What Happens in Your Brain When You Meditate:
Nothing is quite as satisfying as a yoga practice that's filled with
movement. Whether you prefer an intense and sweaty vinyasa practice, a
gentle but deliberate Viniyoga practice, or something in between, all
systems of hatha yoga provide a contented afterglow for the same reason:
You sync your movement with your breath. When you do, your mind stops
its obsessive churning and begins to slow down. Your attention turns
from your endless to-do list toward the rhythm of your breath, and you
feel more peaceful than you did before you began your practice.
For many of us, accessing that same settled, contented state is more difficult to do in meditation.
It's not easy to watch the mind reveal its worries, its self-criticism,
or its old memories. Meditation requires patience and—even more
challenging for most Westerners—time. So, why would you put yourself
through the struggle?
Quite simply, meditation can profoundly alter your experience of life. Thousands of years ago the sage Patanjali,
who compiled the Yoga Sutra, and the Buddha both promised that
meditation could eliminate the suffering caused by an untamed mind. They
taught their students to cultivate focused attention, compassion, and
joy. And they believed that it was possible to change one's mental
powers and emotional patterns by regularly experiencing meditative
states. Those are hefty promises.
But these days, you don't have to take their word for it. Western
scientists are testing the wisdom of the masters, using new technology
that allows researchers to study how meditation influences the brain.
The current findings are exciting enough to encourage even the most
resistant yogis to sit down on the cushion: They suggest that
meditation—even in small doses—can profoundly influence your experience
of the world by remodeling the physical structure of your brain. Read on
to find out how, and then put each finding into practice with
meditations by yoga teachers
Christopher Tompkins, Frank Jude Boccio, and Kate Vogt.
How Meditation Trains Your Brain
Using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, Eileen Luders, a
re-searcher in the Department of Neurology at the University of
California Los Angeles School of Medicine, looks for evidence that
meditation changes the physical structure of the brain. Until recently,
this idea would have seemed absurd. "Scientists used to believe that the
brain reaches its peak in adulthood and doesn't change—until it starts
to decrease in late adulthood," Luders says. "Today we know that
everything we do, and every experience we have, actually changes the
brain."
Indeed, Luders finds several differences between the brains of
meditators and nonmeditators. In a study published in the journal
NeuroImage in 2009, Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22
meditators and 22 age-matched nonmeditators and found that the
meditators (who practiced a wide range of traditions and had between 5
and 46 years of meditation experience) had more gray matter in regions
of the brain that are important for attention, emotion regulation, and
mental flexibility. Increased gray matter typically makes an area of the
brain more efficient or powerful at processing information. Luders
believes that the increased gray matter in the meditators' brains should
make them better at controlling their attention, managing their
emotions, and making mindful choices.
Why are there differences between the brains of meditators and
nonmeditators? It's a simple matter of training. Neuroscientists now
know that the brain you have today is, in part, a reflection of the
demands you have placed on it. People learning to juggle, for example,
develop more connections in areas of the brain that anticipate moving
objects. Medical students undergoing periods of intense learning show
similar changes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for
memory. And mathematicians have more gray matter in regions important
for arithmetic and spatial reasoning.
More and more neuroscientists, like Luders, have started to think that
learning to meditate is no different from learning mental skills such as
music or math. Like anything else that requires practice, meditation is
a training program for the brain. "Regular use may strengthen the
connections between neurons and can also make new connections," Luders
explains. "These tiny changes, in thousands of connections, can lead to
visible changes in the structure of the brain."
Those structural changes, in turn, create a brain that is better at
doing whatever you've asked it to do. Musicians' brains could get better
at analyzing and creating music. Mathematicians' brains may get better
at solving problems. What do meditators' brains get better at doing?
This is where it gets interesting: It depends on what kind of meditation
they do.
Over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice
focusing attention on your breath or a mantra, the brain will
restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm
acceptance during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more
resilient to stress. And if you meditate while cultivating feelings of
love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you
spontaneously feel more connected to others.
