New York, USA -- All too many years
ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess
how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical,
my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly,
my results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.
To be sure,
over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation,
some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only
last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis,
by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability
to soothe.
The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely
research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and political leader
in exile, and some of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United States.
The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in
March 2000, to discuss how people might better control their destructive emotions.
One
of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science and ancient
wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience
at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent research using functional
M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain's set
point for moods.
The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally
distressed - anxious, angry, depressed - the most active sites in the brain are
circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and
the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical
of people under stress.
By contrast, when people are in positive moods - upbeat,
enthusiastic and energized - those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity
in the left prefrontal cortex.
Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he
believes is a quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by reading the
baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio
predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the
right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity
to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.
By taking readings on hundreds
of people, Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people
in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people
who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or
anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest
to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid.
This
may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically determined set point
for our emotional range. One finding, for instance, shows that both for people
lucky enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from
an accident, by a year or so after the events their daily moods are about the
same as before the momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point
changes little, if at all.
By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test
the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most
extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.
Dr. Davidson
reported that remarkable finding during the meeting between the Dalai Lama and
the scientists in India. But the finding, while intriguing, raised more questions
than it answered.
Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become
monks? Or was there something about the training of lamas - the Tibetan Buddhist
equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher - that might nudge a set point into
the range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama wondered, can it
be taken out of the religious context to be shared for the benefit of all?
A
tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. Davidson
did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
That
clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases of all kinds, to
help them better handle their symptoms. In an article accepted for publication
in the peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn
report the effects of training in mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from
its Buddhist origins and now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics
throughout the United States and many other countries.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught
mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure biotech business for roughly three hours
a week over two months. A comparison group of volunteers from the company received
the training later, though they, like the participants, were tested before and
after training by Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.
The results bode well for
beginners, who will never put in the training time routine for lamas. Before the
mindfulness training, the workers were on average tipped toward the right in the
ratio for the emotional set point. At the same time, they complained of feeling
highly stressed. After the training, however, on average their emotions ratio
shifted leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their moods improved;
they reported feeling engaged again in their work, more energized and less anxious.
In
short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given the proper
training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and
drop those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that
it may strengthen an array of neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits
the messages from the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.
Another benefit
for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that mindfulness seemed to improve
the robustness of their immune systems, as gauged by the amount of flu antibodies
in their blood after receiving a flu shot.
According to Dr. Davidson, other
studies suggest that if people in two experimental groups are exposed to the flu
virus, those who have learned the mindfulness technique will experience less severe
symptoms. The greater the leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger
the increase in the immune measure.
The mindfulness training focuses on learning
to monitor the continuing sensations and thoughts more closely, both in sitting
meditation and in activities like yoga exercises.
Now, with the Dalai Lama's
blessing, a trickle of highly trained lamas have come to be studied. All of them
have spent at least three years in solitary meditative retreat. That amount of
practice puts them in a range found among masters of other domains, like Olympic
divers and concert violinists.
What difference such intense mind training may
make for human abilities has been suggested by preliminary findings from other
laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing data come from the work of another
scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the
University of California at San Francisco, which studies the facial expression
of emotions. Dr. Ekman also participated in the five days of dialogue with the
Dalai Lama.
Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read
another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial muscles.
As
Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by Times
Books in April, these microexpressions - ultrarapid facial actions, some lasting
as little as one-twentieth of a second - lay bare our most naked feelings. We
are not aware we are making them; they cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily,
and so reveal for those who can read them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.
Perhaps
luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments. Though Dr. Ekman's
book explains how people can learn to detect these expressions in just hours with
proper training, his testing shows that most people - including judges, the police
and psychotherapists - are ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than
someone making random guesses.
Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory
two Tibetan practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions
tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American teacher of
Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six, considered quite rare. Normally,
a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.
Such findings, along
with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr. Ekman to design a program called
"Cultivating Emotional Balance," which combines methods extracted from
Buddhism, like mindfulness, with synergistic training from modern psychology,
like reading microexpressions, and seeks to help people better manage their emotions
and relationships.
A pilot of the project began last month with elementary
school teachers in the San Francisco Bay area, under the direction of Dr. Margaret
Kemeny, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of California at
San Francisco. She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's immune system findings on
mindfulness, as well as adding other measures of emotional and social skill, in
a controlled trial with 120 nurses and teachers.
Finally, the scientific momentum
of these initial forays has intrigued other investigators. Under the auspices
of the Mind and Life Institute, which organizes the series of continuing meetings
between the Dalai Lama and scientists, there will be a round at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama will meet
with an expanded group of researchers to discuss further research possibilities.
Though
open to the public, half the seats will be reserved for graduate students and
academic researchers. (More information is at www.InvestigatingTheMind.org.)
As
for me, I am taking all this to heart. An on-again, off-again meditator since
my college days, I have become decidedly on again. Next month, my wife and I are
heading to a warm spot for two or three weeks of meditation retreat. I may never
catch up with that sublime lama, but I will enjoy trying.