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Page 3 of 6
Reflecting
the insatiable curiosity of its founder, CIHM has more than a dozen
projects underway and new possibilities popping up all the time
(investigation of videogames designed to develop kindness and
compassion, for example). While Davidson is its leading light, the
center clearly operates collegially and collaboratively. More than
twenty-five people are on the go, including scientists, graduate
students, research assistants, outreach specialists, and support staff.
During an extensive visit there, I learned about basic meditation
research, a study of meditative methods for decreasing asthma symptoms,
programs in local schools, a study of mind wandering, research on our
ecological mindset, and how veterans are being helped through yoga
practice. I also learned about the work they do at the center to find
good controls to compare with the practices they are studying.
“Otherwise,” Davidson says, “how will we know that the effects of eight
weeks of meditation are any better than eight weeks of taking time to
let your mind wander?”
Davidson
talked about his days as a graduate student in the mid-1970s, when he
shocked his professors by taking off for India to explore meditation
practice and Buddhist teachings. After three months there and in Sri
Lanka, he came back convinced he would do meditation research. He was
quickly disabused of this notion by his professors, who let him know
that if he had any hope of a career in science, he’d better stow the
meditation and follow a more conventional path of research. He became a
closet meditator and an affective neuroscientist—a student of the
emotions. In those early days, he says, whatever “research” there was on
meditation was half-cocked, filled with extravagant claims of magical
results but not following standard protocols or building on the
methodologies of previous research in related areas. A study that
correlated drops in crime with the activity of Transcendental Meditation
practitioners in the vicinity (and similar misguided efforts) tainted
meditation research and helped keep him in the closet. As well, he says,
“the science and the methods of the time were not suited to the task of
studying subtle internal experience.” They lacked technology like fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging), which takes a moving picture of
brain activity. They didn’t have any appreciation of epigenetics, the
process by which our gene makeup can be changed throughout our lifetime.
But above all, Davidson says, “we lacked an understanding of
neuroplasticity. It is now widely accepted that the brain is an organ
designed to change in response to experience and, importantly for our
work, in response to training.”
For
many meditators, talking about “the brain” seems materialistic, as if
all we were was a lump of electrically charged flesh; similarly, many
scientists are uncomfortable talking about something as intangible as mind.
Where is it? How do you measure it? Davidson is comfortable talking
about both, and says that nowadays many more researchers are too. Mind
may not be so easily defined and delineated as brain, but the center
uses the term healthy minds,
he says, because it is minds—different types of minds—that can be
trained in beneficial ways. And the effects of this training leave their
mark on the brain, and can be observed and measured. These demonstrable
positive results are the point. Not only do they increase Western
science’s understanding of the brain’s nature and capabilities, they
offer convincing evidence for U.S. institutions like the Department of
Education, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense,
even the Department of Energy, that mind/brain training could offer
beneficial results that would help them fulfill their missions. While
the brain-mind conundrum is likely to remain a koan and a Buddhist
metaphysical contemplation, if people develop more positive states and
traits, does it really matter whether we can pinpoint the mind on our
Around Me app?
In his new book coming out in March, The Emotional Life of Your Brain,
written with Sharon Begley, Davidson counsels using your mind to train
your brain. To oversimplify, the pathways carved in the brain take you
quickly to places you need to go, but they can also take you quickly to
less desirable places, like anger, jealousy, depression. Through
training, you can use the power of your mind to change the pathways in
your brain. As you follow those new pathways, it has beneficial effects
on your mind, such as greater composure and a combination of
attentiveness and relaxation. Mind and brain form a virtuous circle.
The
brain imaging and behavior laboratory is a Frankenstein- like lair of
lab benches, booths, wires, screens, and dials. The list of high-end
measuring devices would require a treatise to explain: a 3T MRI scanner;
visual, auditory, and gustatory stimulation capabilities with online
eye tracking during MRI scans; a PET (positron emission tomography)
scanner; a micro PET scanner; a scanning simulation room with a mock
scanner; a tandem accelerator to support the PET scanners; a 256-channel
EEG facility for stand-alone and combined electrical and hemodynamic
imaging studies; and dedicated computing facilities.
This
machinery, Dr. Antoine Lutz tells me, has been blessed by many
meditation adepts, including, most famously, the Dalai Lama. Both
Matthieu Ricard and Mingyur Rinpoche underwent studies of their brain
activity there. Lutz, who began his studies in Paris working with
Francisco Varela, a pioneer in the study of consciousness using first-
and third-person methods of investigation, has long focused on experts.
In psychology, he says, an “expert” is someone who has devoted at least
ten thousand hours to develop a specific skill (playing a violin,
hitting a baseball, knitting). In the case of meditators, many of the
people he has studied have completed the traditional Tibetan three-year
retreat.
We
look first at the fMRI facility. A study participant lies down and
enters the MRI tube. Researchers on the other side of the glass might
show participants images that appear on the inside of goggles. How do
their brains react to a gory image, a pleasant one, a neutral one? What
brain pattern emerges when they’re asked to move a thumb? Or think about
moving a thumb? They might ask participants to do some compassion
practice.
The
fMRI is expensive to run and maintain, so meditators are not being fed
through it right and left. Time in the machine must be scheduled and
prepared for. By the time someone goes into the machine, the researchers
know exactly what they will ask the person to do. After collecting the
data, they spend months crunching it, using sophisticated computer
algorithms to interpret what they’re seeing.
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