As you read this, wiggle your toes. Feel the way they push against
your shoes, and the weight of your feet on the floor. Really think about
what your feet feel like right now – their heaviness.
If you’ve never heard of mindfulness meditation,
congratulations, you’ve just done a few moments of it. More people than
ever are doing some form of this stress-busting meditation, and
researchers are discovering it has some quite extraordinary effects on
the brains of those who do it regularly.
Originally an ancient
Buddhist meditation technique, in recent years mindfulness has evolved
into a range of secular therapies and courses, most of them focused on
being aware of the present moment and simply noticing feelings and
thoughts as they come and go.
Credit: Sebastien Wiertz via Flickr
It’s been accepted as a useful therapy for anxiety and depression for around a decade, and mindfulness websites like GetSomeHeadSpace.com
are attracting millions of subscribers. It’s being explored by schools,
pro sports teams and military units to enhance performance, and is
showing promise as a way of helping sufferers of chronic pain, addiction and tinnitus, too. There is even some evidence that mindfulness can help with the symptoms of certain physical conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, and HIV.
Yet
until recently little was known about how a few hours of quiet
reflection each week could lead to such an intriguing range of mental
and physical effects. Now, as the popularity of mindfulness grows, brain
imaging techniques are revealing that this ancient practice can
profoundly change the way different regions of the brain communicate
with each other – and therefore how we think – permanently.
No fear |
| Mindfulness practice and expertise is associated with a decreased volume of grey matter in the amygdala (red), a key stress-responding region. (Image courtesy of Adrienne Taren) |
MRI scans show
that after an eight-week course of mindfulness practice, the brain’s
“fight or flight” center, the amygdala, appears to shrink. This primal
region of the brain, associated with fear and emotion, is involved in
the initiation of the body’s response to stress.
As the amygdala
shrinks, the pre-frontal cortex – associated with higher order brain
functions such as awareness, concentration and decision-making – becomes
thicker.
The “functional connectivity” between these regions –
i.e. how often they are activated together – also changes. The
connection between the amygdala and the rest of the brain gets weaker,
while the connections between areas associated with attention and
concentration get stronger.
The scale of these changes correlate
with the number of hours of meditation practice a person has done, says
Adrienne Taren, a researcher studying mindfulness at the University of
Pittsburgh.
“The picture we have is that mindfulness practice
increases one’s ability to recruit higher order, pre-frontal cortex
regions in order to down-regulate lower-order brain activity,” she says.
In other words, our more primal responses to stress seem to be superseded by more thoughtful ones.
Lots
of activities can boost the size of various parts of the pre-frontal
cortex – video games, for example – but it’s the disconnection of our
mind from its “stress center” that seems to give rise to a range of
physical as well as mental health benefits, says Taren.
“I’m
definitely not saying mindfulness can cure HIV or prevent heart disease.
But we do see a reduction in biomarkers of stress and inflammation.
Markers like C-reactive proteins, interleukin 6 and cortisol – all of
which are associated with disease.”
Feel the pain
Things get even more interesting when researchers study mindfulness experts experiencing pain.
Advanced meditators report feeling significantly less pain than
non-meditators. Yet scans of their brains show slightly more activity in
areas associated with pain than the non-meditators.
“It doesn’t
fit any of the classic models of pain relief, including drugs, where we
see less activity in these areas,” says Joshua Grant, a postdoc at the
Max Plank Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig,
Germany. The expert mindfulness meditators also showed “massive”
reductions in activity in regions involved in appraising stimuli,
emotion and memory, says Grant.
Again, two regions that are
normally functionally connected, the anterior cingulate cortex
(associated with the unpleasantness of pain) and parts of the prefrontal
cortex, appear to become “uncoupled” in meditators.
“It seems Zen
practitioners were able to remove or lessen the aversiveness of the
stimulation – and thus the stressing nature of it – by altering the
connectivity between two brain regions which are normally communicating
with one another,” says Grant. “They certainly don’t seem to have
blocked the experience. Rather, it seems they refrained from engaging in
thought processes that make it painful.”
Credit: Balint Földesi via Flickr
It’s
worth noting that although this study tested expert meditators, they
were not in a meditative state – the pain-lessening effect is not
something you have to work yourself up into a trance to achieve;
instead, it seems to be a permanent change in their perception.
“We
asked them specifically not to meditate,” says Grant. “There is just a
huge difference in their brains. There is no question expert meditators’
baseline states are different.”
Other studies on expert
meditators – that is, subjects with at least 40,000 hours of mindfulness
practice under their belt – discovered that their resting brain looks
similar, when scanned, to the way a normal person’s does when he or she
is meditating.
At this level of expertise, the pre-frontal cortex
is no longer bigger than expected. In fact, its size and activity start
to decrease again, says Taren. “It’s as if that way of thinking has
becomes the default, it is automatic – it doesn’t require any
concentration.”
There’s still much to discover, especially in
terms of what is happening when the brain comprehends the present
moment, and what other effects mindfulness might have on people.
Research on the technique is still in its infancy, and the imprecision
of brain imaging means researchers have to make assumptions about what
different regions of the brain are doing.
Both Grant and Taren,
and others, are in the middle of large, unprecedented studies that aim
to isolate the effects of mindfulness from other methods of
stress-relief, and track exactly how the brain changes over a long
period of meditation practice.
“I’m really excited about the
effects of mindfulness,” says Taren. “It’s been great to see it move
away from being a spiritual thing towards proper science and clinical
evidence, as stress is a huge problem and has a huge impact on many
people’s health. Being able to take time out and focus our mind is
increasingly important.”
Perhaps it is the new age,
quasi-spiritual connotations of meditation that have so far prevented
mindfulness from being hailed as an antidote to our increasingly frantic
world. Research is helping overcome this perception, and ten minutes of
mindfulness could soon become an accepted, stress-busting part of our
daily health regimen, just like going to the gym or brushing our teeth.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain/
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