precision in research, Cliff flew people in the wait-list group to the retreat place and gave them exactly the same assessments in the identical context as those in the retreat.

One test presented lines of different lengths in rapid succession, with the instruction to press one button for a line that was shorter than the others. Only one out of ten lines was short; the challenge is to inhibit the knee-jerk tendency to press the button for a short line when a long one appears. As the retreat progressed, so did the ability of the meditators to control this impulse—a mirror on a skill critical to managing our emotion, the capacity to refrain from acting on whim or impulse.

This simple skill, statistical analyses suggested, led to a range of improvements on self-reports, from less anxiety to an overall sense of well-being, including emotion regulation as gauged by reports of recovering more quickly from upsets and more freedom from impulses. Tellingly, the wait-list controls showed no change in any of these measures—but showed the same improvements once they had gone through the retreat.

Cliff’s study directly ties these benefits to meditation, lending strong support to the case for altered traits. A clincher: a follow-up five months after the retreats ended found that the improvements remained.

And the study dispels doubts that all the positive traits found in long-term meditators are simply due to self-selection, where people who already had those traits choose the practice or stay with it in the long run. From evidence like this, it seems likely that the states we practice in meditation gradually spill over into daily life to mold our traits—at least when it comes to handling stress.

PAIN IS IN THE BRAIN

But that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of the body, spending hours noticing our bodily sensations in great detail. As we sustain this focus, our awareness morphs.

What had been a painful pinch transforms, breaking down into its constituents: the intensity of the pinch and the painful sensation, and the emotional feeling tone—we don’t want the pain; we urgently want the pain to stop.

But if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinch becomes an experience to unpack with interest, even equanimity. We can see our aversion fall away, and the “pain” break down into subtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.

Imagine now you hear a soft rumble as a five-gallon tank of water starts boiling and sends a stream of fluid through the thin rubber hose that runs through the two-inch square metal plate strapped tight on your wrist. The plate heats up, pleasantly at first. But that pleasantness quickly heads toward pain, as the water temperature jumps several degrees within a couple of seconds. Finally, you can’t take it anymore—if this were a hot stove you had touched, you would instantly pull away. But you can’t remove that metal plate. You feel the almost excruciating heat for a full ten seconds, sure you are getting burned.

But you get no burn; your skin is fine. You’ve just reached your highest pain threshold, exactly what this device, the Medoc thermal stimulator, was designed to detect. Used by neurologists to assess conditions like neuropathy that reveal deterioration of the central nervous system, the thermal stimulator has built-in safety devices so people’s skin won’t be burned, even as it calibrates precisely their maximum pain threshold. And people’s pain thresholds are nowhere near the higher range at which burns occur. That’s why the Medoc has been used with experimental volunteers to establish how meditation alters our perceptions of pain.

Among pain’s main components are our purely physiological sensations, like burning, and our psychological reactions to those sensations.11 Meditation, the theory goes, might mute our emotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations more bearable.

In Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend their mental reactions and categorization of whatever arises in their minds or around them, and this mental stance gradually spills over into everyday life.12 “The experienced practitioner of zazen does not depend on sitting quietly,” as Ruth Sasaki, a Zen teacher, put it, adding, “States of consciousness at first attained only in the meditation hall gradually become continuous in any and all activities.”13

285

See, e.g., James Austin, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
Isshu Miura and Ruth Filler Sasaki, The Zen Koan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. xi.

Seasoned Zen meditators who were having their brains scanned (and who were asked to “not meditate”) endured the thermal stimulator.14 While we’ve noted the reasons to have an active control group, this research had none. But that’s less an issue here, because of the brain imaging. If the outcome measures are based on self-reports (the most easily swayed by expectations) or even behavior observed by someone else (somewhat less susceptible to bias) then an active control group matters greatly. But when it comes to their brain activity, people have no clue what’s going on, and so an active control matters less.

