Brain systems

Beat Pain with Mindfulness

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“A common but unfortunate saying is that the pain is in your head….this saying implies that it’s not real, but fabricated. This is not true. However, pain is located in your head, within your brain. When you have pain, the brain is very active processing it. How your brain processes it determines the pain you experience. So yes, your pain experience is in your head, but it’s real. It can be measured, and it can be changed for the better.” – Adriaan Louw

 

Mindfulness practices including meditation have been shown to reduce perceived pain (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/pain/). The studies that examined mindfulness and pain, however, did not include any control conditions to account for the effects of a placebo or participant expectations about the efficacy of the treatment. The placebo effect is powerful and can produce outcomes that are very similar to those produced by different forms of treatment including therapy and drugs. This effect is based upon the psychological tendency of people to produce outcomes that conform to their expectations. So, if the participant believes that a treatment will make him/her better, it will, regardless of whether the particular treatment is actually effective or not.

 

The placebo effect presents a difficult issue for treatment research and most studies do not include any mechanism for assessing the expectations of the participants. Thus many reported positive results may in fact be due to the placebo effect rather than an actual effect of the treatment. So, it is possible that the reported efficacy for mindfulness training to reduce perceived pain may in fact be due to a placebo effect. Even if a treatment is actually effective, the placebo effect may be so strong that the true effect cannot be distinguished from the placebo effect. It is very difficult to separate the two.

 

A potential method for examining whether an effect is due to a treatment or a placebo is to look at the neural mechanisms underlying the two.  In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness Meditation-Based Pain Relief Employs Different Neural Mechanisms than Placebo and Sham Mindfulness Meditation-Induced Analgesia”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1144956498861608/?type=3&theater

http://jn.sfn.org/press/November-18-2015-Issue/zns04615015307.pdf

Zeidan and colleagues implement this strategy and investigate the neural systems that respond to meditation vs. placebo for pain. They actually implement three control groups, placebo conditioning, sham mindfulness meditation, and book-listening for comparison with meditation and also record functional neuroimaging for each group while responding to an experimental pain condition. The placebo condition involved telling the participant that they were being administered a pain killing cream which was in actuality an inert petroleum jelly. The sham meditation condition only instructed the participant to close their eyes and breath and meditate but without specific instructions as to how to meditate. The experimental pain procedure involved the application of a non-damaging hot probe. During the application of the probe the participants rated their pain and also had their brains scanned with functional MRI.

 

They found that only the meditation group had an increase in mindfulness and that all groups except the book-listening control group had decreased pain intensity and pain unpleasantness ratings. The meditation group, however, had the largest decrease in perceived pain and pain unpleasantness. They also found that different neural structures were activated with the pain manipulation with the different conditions. Meditation produced a greater activation in brain regions associated with the cognitive processing of pain, including the orbitofrontal, subgenual anterior cingulate, and anterior insular cortex. While the placebo produced increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and deactivation of sensory processing regions. Sham meditation did not produce significant neural activity, but rather greater reductions in the respiration rate.

 

These results are interesting and important. They demonstrate that meditation is more effective than either a placebo or a sham meditation in reducing perceived pain and pain unpleasantness. In addition, they demonstrate that there were different neural mechanisms involved in the effects of each on pain. The fact that they work differently in the brain indicates that meditation’s effectiveness at relieving pain is not due to a placebo or subject expectancy effect or to the conditions of meditation. Hence, meditation is an effective treatment for pain.

 

So, meditate and beat pain.

 

“Your brain plays a major role in controlling your pain. How you are feeling or what you are thinking about your pain has a direct impact on what happens to the pain signal in the spinal cord, and thus has a huge effect on how much pain you feel.”- Charles Argoff

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Reset the Default Mode Network with Meditation

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“I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.” – Steven Wright

 

We spend a tremendous amount of our time with our minds wandering and not on the task or the environment at hand. We daydream, plan for the future, review the past, ruminate on our failures, exalt in our successes. In fact we spend almost half of our waking hours off task with our mind wandering. You’d think that if we spend so much time doing this it must be enjoyable. But, in fact research has shown that when our mind is wandering we are actually unhappier than when we are paying attention to what is at hand.

 

A system of the brain known as the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes active during wind wandering and relatively quiet during focused on task behavior. It is involved when we are engaged in internally focused tasks such as recalling deeply personal memories, daydreaming, sleeping, imagining the future and trying to take the perspective of others. The DMN involves neural structures including the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, precuneus, inferior parietal cortex, and lateral temporal cortex. These areas of the DMN are functionally connected, such that they are simultaneously active during mind wandering.