Improve Your Attention
New research shows that meditation can help you improve your ability to
concentrate in two ways. First, it can make you better at focusing on
something specific while ignoring distractions. Second, it can make you
more capable of noticing what is happening around you, giving you a
fuller perspective on the present moment.
Some of the most fascinating research on how meditation affects
attention is being conducted by Antoine Lutz, PhD, an associate
scientist at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at
the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in collaboration with Richard
Davidson and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University
of Wisconsin. Their work has shown that concentration meditation, in
which the meditator focuses complete attention on one thing, such as
counting the breath or gazing at an object, activates regions of the
brain that are critical for controlling attention. This is true even
among novice meditators who receive only brief training. Experienced
meditators show even stronger activation in these regions. This you
would expect, if meditation trains the brain to pay attention. But
extremely experienced meditators (who have more than 44,000 hours of
meditation practice) show less activation in these regions, even though
their performance on attention tasks is better. The explanation for
this, in Lutz's view, is that the meditation training can eventually
help reduce the effort it takes to focus your attention. "This would be
consistent with traditional accounts of progress in meditation practice.
Sustaining focus becomes effortless," Lutz says. This suggests that
people can immediately enhance concentration by learning a simple
meditation technique, and that practice creates even more progress.
The researchers also looked at whether vipassana meditation training can
improve overall attention. (Vipassana means "to see things as they
really are," and the meditation techniques are designed to increase
focus, awareness, and insight.) Researchers label our inability to
notice things in our environment as "attentional blink." Most of us
experience this throughout the day, when we become so caught up in our
own thoughts that we miss what a friend says to us and have to ask her
to repeat it. A more dramatic example would be a car accident caused by
your thinking about a conversation you just had and not noticing that
the car in front of you has stopped. If you were able to reduce your
attentional blink, it would mean a more accurate and complete perception
of reality—you would notice more and miss less.
To test whether meditation reduces attentional blink, participants had
to notice two things occurring in rapid succession, less than a second
apart. The findings, published in PLoS Biology, reveal that the
meditation training improved the participants' ability to notice both
changes, with no loss in accuracy.
What explained this improvement? EEG recordings—which track patterns of
electrical activity in the brain, showing precise moment-by-moment
fluctuations in brain activation—showed that the participants allocated
fewer brain resources to the task of noticing each target. In fact, the
meditators spent less mental energy noticing the first target, which
freed up mental bandwidth for noticing what came next. Paying attention
literally became easier for the brain.
As a result, Lutz and his colleagues believe that meditation may
increase our control over our limited brain resources. To anyone who
knows what it's like to feel scattered or overwhelmed, this is an
appealing benefit indeed. Even though your attention is a limited
resource, you can learn to do more with the mental energy you already
have.
Reduce Your Stress
Dhyana heyah tad vrttayah.
Meditation removes disturbances of the mind. —Yoga Sutra II.11
Research also shows that meditation can help people with anxiety
disorders. Philippe Goldin, director of the Clinically Applied Affective
Neuroscience project in the Department of Psychology at Stanford
University, uses mindfulness meditation in his studies. The general
practice is to become aware of the present moment—by paying attention to
sounds, your breath, sensations in your body, or thoughts or
feelings—and to observe without judgment and without trying to change
what you notice.
Like most of us, the participants in Goldin's studies suffer from all
sorts of disturbances of the mind—worries, self-doubt, stress, and even
panic. But people with anxiety disorders feel unable to escape from such
thoughts and emotions, and find their lives overtaken by them. Goldin's
research shows that mindfulness meditation offers freedom for people
with anxiety, in part by changing the way the brain responds to negative
thoughts.
In his studies, participants take an eight-week mindfulness-based course
in stress reduction. They meet once weekly for a class and practice on
their own for up to an hour a day. The training includes mindfulness
meditation, walking meditation, gentle yoga, and relaxation with body
awareness as well as discussions about mindfulness in everyday life.