285

Joshua A. Grant et al., “A Non-Elaborative Mental Stance and Decoupling of Executive and Pain-Related Cortices Predicts Low Pain Sensitivity in Zen Meditators,” Pain 152 (2011): 150–56.

The more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we are under such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains seemed to disconnect the usual link between executive center circuits where we evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain (This burns).

In short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain as though it was a more neutral sensation. In more technical language, their brains showed a “functional decoupling” of the higher and lower brain regions that register pain—while their sensory circuitry felt the pain, their thoughts and emotions did not react to it. This offers a new twist on a strategy sometimes used in cognitive therapy: reappraisal of severe stress—thinking about it in a less threatening way—which can lessen its subjective severity as well as the brain’s response. Here, though, the Zen meditators seemed to apply a no-appraisal neural strategy—in keeping with the mind-set of zazen itself.

A close reading of this article reveals a mention only in passing of a significant trait effect, in a difference found between Zen meditators and the comparison group. During the initial baseline reading the temperature is increased in a staircase-like series of finely graduated rises to calibrate the precise maximum pain threshold for each person. The Zen practitioners’ pain threshold was 2 degrees Centigrade (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than for nonmeditators.

This may not sound like much, but the way we experience pain from heat means that slight increases in temperature can have dramatic impact both subjectively and in how our brain responds. Though that difference of 2 degrees Centigrade may seem trivial, in the world of pain experience, it is huge.

Researchers are, appropriately, skeptical about such traitlike findings because self-selection in who chooses to stick with meditation and who drops out along the way might also account for such data; perhaps people who choose to meditate for years and years are already different in ways that look like trait effects. The maxim “Correlation does not mean causation” applies here.

But if a trait can be understood as a lasting effect of the practice, that poses an alternative explanation. And when different research groups come up with similar trait findings, these converging results make us take the result more seriously.

Contrast the Zen sitters’ recovery from stress reactivity with burnout, the depleted, hopeless state that comes from years of constant, unremitting pressures, like from jobs that demand too much. Burnout has become rampant among health care professions such as nurses and doctors, as well as those who care at home for loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s. And, of course, anyone can feel burned-out who faces the rants of rude customers or continual implacable deadlines, as with the hectic pace of a business start-up.

Such constant stress sculpts the brain for the worse, it seems.15 Brain scans of people who for years had faced work that demanded up to seventy hours each week revealed enlarged amygdalae and weak connections between areas in the prefrontal cortex that can quiet the amygdala in a disturbing moment. And when those stressed-out workers were asked to reduce their emotional reaction to upsetting pictures, they were unable to do so—technically, a failure in “down-regulation.”

Like people who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, victims of burnout are no longer able to put a halt to their brain’s stress response—and so, never have the healing balm of recovery time.

285

A. Golkar et al., “The Influence of Work-Related Chronic Stress on the Regulation of Emotion and on Functional Connectivity in the Brain,” PloS One 9:9 (2014): e104550.

There are tantalizing results that indirectly support meditation’s role in resilience. A collaboration between Richie’s lab and the research group directed by Carol Ryff looked at a subset of participants in a large, multisite, national study of midlife in the United States. They found that the stronger a person’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recovered from a lab stressor.16

Having a sense of purpose and meaning may let people meet life’s challenges better, reframing them in ways that allow them to recover more readily. And, as we saw in chapter three, meditation seems to enhance well-being on Ryff’s measure, which includes a person’s sense of purpose. So what’s the direct evidence that meditation can help us meet upsets and challenges with more aplomb?

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Stacey M. Schaefer et al., “Purpose in Life Predicts Better Emotional Recovery from Negative Stimuli,” PLoS One 8:11 (2013): e80329; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080329.

A DEVILISH ORDEAL

Imagine you are describing your qualifications for a job while two interviewers glare at you, unsmiling. Their faces reveal no empathy, not even an encouraging nod. That’s the situation in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), one of the most reliable ways known to science to trigger the brain’s stress circuits and its cascade of stress hormones.