 

In today’s Research News article “The default mode network as a biomarker for monitoring the therapeutic effects of meditation”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1131158196908105/?type=3&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4460295/

Simon and colleagues review the literature on the DMN and note that its malfunction is associated with psychiatric disorders and returns to normal upon successful treatment of the disorders. The DMN activity is also affected by meditation which has also been shown to produces improvements in psychiatric disorders. So there would appear to be a common thread here; DMN activity.

 

They find that the DMN is abnormally active in a number of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, successful treatments of these disorders are associated with a return to normal activity in the DMN. For example when a schizophrenic patient responds favorably to antipsychotic medication, DMN activity is normalized.

 

Meditation training is devoted to improving present moment awareness and decreasing mind wandering. As a result meditation training reduces the activity of the DMN. In addition, meditation has been shown to be beneficial for the treatment of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, addictions, alcoholism, and mild cognitive impairments.

 

As a result of these findings Simon and colleagues conclude that the state of the DMN may be an excellent indicator of the psychiatric health of the individual and it can also be an indicator of therapeutic improvement. In addition, it is a metric of the effectiveness of meditation for the treatment of disease. Hence, it is postulated that the DMN may be the common thread linking, psychiatric disorders, to therapeutic effectiveness, and to mindfulness training. If this is true it could lead to more effective diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses with meditation.

 

Needless to say the Default Mode Network (DMN) may be much more important than just the seat of mind wandering. It may be a crucial for mental health.

 

So, reset the default mode network with meditation and improve psychiatric health.

 

“Remember that breath walking – as with any meditation technique – should not be pursued with a grim determination to ‘get it right.’ The point is to cultivate openness, relaxation and awareness, which can include awareness of your undisciplined, wandering mind.” – Andrew Weil

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

The Made-up “Real”

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“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” ~ Albert Einstein

 

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.” – Eugene Ionesco
Dreams are purported to be not real. They are thought to be constructions of our nervous system that occur during an altered state of consciousness termed sleep. But, they appear and feel very real. While the dream is in progress we experience it as completely real. Things happen mostly in real time. We visualize people, places, and things in great detail and hear sounds and voices. We even feel emotions. What’s different about a dream in comparison to what we call reality?

 

In actuality, much of what we experience during so called “reality” is not real, but a construction produced by our nervous systems. We experience color in our visual world, but in fact there is nothing in the physical world that has color. Our eyes take in different wavelengths of light, electromagnetic radiation with different distances between peaks. That is all. There is nothing colored here. But our eyes have three different receptors that respond to different ranges of wavelengths. Our brain then interprets the activity of these receptors as different colors. In fact it is a complete illusion. What we think we see and experience is in fact not there.

 

Our everyday thoughts, day dreams, and fantasies we recognize as not a reflection of reality. But nevertheless they constitute a constructed experience. Our brain is completely capable of constructing experiences that are similar to those that we label as “reality.” Could it be that this labelled “reality” is in fact just another constructed experience?

 

The great physiologist and philosopher, Johannes Müller, pointed out that we are not directly aware of the natural world, but rather what we are aware of is the state of our nervous system. In other words, our awareness is simply of what is going on in our nervous system. It is constructed by brain processes. Is this any more real than the dream?

 

It is clear that we can make up experiences and perceive them vividly. The great question then becomes how much is “real” and how much and which ones are mental constructs. This question has had a range of answers from the materialist who suggests that there is objective reality to the Zen master who suggests that there is no reality other than pure being.

 

If all that we are aware of is the state of our nervous system is that, at least, an objective reality? Dreams are produced by internal brain activity that lacks an external referent. These are apparently very “real’ to the dreamer, but most would agree that they are not “real.” Drugs can produce very “real” experiences but most agree that they are not “real.” But are these experiences not just a construct of altered brain activity produced by sleep systems or altered chemistry, respectively? If our sleep systems or altered brain chemistry can produce an untrue “reality” what does this imply about the “reality” produced by our usual brain chemistry? Does it not imply that the nervous system is at best an unstable platform for the expression of “reality” or that our awareness itself does not present to us the “real?”

