Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, here comes to the conclusion that 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."
Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson's lab, and next he dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners of Buddhist meditiation 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.
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. 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.
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."
But brain scanning has recently been moving far from its medical roots. Scientists have also located such complex emotional states as the feeling of regret or a sense of humour. The findings are potential commercial and political gold dust and have given rise to two new trades, neuromarketing and neuropolling, that promise to reveal some of the secrets of buying or voting habits. At the time of the US presidential election, for instance, researchers reported that violent images produced different areas of activity in the brains of Democrat and Republican voters. These developments have led to fears that it won’t be long before corporations and political parties are able to figure out how to manipulate us even more successfully. But how realistic is this? Could our free will be eroded by clever advertising and political campaigns, honed in the scanning labs to press the right neurological buttons? Not necessarily. Last month a highly critical article in the online journal The Scientist pointed out that for all the appearance of objectivity, the reading of MRI scans is still a highly interpretive practice — “akin to deciding whether Van Gogh or Matisse is the more colourful artist”.
In the recent study of US voters, for instance, researchers found that scenes of 9/11 evoked more activity in the fear centre of the brain — the amygdala — of Democrats than Republicans. The researchers claimed it was because the Democrats are more alarmed by the use of force. But it could also mean that they were more concerned by the people who died, or more concerned about the political capital that President Bush would make from it. Then there are the key issues of time and space. Brain scans measure blood flow so they work in minutes, but brain activity is measured in milliseconds. Between one brain scan “snapshot” and another, billons of neural actions could have occurred. The space mismatch is as bad. The latest machines can focus on an area as small as a cubic millimetre but that still contains about 100,000 neurons, each with thousands of connections.
What all this means is that a brain scan image is made up of broad brush strokes. The multiple layers of the mind are still beyond being matched to different splodges of colour. No scans, for instance, can detect the different patterns that different personalities might create. Fascinating and valuable as they are, brain scans aren’t yet the all-seeing magical eyes we sometimes hope and fear that they might be. According to free-market theory, we make economic decisions based on a rational assessment of self-interest. But, in fact, this is fiction. By scanning the brains of people while they played computer games mimicking real-life choices, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta found that we seem to be hard-wired for “irrational ” acts such as trusting people and dividing profits fairly. The rules of the game meant that you got more if you co-operated and trusted the other person, but it also laid you open to being robbed.
The scientists had expected a positive brain response when one player cheated successfully on another. Instead, what they found was that trusting brought its own emotional reward, triggering activity in the same reward centre that responds to sex.
Another game involved two rules. Player A could decide how much of a sum of money he would give to B. If B refused the money, both got nothing.
The rational decision would be for A to offer as little as possible and for B to always accept it — something is better than nothing. Instead, A usually offered about 40 per cent of the total and B often rejected lower offers.
Once men had made a decision, their brain more or less shut down but women’s brains looked as if they were still worrying whether they had done the right thing.
Mind over money
According to free-market theory, we make economic decisions based on a rational assessment of self-interest. But, in fact, this is fiction. By scanning the brains of people while they played computer games mimicking real-life choices, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta found that we seem to be hard-wired for “irrational ” acts such as trusting people and dividing profits fairly. The rules of the game meant that you got more if you co-operated and trusted the other person, but it also laid you open to being robbed.
The scientists had expected a positive brain response when one player cheated successfully on another. Instead, what they found was that trusting brought its own emotional reward, triggering activity in the same reward centre that responds to sex.
Another game involved two rules. Player A could decide how much of a sum of money he would give to B. If B refused the money, both got nothing. The rational decision would be for A to offer as little as possible and for B to always accept it — something is better than nothing.
Instead, a usually offered about 40 per cent of the total and B often rejected lower offers.
Once men had made a decision, their brain more or less shut down but women’s brains looked as if they were still worrying whether they had done the right thing.
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