Now imagine, after that dispiriting job interview, doing some pressured mental arithmetic: you have to subtract 13s in rapid-fire succession from a number like 1,232. That’s the second part of the Trier test, and those same impassive interviewers push you to do the math faster and faster—and whenever you make a mistake, they tell you to start all over at 1,232. That devilish test delivers a huge dose of social stress, the awful feelings we get when other people evaluate, reject, or exclude us.

Alan Wallace and Paul Ekman created a renewal program for schoolteachers that combined psychological training with meditation.19 Whereas Dan had used the shop accident film to bring stress into the lab, here the stressor was the Trier test’s simulated job interview followed by that formidable math challenge.

The more hours those teachers had practiced meditation, the quicker their blood pressure recovered from a high point during the TSST. This was true five months after the program ended, suggesting at least a mild trait effect (five years afterward would be still stronger evidence of a trait).

Richie’s lab used the Trier with seasoned (lifetime average = 9,000 hours) vipassana meditators who did an eight-hour day of meditation and the next day underwent the test.20 The meditators and their age- and gender-matched comparison group all went through the TSST (as well as a test for inflammation—more on those results in chapter nine, “Mind, Body, and Genome”).

Result: the meditators had a smaller rise in cortisol during the stress. Just as important, the meditators perceived that dreaded Trier test as less stressful than did the nonmeditators.

This cooled-out, more balanced way of viewing that stressor among the seasoned meditators was not tapped while they were practicing but while they were at rest—our “before.” Their ease during both the stressful interview and the formidable mental math challenge seems a genuine trait effect.

Further evidence for this comes from research with these same advanced meditators.21 The meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional hijacking.

The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts.

This connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotional reactivity: the stronger the link, the less reactive. Indeed, that relationship is so strong that a person’s reactivity level can be predicted by the connectivity. So, when these high-lifetime-hour meditators saw an image of a gruesome-looking burn victim, they had little amygdala reactivity. Age-matched volunteers did not show either the heightened connectivity or the equanimity on viewing the disturbing images.

286

T. R. A. Kral et al., “Meditation Training Is Associated with Altered Amygdala Reactivity to Emotional Stimuli,” under review, 2017.

285

Clifford Saron, “Training the Mind—The Shamatha Project,” in A. Fraser, ed., The Healing Power of Meditation (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 2013), pp. 45–65.
Baljinder K. Sahdra et al., “Enhanced Response Inhibition During Intensive Meditation Training Predicts Improvements in Self-Reported Adaptive Socioemotional Functioning,” Emotion 11:2 (2011): 299–312.
Margaret E. Kemeny et al., “Contemplative/Emotion Training Reduces Negative Emotional Behavior and Promotes Prosocial Responses,” Emotion 1:2 (2012): 338.
Melissa A. Rosenkranz et al., “Reduced Stress and Inflammatory Responsiveness in Experienced Meditators Compared to a Matched Healthy Control Group,” Psychoneuroimmunology 68 (2016): 117–25. The long-term meditators all had practiced vipassana and loving-kindness meditation over a period of at least three years, did daily practice of at least thirty minutes, and had also done several intensive meditation retreats. Each was matched on age and sex with a nonmeditating volunteer to create a comparison group. They also gave saliva samples at several points in the experiment, which revealed their levels of cortisol. There was no active control group here, for two reasons. When the measures used are biological rather than self-report, the outcomes are far less susceptible to bias. And, as with Cliff’s three-month course, it would be impossible to create an active control akin to 9,000 hours of meditation over three years or more.

But when Richie’s group repeated this study with people taking the MBSR training (a total of just under thirty hours) plus a bit of daily at-home practice, they failed to find any strengthening of connection between the prefrontal region and the amygdala during the challenge of upsetting images. Nor was there any when the MBSR group simply rested.

The good news is that this resilience can be learned. What we don’t know is how long this effect might last. We suspect that it would be short-lived unless participants continued to practice, a key to transforming a state into a trait.

Notes

Amount: 3

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