Before and after the intervention, participants have their brains
scanned inside an fMRI (or functional MRI) machine, which looks at brain
activity rather than the structure of the brain, while completing what
Goldin calls "self-referential processing"—that is, thinking about
themselves. An fMRI scanner tracks which brain areas consume more energy
during meditation and, therefore, which regions are more active.
Ironically, the brain-scanning sessions could provoke anxiety even in
the calmest of people. Participants must lie immobilized on their back
with their head held in the brain scanner. They rest their teeth on
dental wax to prevent any head movement or talking. They are then asked
to reflect on different statements about themselves that appear on a
screen in front of their face. Some of the statements are positive, but
many of them are not, such as "I'm not OK the way I am," or "Something's
wrong with me." These are exactly the kinds of thoughts that plague
people with anxiety.
The brain scans in Goldin's studies show a surprising pattern. After the
mindfulness intervention, participants have greater activity in a brain
network associated with processing information when they reflect on
negative self-statements. In other words, they pay more attention to the
negative statements than they did before the intervention. And yet,
they also show decreased activation in the amygdala—a region associated
with stress and anxiety. Most important, the participants suffered less.
"They reported less anxiety and worrying," Goldin says. "They put
themselves down less, and their self-esteem improved."
Goldin's interpretation of the findings is that mindfulness meditation
teaches people with anxiety how to handle distressing thoughts and
emotions without being overpowered by them. Most people either push away
unpleasant thoughts or obsess over them—both of which give anxiety more
power. "The goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts or
emotions. The goal is to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions
and learn how to move through them without getting stuck." The brain
scans suggest that the anxiety sufferers were learning to witness
negative thoughts without going into a full-blown anxiety response.
Research from other laboratories is confirming that mindfulness
meditation can lead to lasting positive changes in the brain. For
example, a recent study by Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
University put 26 highly stressed adults through an eight-week
mindfulness-based course in stress reduction that followed the same
basic format as Goldin's study. Brain scans were taken before and after
the intervention, along with participants' own reports of stress. The
participants who reported decreased stress also showed decreases in gray
-matter density in the amygdala. Previous research had revealed that
trauma and chronic stress can enlarge the amygdala and make it more
reactive and more connected to other areas of the brain, leading to
greater stress and anxiety. This study is one of the first documented
cases showing change occurring in the opposite direction—with the brain
instead becoming less reactive and more resilient.
Together, these studies provide exciting evidence that small doses of
mental training, such as an eight-week mindfulness course, can create
important changes in one's mental well-being.
Feel More Compassionate
Maitryadisu balani
The cultivation of friendliness creates inner strength.—Yoga Sutra III.24
We typically think of our emotional range as something that is fixed and
unchanging—a reflection of the personality we're born with. But
research is revealing the possibility that we may be able to cultivate
and increase our ability to feel the emotional state of compassion.
Researchers have found that feeling connected to others is as learnable
as any other skill. "We are trying to provide evidence that meditation
can cultivate compassion, and that you can see the change in both the
person's behavior and the function of the brain," Lutz says.
So what does compassion look like in the brain? To find out, Lutz and
his colleagues compared two groups of meditators—one group whose members
were experienced in compassion meditation, and the other a group whose
members were not—and gave them the same instructions: to generate a
state of love and compassion by thinking about someone they care about,
extend those feelings to others, and finally, to feel love and
compassion without any specific object. As each of the participants
meditated inside the fMRI brain scanners, they were occasionally
interrupted by spontaneous and unexpected human sounds—such as a baby
cooing or a woman screaming—that might elicit feelings of care or
concern.
All of the meditators showed emotional responses to the sounds. But the
more experienced compassion meditators showed a larger brain response in
areas important for processing physical sensations and for emotional
responding, particularly to sounds of distress. The researchers also
observed an increase in heart rate that corresponded to the brain
changes. These findings suggest that the meditators were having a
genuine empathic response and that the experienced meditators felt
greater compassion. In other words, compassion meditation appears to
make the brain more naturally open to a connection with others.
