Mindfulness Meditation Changes the Brain

When Dr Norman Doidge wrote "The Brain That Changes Itself," no-one in the publishing world had any inkling how it would change the public debate around the treatment of brain injury patients. After 9 months on the New York Times Best Seller List, Doidge's book has become a phenomenon.

"It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. Arguably the most important breakthrough in neuroscience since scientists first sketched out the brain’s basic anatomy, this revolutionary discovery, called neuroplasticity, promises to overthrow the centuries-old notion that the brain is fixed and unchanging. The brain is not, as was thought, like a machine, or “hardwired” like a computer. Neuroplasticity not only gives hope to those with mental limitations, or what was thought to be incurable brain damage, but expands our understanding of the healthy brain and the resilience of human nature." Says Doidge - and the key piece in the puzzle is that "...our thoughts can switch our genes on and off, altering our brain anatomy."

What is truly exciting for me, however, is that the work of cellular biologists like Bruce H Lipton, and the work of Quantum Biologists - Gariaev and Popponin - are starting to reach the coal-face and make a difference to the way we treat disease and injury.

When I was a child, recovering from a series of strokes, I was expected to recover more quickly than an older stroke victim, and so I did. But if the mounting evidence is right, that's the point. Older stroke victims have been told for generations that they 'are unlikely to regain full speech, unlikely to walk, or unlikely to regain lost memories.' Now we know that giving a brain injury victim this kind of prognosis impairs recovery.

The implication of all this research is that our cells are listening, and our DNA responds to the suggestions it is given by our own thoughts and emotions and by those of people in authority that we trust.

It is my sincerest hope that more and more clinicians working in medicine and rehabilitation - from nurses to physicians, to surgeons and physical therapists take these findings to heart, and bring back the healing to medicine.

I encourage you to read more about this amazing book by visiting the official site at: 

http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html

In the meantime, the research just keeps coming, enjoy the latest findings about the benefits of being mindful and learning to meditate. The benefits actually change the brain for the better.

Enjoy! 

Mindfulness Meditation Training Changes Brain Structure in Eight Weeks

ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2011) — Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter.

"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."

Previous studies from Lazar's group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

For the current study, MR images were take of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation -- which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind -- participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images were also taken of a control group of non-meditators over a similar time interval.

Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.

"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life." says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. "Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change."

Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training's effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, "These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an 8-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amydala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR's potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder." Jha was not one of the study investigators.

James Carmody, PhD, of the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical School, is one of co-authors of the study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the British Broadcasting Company, and the Mind and Life Institute.

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Massachusetts General Hospital.

Journal Reference:
    1.    Britta K. Hölzel, James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita M. Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, Sara W. Lazar. Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2011; 191 (1): 36 DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006

Silent DNA, the sleeper in our midst

The discoveries in genetic science are coming thick and fast. The protective coding of genes is being revealed as an ingenious set of interlocking codes that determine what is copied, what is activated and what is switched off at any time. In the article below, our genetic material is compared to a cookbook, a repository of recipes for particular biological and behavioural patterns. This explains why when geneticists look at our DNA, they see so many silent DNA represented, which up until recently they've considered to be junk, like all the other genetic material they couldn't decode.


Thinking about our genes like a recipe book is useful, because it allows us to understand that a particular biological process requires certain ingredients and a certain process to be expressed. A different combination of those same resources will lead to a different result, rather like the difference between using flower to make pancakes or scones.

For behavioural patterns the environment plays a big part. Recent research out of Kings College in London, cited previously in this blog, has revealed that behavioural responses to stress, like anxiety, require certain gene sequences within the DNA to be latent, but not necessarily switched on. Exposure to specific stimuli from the environment, like bullying, then activates the latent gene. This combination then produces the anxiety response, which feeds back to the gene and keeps it switched on.


I read some interesting research recently which talked about how patient the HIV virus is. When a subject is infected with the HIV virus, the virus inserts itself into the host's cells and then patiently and diligently attempts to break the protective codes of the cell's DNA, until it literally splices itself into the gene and is then able to infect many systems and impair the immune system. It literally hijacks the cell. 

This hijacking may take ten years or more to achieve, which explains why HIV takes so long to manifest as AIDS. The HIV virus can also make itself invisible, so that it is not attacked while its cracking the code. Researchers compared the HIV virus to a software program, whose specialty is code cracking.


This makes me wonder what else within us is silent, waiting to be activated by specific environmental influences. US quantum biologists are postulating that photon storms, predicted to start bombarding the earth again from 2012, coincide with all the major evolutionary leaps on the planet - literally waking up silent genes and mutating others.


These are indeed interesting times. Enjoy the latest article on the subject of genetics from Science Daily...

Mystery Solved: How Genes Are Selectively Silenced

ScienceDaily (Oct. 18, 2010) — Our genetic material is often compared to a book. However, it is not so much like a novel to be read in one piece, but rather like a cookbook. The cell reads only those recipes which are to be cooked at the moment. The recipes are the genes; 'reading' in the book of the cell means creating RNA copies of individual genes, which will then be translated into proteins.