 

The only thing that we conclusively know to be real is our personal awareness of the immediate moment. Everything else is just a memory or a fantasy. That experienced moment is ever changing, mutating, arising and falling away. It cannot be held onto. So, the only thing that we know to be real is ephemeral, a puff of smoke blown in the wind. But, is this phantasm real or is it created in our awareness? Is it a reflection of an objective reality or a compelling hallucination? Does it have substance beyond experience?

 

We have arrived at the point of concluding that the only “reality” that we can know to be real is an ephemeral experience of a present moment and that even this is perhaps only a continuing experience of the ever changing state of our nervous system that we know is not an accurate depiction of any external physical state of environmental energies. To be sure, this is a very tenuous grasp at something “real.”

 

Doesn’t it make more sense to admit that awareness is the only “reality?” What enters awareness is simply what we experience regardless of its origin. Does it really matter if it is reflective of an external “reality” or simply all made up? It is simply our “reality” and it may not need to be anything more. Seeing it this way, the question becomes irrelevant.

 

 “I’m more convinced each day of the complete unreality of the material world and the supreme vitality of the invisible world of spirit.”- Paul Russo

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Aging the Brain Healthily with Mindfulness

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Aging the Brain Healthily with Mindfulness

 

“He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.” – Plato (427-346 B.C.)

 

If we are lucky enough to survive long enough we’ll all have an opportunity to experience the aging process. It is a systematic progressive decline in every system in the body. It cannot be avoided. But, there is evidence that it can be slowed. Contemplative practices such as meditation, yoga, and tai chi or qigong have all been shown to be beneficial in slowing or delaying physical and mental decline with aging (see links below).

 

Using modern neuroimaging techniques, scientists have been able to view the changes that occur in the nervous system with aging. In addition, they have been able to investigate various techniques that might slow the process of neurodegeneration that accompanies normal aging. They have found that contemplative practices of meditation and yoga restrain the loss of neural tissue with aging. The brains of practitioners degenerate less than non-practitioners.

 

The hippocampus is a large subcortical structure that has been shown to decrease in size and connectivity with aging. It also has been found that long-term meditators are somewhat protected from this deterioration. A part of the hippocampus known as the subiculum is of particular interest because it decreases in size with aging and is associated with memory and spatial ability, both of which decline with aging. In addition, the subiculum appears to be larger in long-term meditators. But it has yet to be seen if the age related deterioration of the subiculum is spared with meditation.

 

In today’s Research News article “Reduced age-related degeneration of the hippocampal subiculum in long-term meditators”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1114180745272517/?type=3&theater

Kurth and colleagues investigate this question by looking at the size of the subiculum in meditators and non-meditators ranging in age from 24 to 77 years. They found that the non-meditators showed the expected decrease in size of the subiculum with aging. But there was no significant decline in the subiculum size on the left side with aging with the meditators.

 

Hence, the findings of Kurth and colleagues suggest that meditation practice protects an important part of the brain from deteriorating with age. This is interesting and important and could reflect the mechanism by which meditation decreases the aging individual’s loss of memory and spatial ability.

 

Meditation is known to decrease the physiological and psychological responses to stress. In addition, stress including childhood trauma is known to produce a reduction in the size of the subiculum on the left side. It follows then the neuroprotective effects of meditation on the age related deterioration of the left subiculum may result from meditations known ability to reduce stress. Further research will be required to test this idea. Regardless, the results clearly demonstrate that meditation can result in less deterioration with aging of an important part of the brain.

 

So, meditate to reduce brain loss with aging.

 

“There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain, or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing, inner peace, and well-being.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Mindfulness practices are known to increase the activity, size, and connectivity of neural structures (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/01/this-is-your-brain-on-meditation/ and http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/19/spirituality-mindfulness-and-the-brain/ and http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/03/make-the-brain-more-efficient-with-meditation/).

Yoga practice has been shown to decrease age related brain deterioration. ( See http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/age-healthily-protect-the-brain-with-yoga/).

 

Meditation improves sleep in aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/31/age-healthily-sleep-better-with-meditation/

Mindfulness improves emotions in aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/age-healthily-mindfulness/

Qigong improves responses to stress in aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/09/28/age-healthily-with-qigong-soothing-stress-responses/

Yoga practice improves the symptoms of arthritis http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/14/age-healthily-yoga-for-arthritis/

Yoga practice can reduce indicators of cellular aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/aging-healthily-yoga-and-cellular-aging/

Yoga decreases musculoskeletal deterioration in aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/age-healthily-yoga/

Tai Chi reduces inflammation and insomnia in aging http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/06/age-healthily-treating-insomnia-and-inflammation/ and http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/aging-healthily-sleeping-better-with-mindful-movement-practice/

 

 

 

Develop a Better Brain Mindfully

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The nervous system changes dramatically during development. It is a time when the brain is greatly affected by the environment and experiences of the individual. This is what neuroscientists call neuroplasticity. It is present in adulthood, but is particularly evident and important during development. The nervous system is molded to efficiently analyze the environment presented.

