Posted by ROO on September 23, 2003, at 9:40:09
Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?
September 14, 2003
By STEPHEN S. HALL
In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in
Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter
from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a
Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for
himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word
of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The
exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to
offer the minds of his monks -- in particular, their
meditative prowess -- for scientific research.Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink
from, if not flee, an invitation to study Buddhist
meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as
Davidson recently conceded, ''very flaky.'' But the
Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself -- he
took leave from graduate school to travel through India and
Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices -- leapt at
the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and
embarked on an ambitious data-gathering expedition to
northern India, lugging portable electrical generators,
laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG)
recording equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas.
His goal was to measure a remarkable, if seemingly
evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of the
Buddhist mind at work. ''These are the Olympic athletes,
the gold medalists, of meditation,'' Davidson says.The work began fitfully -- the monks initially balked at
being wired -- but research into meditation has now
attained a credibility unimaginable a decade ago. Over the
past 10 years, a number of Buddhist monks, led by Matthieu
Ricard, a French-born monk with a Ph.D. in molecular
biology, have made a series of visits from northern India
and other South Asian countries to Davidson's lab in
Madison. Ricard and his peers have worn a Medusa-like
tangle of 256-electrode EEG nets while sitting on the floor
of a little booth and responding to visual stimuli. They
have spent two to three hours at a time in a magnetic
resonance imaging machine, trying to meditate amid the
clatter and thrum of the brain-imaging machinery.No data from these experiments have been published formally
yet, but in ''Visions of Compassion,'' a compilation of
papers that came out last year, Davidson noted in passing
that in one visiting monk, activation in several regions of
his left prefrontal cortex -- an area of the brain just
behind the forehead that recent research has associated
with positive emotion -- was the most intense seen in about
175 experimental subjects.In the years since Davidson's fax from the Dalai Lama, the
neuroscientific study of Buddhist practices has crossed a
threshold of acceptability as a topic worthy of scientific
attention. Part of the reason for this lies in new, more
powerful brain-scanning technologies that not only can
reveal a mind in the midst of meditation but also can
detect enduring changes in brain activity months after a
prolonged course of meditation. And it hasn't hurt that
some well-known mainstream neuroscientists are now
intrigued by preliminary reports of exceptional Buddhist
mental skills. Paul Ekman of the University of California
at San Francisco and Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard have begun
their own studies of the mental capabilities of monks. In
addition, a few rigorous, controlled studies have suggested
that Buddhist-style meditation in Western patients may
cause physiological changes in the brain and the immune
system.This growing, if sometimes grudging, respect for the
biology of meditation is achieving a milestone of sorts
this weekend, when some of the country's leading
neuroscientists and behavioral scientists are meeting with
Tibetan Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama himself, at a
symposium held at M.I.T. ''You can think of the monks as
cases that show what the potential is here,'' Dr. Jon
Kabat-Zinn, an emeritus professor of medicine at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School who has
pioneered work in the health benefits of meditation, says.
''But you don't have to be weird or a Buddhist or sitting
on top of a mountain in India to derive benefits from this.
This kind of study is in its infancy, but we're on the
verge of discovering hugely fascinating things.''
In the 2,500-year history of Buddhism, the religion has
directed its energy inward in an attempt to train the mind
to understand the mental state of happiness, to identify
and defuse sources of negative emotion and to cultivate
emotional states like compassion to improve personal and
societal well-being. For decades, scientific research in
this country has focused on the short-term effects of
meditation on the nervous system, finding that meditation
reduces markers of stress like heart rate and perspiration.
This research became the basis for the ''relaxation
response'' popularized by Prof. Herbert Benson of Harvard
in the 1970's. Buddhist practice, however, emphasizes
enduring changes in mental activity, not just short-term
results. And it is the neural and physical impact of the
long-term changes, achieved after years of intense
practice, that is increasingly intriguing to scientists.''In Buddhist tradition,'' Davidson explains,
'''meditation' is a word that is equivalent to a word like
'sports' in the U.S. It's a family of activity, not a
single thing.'' Each of these meditative practices calls on
different mental skills, according to Buddhist
practitioners. The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are
focusing on three common forms of Buddhist meditation.