The cell uses highly complex, sophisticated regulatory mechanisms to make sure that not all genes are read at the same time. Particular gene switches need to be activated and, in addition, there are particular chemical labels in the DNA determining which genes are transcribed into RNA and which others will be inaccessible, i.e. where the book literally remains closed. The biological term for this is epigenetic gene regulation.

"One of the great mysteries of modern molecular biology is: How do methyltransferases know where to attach their labels in order to selectively inactivate an individual gene?" says Professor Ingrid Grummt of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ).

Grummt has now come much closer towards unraveling this mystery. She has focused on studying those text passages in the genetic material which do not contain any recipes. Nevertheless, these texts are transcribed into RNA molecules in a controlled manner. "These so-called noncoding RNAs do not contain recipes for proteins. They are important regulators in the cell which we are just beginning to understand," says Ingrid Grummt.

In her most recent work, Grummt and her co-workers have shown for the first time that epigenetic regulation and regulation by noncoding RNAs interact. The scientists artificially introduced a noncoding RNA molecule called pRNA into cells. As a result, methyl labels are attached to a particular gene switch so that the genes behind it are not read. The trick is that pRNA exactly matches (is complementary to) the DNA sequence of this gene switch. The investigators found out that pRNA forms a kind of plait, or triple helix, with the two DNA strands in the area of this gene switch. Methyltransferases, in turn, are able to specifically dock to this 'plait' and are thus directed exactly to the place where a gene is to be blocked.

More than half of our genetic material is transcribed into noncoding RNA. This prompts Ingrid Grummt to speculate: "It is very well possible that there are exactly matching noncoding RNA molecules for all genes that are temporarily silenced. This would explain how such a large number of genes can be selectively turned on and off."

DNA, Consciousness, Performance and Pain Perception

Topping up our Energy Bucket
 
There's a flood of findings on how our emotions effect our perception, and how our DNA is activated or de-activated by our emotional state and triggers from the environment, coming from the world of quantum biology. Pjotr Gariaev and Vladimir Popponin's contributions to this field lead the way, but they are in no way alone. Every day I source more peer-reviewed, published articles coming from neuro-science, quantum physics, quantum biology, and psycho-neuroimmunology that all point to a major shift in the way we understand consciousness. In my latest blog, I want to explore the relationship between brain-wave state and performance.

I include four studies below that each show how our emotional state effects our performance, from the way we experience pain, to how well we can focus and complete tasks. In each of these studies it is apparent that our emotional state has an immediate impact on our brain-wave function - literally the frequency of our brain's electrical output, and this in turn affects our perception. Link this to the studies by Popponin and Gariaev and you can understand how our energy state impacts performance.

Lately I've updated my Key Principles of Energy Management to include a sixth key principle -  understanding personality - because, at the end of the day, personality colors the way our emotions show up, and are experienced by others. How we experience life is colored by our personality and our emotional state in the moment. Understanding these factors allows us to work out what we need to add to our Energy Bucket to feel happier, be healthier and maximize our potential.

Why Does Feeling Low Hurt? Depressed Mood Increases the Perception of Pain

ScienceDaily (June 7, 2010) — When it comes to pain, the two competing schools of thought are that it's either "all in your head" or "all in your body." A new study led by University of Oxford researchers indicates that, instead, pain is an amalgam of the two.

Depression and pain often co-occur, but the underlying mechanistic reasons for this have largely been unknown. To examine the interaction between depression and pain, Dr. Chantal Berna and colleagues used brain imaging to see how healthy volunteers responded to pain while feeling low.

Their findings revealed that inducing depressed mood disrupted a portion of the participants' neuro-circuitry that regulates emotion, causing an enhanced perception of pain. In other words, as explained by Dr. Berna, "when the healthy people were made sad by negative thoughts and depressing music, we found that their brains processed pain more emotionally, which lead to them finding the pain more unpleasant."

The authors speculate that being in a sad state of mind and feeling low disables one's ability to regulate the negative emotion associated with feeling pain. Pain, then, has a greater impact. Rather than merely being a consequence of having pain, depressed mood may drive pain and cause it to feel worse.
"Our research suggests depressed mood leads to maladaptive changes in brain function associated with pain, and that depressed mood itself could be a target for treatment by medicines or psychotherapy in this context," commented Dr. Berna. Thus, the next step in this line of research will be to examine this mechanism in individuals who suffer from chronic pain, as these individuals also commonly experience depression. The ultimate goal, of course, is to develop more effective treatments. This is good news for the millions of individuals around the world who suffer from chronic pain and depression.
Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Meditation Reduces the Emotional Impact of Pain, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2010) — People who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant because their brains anticipate the pain less, a new study has found.


Scientists from The University of Manchester recruited individuals into the study who had a diverse range of experience with meditation, spanning anything from months to decades. It was only the more advanced meditators whose anticipation and experience of pain differed from non-meditators.
The type of meditation practised also varied across individuals, but all included 'mindfulness meditation' practices, such as those that form the basis of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), recommended for recurrent depression by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 2004.

"Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis," said Dr Christopher Brown, who conducted the research. "Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50% of people with chronic pain. However, scientists have only just started to look into how meditation might reduce the emotional impact of pain."