 

Studies of the development of the nervous system during adolescence have revealed marked changes occurring throughout the teen years. The brain doesn’t look like that of an adult until the early 20s. Over the course of childhood the outer layer of the nervous system, the cortex, increases in thickness and then during adolescence thins. Late adolescence is a time of brain development when the highest levels of intellectual development are being produced by refinements in the structures of the nervous system. The thinning of the cortex is thought to reflect a pruning of cortical systems making processing more and more efficient. It is making the nervous system more efficient and tuned to the environment in which it is immersed.

 

It is thought that many of the emotional and behavioral problems during adolescence occur due to the fact that the neural systems underlying emotional reactivity and expression are fully developed well before the development of the higher processes that regulate and control the emotions and the responses to the emotions. As a result, adolescent behavior can be overly determined by emotion. This can potentially explain the high rates of teen suicide, reckless, thrill seeking behavior, and social anxiety. The erratic emotion driven behavior of the teen years is reflected in the teen nervous system.

 

Mindfulness has been shown to be associated with emotion regulation. The higher the level of mindfulness the better able the individual is in experiencing emotions at a manageable level and responding to them adaptively and appropriately (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/09/10/take-command-and-control-of-your-emotions/). Hence, it makes sense to study the development of the brain, mindfulness, and emotion regulation during adolescence. Perhaps mindfulness can compensate for some of the emotional dominance of behavior in the teen.

 

In today’s Research News article “Dispositional mindfulness is predicted by structural development of the insula during late adolescence”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1108203169203608/?type=3&theater

Friedel and colleagues use MRI neuroimaging to measure brain structure of males and females at age 16 and again at age 19 to view the changes occurring during late adolescence. They also measured mindfulness, emotional self-regulation, attention, inhibitory control, frustration, as well as behavioral aggression and depressive mood. High levels of mindfulness were found to be associated with higher levels of cognitive reappraisal, attention and inhibitory control, and lower levels of self-reported frustration, aggression and depressive mood. In other words, the adolescents who were very mindful were in better control of their emotions.

 

Friedel and colleagues then compared the brains at 16 years to those at 19 years and observed the expected thinning of cortical regions over this period. They found that mindfulness was associated with less thinning of an area called the Insula and that this was also associated with intelligence. They also found that the higher the level of mindfulness the less thinning of the Insula occurred and the higher the IQ test score.

 

These are intriguing findings. The Insula is an area of the cortex that has been found to be associated with interoceptive awareness, that is with the individual’s sensitivity to and awareness of their internal state. This is important for regulating emotions as the first step in regulating is actually becoming aware that they are occurring. Hence, the results suggest that the improved emotion regulation that is associated with mindfulness during late adolescence may be due to improved awareness of the emotional state and that this is due to less thinning of the Insula region of the cortex.

 

So, develop the brain mindfully and develop a more in-control teen.

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Get Connected with Mindfulness

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“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” – Michio Kaku
There are billions of cells in the nervous system that you are born with. Since the number of cells doesn’t increase as we mature, in fact it decreases, it should be obvious that our increased mental capacity is due to the development of connections between these cells. Indeed, the intelligence of a normal individual human is not related to the number of cells in the brain, but rather to how they are connected. It should be clear that the connectivity of the brain is a key to its capacity to perform mental functions.

 

Mindfulness is known to increase the number of cells in certain areas of the nervous system and decrease the number of cells in other areas and also increase the connectivity of some areas to others (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/01/this-is-your-brain-on-meditation/). Since the interactions between neural areas is so central to determining the capabilities of the nervous system it is important to investigate exactly what areas and systems are activated together and which do not.

 

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness is associated with intrinsic functional connectivity between default mode and salience networks”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1105871936103398/?type=3&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4548211/

Doll and colleagues investigated the relative activities of the intrinsic brain networks. Research has identified three distinct interconnected areas, networks that are associated with different mind states during meditation. When the meditator is focused on present experience the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, the central executive network (CEN) was activated. During mind wandering the default mode network (DMN) was activated. When the individual became aware of mind wandering the salience network (SN) was activated.