These meditation techniques may have benefits beyond the experience of
spontaneous compassion. A study by psychology professor Barbara
Fredrickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan, found that a seven-week
lovingkindness meditation course also increased the participants' daily
experience of joy, gratitude, and hope. The more participants meditated,
the better they felt. Participants also reported a greater sense of
self-acceptance, social support, purpose in life, and life satisfaction,
while experiencing fewer symptoms of illness and depression. This study
provides strong evidence that chipping away at the illusion of
separation can open us up to a far more meaningful connection to life.
Commit to Change
As the evidence for the benefits of meditation grows, one of the most
important outstanding questions is, How much is enough? Or, from the
perspective of most beginning meditators, How little is enough to see
positive change?
Researchers agree that many of the benefits happen early on. "Changes in
the brain take place at the very beginning of learning," Luders says.
And many studies show change in a matter of weeks, or even minutes,
among inexperienced meditators. But other studies suggest that
experience matters. More practice leads to greater changes, both in the
brain and in a meditator's mental states. So while a minimal investment
in meditation can pay off for your well-being and mental clarity,
committing to the practice is the best way to experience the full
benefits.
Luders, who was a lapsed meditator when she started her research, had
such a positive experience being around seasoned meditators that she was
motivated to come back to the practice. "It's never too late," Luders
says. She suggests starting small and making meditation a regular habit.
"The norm in our study was daily sessions, 10 to 90 minutes. Start with
10."
If you do, you may discover that meditation has benefits beyond what
science has revealed. Indeed, it will take time for science to catch up
to the wisdom of the great meditation teachers. And even with the
advances in brain technology, there are changes both subtle and profound
transmitted only through direct experience. Fortunately, all you need
to get started is the willingness to sit and be with your own body,
breath, and mind.
Lovingkindness Meditation by Kate Vogt
Put it into practice:
Sit comfortably in a place where you won't be disturbed. Take three to five quiet breaths. Gently close your eyes.
Imagine the horizon spanning through your chest with a radiant sun
rising in your innermost center—your heart. As though being melted by
the solar warmth, release tension in your shoulders and across your
throat. Soften your forehead and rest your attention inward on the light
deep within. Take 7 to 10 smooth, even breaths.
As you inhale, invite the glow from your heart to expand toward the
inner surface of the body. With each exhale, let the light recede. Take
another 7 to 10 peaceful breaths. Inhaling, invite the light to touch
the parts of you that interact with the world—your eyes and ears, the
voice center in your throat, the palms of your hands, the soles of your
feet. Exhaling, feel your light shine more clearly. As you continue to
inhale and exhale, silently say: "I radiate friendliness for those who
are happy, com-passion for those who are unhappy, equanimity toward
all." Continue until your attention wavers. Then, sit quietly for
several minutes.
When you feel complete, place your palms together in front of your heart
and bow your head. Release the backs of your hands to your thighs and
lift your head. Gently open your eyes to return to the horizon of the
world.
Mindfulness Meditation by Frank Jude Boccio
Put it into Practice:
Mindfulness requires concentration, but rather than concentrate on
any one object, we concentrate on the moment and whatever is present in
that moment.
To begin, take a comfortable seat. Bring attention to your breath by
placing your awareness at your belly and feeling it rise and fall. This
will help you tune in to the sensorial presence of the body. Once you
feel settled, widen your awareness to include all the sensations in your
body as well as any thoughts or feelings.
Imagine yourself as a mountain. Some thoughts and feelings will be
stormy, with thunder, lightning, and strong winds. Some will be like fog
or dark, ominous clouds. Inhaling, note "mountain." Exhaling, note
"stable." Use the breath to focus on the present moment; cultivate the
ability to weather the storm. If you find yourself swept up in a thought
or emotion, notice it and simply return to the breath. The key is to
pay attention to the ever-changing process of thinking rather than to
the contents of your thoughts. As you begin to see that they are indeed
just thoughts, they will begin to lose their power. You will no longer
believe everything you think! Continue to watch and become mindful of
your thoughts, feelings, and sensations for 5 to 20 minutes.
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