Archive for October 27th, 2007
Science Favors Meditation
In an article by Rachel Brand for Gaiam Community, a link between the spiritual benefits of meditation and the supporting science was sought. On the spiritual side of things, Buddhists, yogis, and ayurvedic doctors have said for centuries that meditation improves health and well-being. Scientists are now trying to prove it.
Note: The remainder of this post focuses on points of personal and social interest with respect to Brand’s article.
MEDITATION AND HAPPINESS
Meditating may help people stay healthier, sharpen mental focus, and gain more power over their emotions.
The brain of someone who meditates may be physically different from the next person’s.
Talking or writing about your feelings forces you to call them something. It’s part of noticing and detaching from those emotions versus letting them hijack your bliss. It’s about helping people develop that pause button, so they can observe emotions from the outside.
Two UCLA studies showed “that simply labeling emotion promotes detachment,” says David Creswell, Ph.D., a meditation researcher at the university who joined colleague Matthew D. Lieberman, Ph.D., in heading up the studies.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity and pinpoint where in the brain it occurs, Lieberman’s team found that assigning names to negative emotions turns down the intensity of activity in the amygdala — an almond-sized sector of the brain that acts like an alarm system: When you witness a car crash, argue with your spouse or get yelled at by your boss, it’s your amygdala’s job to set off a cascade of stress-related reactions.
But if you simply name the distressing event, Lieberman says, you can wield more power over your amygdala’s freak-out. “When you attach the word ‘angry,’” he explains, “you see a decreased response in the amygdala.”
Mindful patients (those inclined to pay attention to present emotions, thoughts, or sensations) show more activity in the areas that calm down emotional response, known as the prefrontal cortex; and less activation in the amygdala.
Twenty-year meditation practitioner Joyce Bonnie says having that emotion-diffusing ability is one thing, and using it is another. “It’s very challenging to bring what you practice on the meditation cushion out in a real-life situation,” says Bonnie. “When you’re actually in that moment — say someone is yelling at you — you have to remember to step back, say, ‘Oh, that’s anger I’m feeling,’ and change what you do with that emotion, all in a millisecond. It takes a lot of practice.”
Creswell says, “For the first time since [the Buddha’s] teachings,” he adds, “we have shown that there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness meditation.”