 

Doll and colleagues found that the higher the mindfulness of the individual the greater the inverse relationship between the networks respective activities. That is, they found that the higher the activity of one network the lower the activity of the others. In other words the three networks had tendencies to inhibit each other’s activity. So, when areas associated with increased focus on the present moment were activated there was a reduction in activity in areas associated with mind wandering and detecting salience and visa-versa. The higher the individual’s level of mindfulness the greater the negative relationship.

 

Hence, mindfulness is associated with greater mutual inhibition between the three neural networks. The more mindful the individual is the greater the difference between the networks’ activities. This suggests that mindfulness is associated with neural system interactions, such that their activities become more distinct. When focused on the present moment mind wandering is much less in a mindful individual. Similarly, when mind wandering is present in that mindful individual, focus on the present moment is lower.

 

Thus the neural systems reflect the observations that mindful people have more focused attention on their mental state than less mindful people. Their brains appear better able to separate out and focus on specific mental states. Hence the brains of mindful people are tuned to and probably underlie their abilities to pay attention in the present moment nonjudgmentally.

 

So, practice mindfulness and get your neural networks more connected.

 

“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.” – Carl Sagan
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Do Spiritual Experiences Reveal Ultimate Truth or Merely Brain Activity?

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Spiritual experiences, be they called awakenings, mystical experiences, or enlightenments, involve a shift in how the individual perceives reality. This could be viewed as a spiritual revelation. But it could also be viewed as a change in the neural systems integrating and interpreting experiences. So, are spiritual awakenings revelations of a reality beyond physical reality or are they simply hallucinatory experience evoked by changes in the nervous system?

 

One way of investigating this question is to study the brain-spirituality connection. Research along these lines has revealed that there is a clear association between spirituality and the brain. Modern neuroscience has developed methods, such as neuroimaging, to investigate the relationship. Applying these techniques it has been demonstrated that spirituality is associated with changes in the size, activity, and connectivity of the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/19/spirituality-mindfulness-and-the-brain/). So spirituality and changes in neural systems co-occur. But, this does not demonstrate a causal connection, whether spirituality alters the brain or brain alteration causes spirituality, or some third factor is responsible for both.

 

A better way to demonstrate if brain activity cause spiritual experiences is to investigate what happens to spirituality when the brain changes. One place to look at this is with accidental brain injuries incurred by humans that afford an opportunity to glimpses associations between brain change and spirituality. In general people who have incurred damage to the right inferior parietal area show an increase in spirituality. So, brain alteration affects spirituality. But, increased spiritual beliefs and spiritual seeking is not the same thing as spiritual experiences. So, we cannot conclude that these changes in the brain are responsible for awakening experiences.

 

Another manipulation of the brain occurs with drugs. Indeed, various hallucinogenic drugs such as mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, etc. have been shown to produce experiences that are extremely similar to spiritual experiences. These drugs have been shown to alter the activity in specific neurochemical systems in the brain and when that happens, experiences that are very similar to spiritual awakenings are evoked. Many people who have used these drugs are altered spiritually but vast numbers of people find hallucinatory drugs as fun recreation but are not affected spiritually.

 

Spiritual seekers who have used psychedelic substances report that they experience something like but not the same as spiritual awakening experiences. The following quote from Alan Watts is illustrative.

“Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse            which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs   are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones.             The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away        and works on what he has seen…”

Also a quote from Ralph Metzner

            “While psychedelic use is all about altered states, Buddhism is all about altered traits,        and one does not necessarily lead to the other.”

Hence, it appears that although there are great similarities between manipulation of brain chemistry with drugs and the experiences occurring with spiritual awakenings, they are in fact quite different.

 

So, what should we conclude regarding the clear relationship between the brain and spiritual experiences? It has been established that spirituality changes the brain and that changes in the brain are associated with spiritual experiences. Does this indicate that spirituality is nothing but a brain function? This would suggest that spirituality and spiritual experiences are nothing but physical events and don’t represent experience of true transcendence or an indication of a god. If this were true then it would suggest that there is nothing beyond the physical, that spiritual awakenings are nothing other than evoked changes in the nervous system.

 

It should be noted that reported spiritual experiences most frequently involve changes in sensory experiences. We know that sensory experiences are produced by the nervous system. So, it would be expected that if a spiritual experience occurs then there would be changes in the nervous system. As a result it is not surprising that nervous system changes would accompany spiritual experiences.