''One is focused attention, where they specifically train
themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of
time,'' Davidson says. ''The second area is where they
voluntarily cultivate compassion. It's something they do
every day, and they have special exercises where they
envision negative events, something that causes anger or
irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an
antidote, which is compassion. They say they are able to do
it just like that,'' he says, snapping his fingers. ''The
third is called 'open presence.' It is a state of being
acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is
present, without reacting to it. They describe it as pure
awareness.''The fact that the brain can learn, adapt and molecularly
resculpture itself on the basis of experience and training
suggests that meditation may leave a biological residue in
the brain -- a residue that, with the increasing
sophistication of new technology, might be captured and
measured. ''This fits into the whole neuroscience
literature of expertise,'' says Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard
neuroscientist, ''where taxi drivers are studied for their
spatial memory and concert musicians are studied for their
sense of pitch. If you do something, anything, even play
Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there's going
to be something in your brain that's different from someone
who didn't do that. It's just got to be.''Jonathan D. Cohen, an expert on attention and cognitive
control at Princeton, has been intrigued by reports that
certain Buddhist adepts can maintain focus for extended
periods. ''Our experience -- and the laboratory evidence is
abundant -- is that humans have a limited capacity for
attention,'' he says. ''When we try to sustain attention
for longer periods of time, like air-traffic controllers
have to do, we consider it incredibly effortful and
stressful. Buddhism is all about the ability to direct
attention flexibly, and they talk about this state of
sustained and focused attention that is pleasant, no longer
stressful.''If nothing else, the meeting at M.I.T. this weekend shows
that Davidson, one of its principal organizers, has managed
to persuade a lot of marquee names to join him in making
the case that it has become scientifically respectable to
investigate these practices. Participants include
mainstream scientists like Eric Lander, a leader of the
human genome project; Cohen, a prominent researcher into
the neural mechanisms of moral and economic
decision-making; and Daniel Kahneman, the
Nobel-Prize-winning Princeton economist who has pioneered
research into the psychology of financial decision-making.''Neuroscientists want to preserve both the substance and
the image of rigor in their approach, so one doesn't want
to be seen as whisking out into the la-la land of studying
consciousness,'' concedes Cohen, who is chairman of a
session at the M.I.T. meeting. ''On the other hand, my
personal belief is that the history of science has humbled
us about the hubris of thinking we know everything.''
The ''Monk experiments'' at Madison are beginning to
intersect with a handful of small but suggestive studies
showing that Buddhist-style meditation may have not only
emotional effects but also distinct physiological effects.
That is, the power of meditation might be harnessed by
non-Buddhists in a way that along with reducing stress and
defusing negative emotion, improves things like immune
function as well.The power of the mind to influence bodily function has long
been of interest to scientists, especially connections
between the nervous, immune and endocrine systems. Janice
Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser, researchers at Ohio State
University, for example, have done a series of studies
showing that stress typically impairs immune function,
though the exact woof and weave of these connections
remains unclear.Interestingly enough, the Buddhist subjects themselves are
largely open to scientific explanation of their practices.
''Buddhism is, like science, based on experience and
investigation, not on dogma,'' Matthieu Ricard explained in
an e-mail message to me last month. The religion can be
thought of as ''a contemplative science,'' he wrote,
adding, ''the Buddha always said that one should not accept
his teachings simply out of respect for him, but rediscover
their truth through our own experience, as when checking
the quality of a piece of gold by rubbing it on a piece on
stone, melting it and so on.''In July, I joined Davidson and several colleagues as they
stood in a control room and watched an experiment in
progress. On a television monitor in the control room, a
young woman sat in a chair in a nearby room, alone with her
thoughts. Those thoughts -- and, more specifically, the way
she tried to control them when provoked -- were the point
of the experiment.Davidson hypothesizes that a component of a person's
emotional makeup reflects the relative strength, or
asymmetry, of activity between two sides of the prefrontal
cortex -- the left side, which Davidson's work argues is
associated with positive emotion, and the right side, where
heightened activity has been associated with anxiety,
depression and other mood disorders.His research group has conducted experiments on infants and
the elderly, amateur meditators and Eastern adepts, in an
attempt to define a complex neural circuit that connects
the prefrontal cortex to other brain structures like the
amygdala, which is the seat of fear, and the anterior
cingulate, which is associated with
''conflict-monitoring.'' Some experiments have also shown
that greater left-sided prefrontal activation is associated
with enhanced immunological activity by natural killer
cells and other immune markers.When one scientist in the control room said, ''All right,
here comes the first picture,'' the young woman visibly
tensed, gripping her elbows. Electrodes snaked out of her
scalp and from two spots just below her right eye. And
then, staring into a monitor, the young woman watched as a
succession of mostly disturbing images flashed on a screen