 

Neural changes may represent the effects of spiritual experiences on the physical body. After all, when we become aware of any kind of remarkable occurrence we react emotionally, physically, and thoughtfully. This would imply that the neural changes occur after the spiritual experience and not before it as a causal relationship would demand. In addition, changing the brain with drugs may simply induce the same effects as the sequela of spiritual experience and not the spiritual experiences themselves.

 

The most common report of spiritual experience is that everything is perceived as one. This oneness experience is not reported to be a change in the actual sensory information, but rather as a perception of the interconnectedness of all things such that they are seen as all a part of a singular entity, like seeing individual waves as all being part of one ocean. The more modern science studies events and their interconnections the more that the truth of oneness is revealed. The entire science of ecology has developed to study the interconnectedness among biological entities, meteorology has determined that atmospheric conditions over the entire planet are interconnected, and geology has revealed the interconnectedness of all movement of the planet’s surface and interior. Just think how interconnected everything is with sunlight. Without this energy, life could not exist and even the weather would not be changing. Everything about us and our planet is interconnected to the sun’s energy.

 

So, perhaps the oneness revealed in spiritual experiences may actually be a more accurate glimpse of the truth of existence. Perhaps, the changes observed in the brain may simply be the effect of this revelation rather than the cause. At this point we cannot reach a clear conclusion as to whether spiritual experiences are material and physical or true revelation of a non-physical reality. But the research is exciting and will continue to explore these ultimate questions regarding existence.

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

Calm your Mind and Brain with a Mantra

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“Chanting a mantra at the beginning of your meditation helps you clear the mind and takes you deep within the self. Chanting a mantra at the end of meditation helps you seal the meditation. It helps you bring the awareness of the meditation down into your daily life.” – Rama

 

Mantras are a very common component of many contemplative practices. Transcendental Meditation for example emphasizes mantras. Mantra is a Sanskrit word for “sound tool.” It is literally a tool employing sounds used in contemplative practice. It is a sound, e.g. “om”, or a phrase, e.g. “Love is the only miracle there is” that is repeated over and over and over during a contemplative practice.

 

Mantras are claimed to be helpful in contemplative practice and to help improve physical and mental well-being. But, there is very little empirical research on mantras or their effectiveness. One problem in studying mantras is that they are embedded in a contemplative practice. It is difficult then to separate the effects of the mantra from that of the overall practice. So, it is important to study mantras while extracting them from the practices.

 

In today’s Research News article “Repetitive speech elicits widespread deactivation in the human cortex: the “Mantra” effect? Brain and Behavior”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1098850243472234/?type=3&theater

Berkovich-Ohana and colleagues do just this. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511287/

They study the effects of repetitive speech, devoid of its spiritual or meditative context, on the activity of the brain. They simply had participants repeat the word “one” over and over again for 8-minutes while resting in an f-MRI scanner. They found that during repetitive speech there was an overall reduction in brain activity. In studies of meditation it has been reported that there is a reduction of activity in some areas and an increase in others. So, it is remarkable to observe a reduction without an increase elsewhere.

 

They found that the reduction in brain activity was particularly focused on a set of structures that has been labelled as the default mode network (DMN). The DMN has been found frequently in the past to be the areas that are active during mind wandering and internalized self-referential activity. In support of this, they obtained reports of the participants experience during repetitive speech and found that there was a marked reduction in thoughts and sensations experienced. Hence it appears that the repetitive speech reduced brain activity in association with reduced mental activity.

 

These results clarify why mantras are so often used in contemplative practices. They quiet the mind and they quiet the brain. This is exactly the initial goal of contemplative practice. So, mantras can be of great help in establishing the exact mental and physical state desired in contemplative practices.

 

So, incorporate mantras in your contemplative practice and calm your mind and brain.

 

“You are a cosmic flower. Om chanting is the process of opening the psychic petals of that flower.”  ― Amit Ray

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

Change Your Brain for Better Health with Yoga

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“The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what’s been called the relaxation response. When you do yoga – the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body – you initiate a process that turns the fight or flight system off and the relaxation response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms.” – Richard Faulds

 

The practice of yoga has many benefits for the individual’s physical and psychological health. Yoga has diverse effects because it is itself diverse having components of exercise, mindfulness meditation, and spirituality. So, yoga nourishes the body, mind, and spirit. As a result, yoga practice would be expected to produce physical changes. These include the relaxation response and stress relief as suggested in the above quote. These should be obvious in the muscles, tendons and joints, but, less obvious in the nervous system.

 

The nervous system changes in response to how it is used and how it is stimulated in a process called neuroplasticity. Highly used areas grow in size and connectivity. Mindfulness practices in general are known to produce these kinds of changes in the structure and activity of the brain (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/01/this-is-your-brain-on-meditation/). Indeed, yoga practice has been shown to protect the brain from age related degeneration (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/age-healthily-protect-the-brain-with-yoga/).

 

In today’s Research News article “Effects of yoga on brain waves and structural activation: A review.”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1095816263775632/?type=3&theater

Desai and colleagues review the literature on the effects of yoga practice on the structure and activity of the nervous system. They found that the published evidence indicates that there is an overall increase in brain wave activity. This increased nervous system activity may explain the decreases in anxiety and increases in focus that are evident after yoga training programs.

 

They also found that there were reported changes in brain structure. There were reported increases in the gray matter volume overall and also increases in volume of specific areas. There was reported to be increased gray matter in the insula which may explain decreased pain perception with yoga. There was reported to be an increase of hippocampal volume which is associated with spatial ability and memory. In addition, increases in amygdala and frontal cortex activation were evident after a yoga intervention. This was suggested to be associated with improved emotion regulation.

 

Regardless of the specific structure-function relationships, it’s clear that yoga practice alters the brain, increasing overall activity and increasing the volume of gray matter in areas of the brain that underlie emotion regulation, memory, spatial ability, pain, and attentional mechanisms.

 

So, practice yoga and change your brain for better physical and psychological health.

 

“The beauty is that people often come here for the stretch, and leave with a lot more.” – Liza Ciano

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

This is the Brain on Meditation – Major Depressive Disorder

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Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a severe mood disorder that includes mood dysregulation and cognitive impairment. It is estimated that 16 million adults in the U.S. (6.9% of the population suffered from major depression in the past year and affects females (8.4%) to a great extent than males (5.2%). It is second-leading cause of disability in the world following heart disease.

The usual treatment of choice for MDD is drug treatment. In fact, it is estimated that 10% of the U.S. population is taking some form of antidepressant medication. But a substantial proportion of patients (~40%) do not respond to drug treatment. In addition the drugs can have nasty side effects. So, there is need to explore other treatment options. Mindfulness meditation is a safe alternative that has been shown to be effective for major depressive disorder even in individuals who do not respond to drug treatment. (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/dealing-with-major-depression-when-drugs-fail/ ).

In today’s Research News article “The effect of body-mind relaxation meditation induction on major depressive disorder: A resting-state fMRI study”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1071024146254844/?type=1&theater

Chen and colleagues explore potential brain mechanisms for meditation effects on depression. They observed neural activity in patients with MDD before and after a mindfulness meditation exercise. They observed decreased activity in the frontal pole and increased connectivity between the right side dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (r-dmPFC) and both the left side dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (l-dlPFC) and the left side orbitofrontal cortex (l-OFC).

The frontal pole area of the brain has been shown to be heavily involved in evaluation, monitoring, or manipulation of internally generated information, basically thinking without an external referent. One of the characterizing features of depression is rumination, which is a repetitive thought pattern involving worry about past troublesome events. Hence rumination comprises negative internal thoughts without external referents. This has the effect of amplifying the depression as worry about depression produces more depression which produces worry about the depression, etc. So, decreased activity of the frontal pole would signal that after meditation there is a reduced tendency for rumination. This suggests that meditation may in part reduce depressive symptoms by reducing frontal pole meditated rumination.

The increased connectivity between the r-dmPFC and both the l-dlPFC and the (l-OFC is significant as these areas have been implicated in cognitive reappraisal, a strategy to regulate emotions by reinterpreting their meaning from a negative interpretation to a more positive one. For example rather than the feeling surrounding an emotion signaling that the individual is upset and unhappy, it is reinterpreted to mean that the individual is sensitive and empathetic toward other people. So, meditation by improving communications between these areas helps the individual to better and more positively interpret the feeling that they’re experiencing, moving them away from thoughts about depression toward thoughts about more uplifting characteristics.

Hence it appears that even a brief meditation practice can alter the activity of the brain in such a way as to relieve depression.

So, meditate and induce your brain to relieve depression.

CMCS