in front of her -- a horribly mutilated body, a severed
hand, a venomous snake poised to strike. Through earphones,
the woman was prompted to modulate her emotional response
as each image appeared, either to enhance it or suppress
it, while the electrodes below her eye surreptitiously
tapped into a neural circuit that would indicate if she had
successfully modified either a positive or negative
emotional response to the images.''What's being measured,'' Davidson explained, ''is a
person's capacity to voluntarily regulate their emotional
reactions.''Daren Jackson, the lead researcher on the study, added,
''Meditation may facilitate more rapid, spontaneous
recovery from negative reactions.''The visiting monks, as well as a group of meditating office
workers at a nearby biotech company, have viewed these same
gruesome images for the same purpose: to determine what
Davidson calls each individual's ''affective style'' (if
they are prone, for example, to hang onto negative
emotional reactions) and if that style can be modulated by
mental effort, of the sort that meditation seeks to
cultivate. It is the hope of Davidson and his sometime
collaborator Jon Kabat-Zinn that the power of meditation
can be harnessed to promote not only emotional well-being
but also physical health.Since founding the Stress Reduction Clinic at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979,
Kabat-Zinn and colleagues have treated 16,000 patients and
taught more than 2,000 health professionals the techniques
of ''mindfulness meditation,'' which instructs a
Buddhist-inspired ''nonjudgmental,'' total awareness of the
present moment as a way of reducing stress. Along the way,
Kabat-Zinn has published small but intriguing studies
showing that people undergoing treatment for psoriasis heal
four times as fast if they meditate; that cancer patients
practicing meditation had significantly better emotional
outlooks than a control group; and not only that meditation
relieved symptoms in patients with anxiety and chronic pain
but also that the benefits persisted up to four years after
training. Kabat-Zinn is conducting a study for Cigna
HealthCare to see if meditation reduces the costs of
treating patients with chronic fatigue syndrome,
fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome.
For the time being, meditation science is still stuck in a
cultural no-man's land between being an oxymoron and
something more substantive. ''We're very early in the
research,'' said Davidson, who admitted that ''the vast
majority of meditation research is schlock.'' But a
well-designed study published in July by Davidson,
Kabat-Zinn and their colleagues provides further evidence
that the topic is legitimate.In July 1997, Davidson recruited human subjects at a small
biotech company outside Madison called Promega to study the
effects of Buddhist-style meditation on the neural and
immunological activity of ordinary American office workers.
The employees' brains were wired and measured before they
began a course in meditation training taught by Kabat-Zinn.
It was a controlled, randomized study, and after eight
weeks, the researchers would test brain and immune markers
to assess the effects of meditation.There was reluctance among some employees to volunteer, but
eventually, about four dozen employees participated in the
study. Once a week for eight weeks, Kabat-Zinn would show
up at Promega with his boom box, his red and purple
meditation tape cassettes and his Tibetan chimes, and the
assembled Promega employees -- scientists, marketing
people, lab techs and even some managers -- would sit on
the floor of a conference room and practice mindfulness for
three hours.In July, the results of the experiment at Promega were
published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, and they
suggest that meditation may indeed leave a discernible and
lasting imprint on the minds and bodies of its
practitioners. Among the Promega employees who practiced
meditation for two months, the Wisconsin researchers
detected significant increases in activity in several areas
of the left prefrontal cortex -- heightened activity that
persisted for at least four months after the experiment,
when the subjects were tested again. Moreover, the
meditators who showed the greatest increase in prefrontal
activity after training showed a correspondingly more
robust ability to churn out antibodies in response to
receiving a flu vaccine. The findings, Kabat-Zinn
suggested, demonstrated qualitative shifts in brain
activity after only two months of meditation that mirror
preliminary results seen in expert meditators like monks.These results are still embraced cautiously, at best.
Indeed, the Wisconsin study took five years to publish in
part because several higher-profile journals to which it
was submitted refused even to send it out for peer review,
according to Davidson. And yet, by the time the study was
over, the subjective experience of participants
complemented the objective data: meditation ultimately left
people feeling healthier, more positive and less stressed.
''I really am an empiricist in every aspect of my life,''
said Michael Slater, a molecular biologist at Promega. ''I
doubt dogma, and I test it. I do it at the laboratory
bench, but also in my personal life. So this appealed to
me, because I could feel the reduction in stress. I could
tell I was less irritable. I had more capacity to take on
more stressors. My wife felt I was easier to be around. So
there were tangible impacts. For an empiricist, that was
enough.''Granted, that's not enough for many other people,
especially the scientific skeptics. But Slater made an
offhand comment that struck me as a highly convincing,
though thoroughly unofficial, form of peer review. ''My
wife,'' Slater said quietly, ''is dying for me to start
meditating again.''
Stephen S. Hall is the author, most recently, of
''Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life
Extension.''http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/14BUDDHISM.html?ex=1064599469&ei=1&en=83bffdd758849b8e
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