The study, to be published in the journal Pain, found that particular areas of the brain were less active as meditators anticipated pain, as induced by a laser device. Those with longer meditation experience (up to 35 years) showed the least anticipation of the laser pain.

Dr Brown, who is based in the University's School of Translational Medicine, found that people who meditate also showed unusual activity during anticipation of pain in part of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region known to be involved in controlling attention and thought processes when potential threats are perceived.

He said: "The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse."

Dr Brown said the findings should encourage further research into how the brain is changed by meditation practice. He said: "Although we found that meditators anticipate pain less and find pain less unpleasant, it's not clear precisely how meditation changes brain function over time to produce these effects.

"However, the importance of developing new treatments for chronic pain is clear: 40% of people who suffer from chronic pain report inadequate management of their pain problem."

In the UK, more than 10 million adults consult their GP each year with arthritis and related conditions. The estimated annual direct cost of these conditions to health and social services is £5.7 billion.
Study co-author Professor Anthony Jones said: "One might argue that if a therapy works, then why should we care how it works? But it may be surprising to learn that the mechanisms of action of many current therapies are largely unknown, a fact that hinders the development of new treatments. Understanding how meditation works would help improve this method of treatment and help in the development of new therapies.

"There may also be some types of patient with chronic pain who benefit more from meditation-based therapies than others. If we can find out the mechanism of action of meditation for reducing pain, we may be able to screen patients in the future for deficiencies in that mechanism, allowing us to target the treatment to those people.

Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Brain Waves and Meditation

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2010) — Forget about crystals and candles, and about sitting and breathing in awkward ways. Meditation research explores how the brain works when we refrain from concentration, rumination and intentional thinking. Electrical brain waves suggest that mental activity during meditation is wakeful and relaxed.

"Given the popularity and effectiveness of meditation as a means of alleviating stress and maintaining good health, there is a pressing need for a rigorous investigation of how it affects brain function," says Professor Jim Lagopoulos of Sydney University, Australia. Lagopoulos is the principal investigator of a joint study between his university and researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on changes in electrical brain activity during non-directive meditation.

Constant brain waves

Whether we are mentally active, resting or asleep, the brain always has some level of electrical activity. The study monitored the frequency and location of electrical brain waves through the use of EEG (electroencephalography). EEG electrodes were placed in standard locations of the scalp using a custom-made hat.

Participants were experienced practitioners of Acem Meditation, a non-directive method developed in Norway. They were asked to rest, eyes closed, for 20 minutes, and to meditate for another 20 minutes, in random order. The abundance and location of slow to fast electrical brain waves (delta, theta, alpha, beta) provide a good indication of brain activity.

Relaxed attention with theta

During meditation, theta waves were most abundant in the frontal and middle parts of the brain.
"These types of waves likely originate from a relaxed attention that monitors our inner experiences. Here lies a significant difference between meditation and relaxing without any specific technique," emphasizes Lagopoulos.

"Previous studies have shown that theta waves indicate deep relaxation and occur more frequently in highly experienced meditation practitioners. The source is probably frontal parts of the brain, which are associated with monitoring of other mental processes."

"When we measure mental calm, these regions signal to lower parts of the brain, inducing the physical relaxation response that occurs during meditation."

Silent experiences with alpha

Alpha waves were more abundant in the posterior parts of the brain during meditation than during simple relaxation. They are characteristic of wakeful rest.

"This wave type has been used as a universal sign of relaxation during meditation and other types of rest," comments Professor Øyvind Ellingsen from NTNU. "The amount of alpha waves increases when the brain relaxes from intentional, goal-oriented tasks.This is a sign of deep relaxation, -- but it does not mean that the mind is void."

Neuroimaging studies by Malia F. Mason and co-workers at Dartmouth College NH suggest that the normal resting state of the brain is a silent current of thoughts, images and memories that is not induced by sensory input or intentional reasoning, but emerges spontaneously "from within."

"Spontaneous wandering of the mind is something you become more aware of and familiar with when you meditate," continues Ellingsen, who is an experienced practitioner. "This default activity of the brain is often underestimated. It probably represents a kind of mental processing that connects various experiences and emotional residues, puts them into perspective and lays them to rest."

Different from sleep

Delta waves are characteristic of sleep. There was little delta during the relaxing and meditative tasks, confirming that non-directive meditation is different from sleep.

Beta waves occur when the brain is working on goal-oriented tasks, such as planning a date or reflecting actively over a particular issue. EEG showed few beta waves during meditation and resting.
"These findings indicate that you step away from problem solving both when relaxing and during meditation," says Ellingsen.

Nondirective versus concentration

Several studies indicate better relaxation and stress management by meditation techniques where you refrain from trying to control the content of the mind.

"These methods are often described as nondirective, because practitioners do not actively pursue a particular experience or state of mind. They cultivate the ability to tolerate the spontaneous wandering of the mind without getting too much involved. Instead of concentrating on getting away from stressful thought and emotions, you simple let them pass in an effortless way."
 
Take home message

Nondirective meditation yields more marked changes in electrical brain wave activity associated with wakeful, relaxed attention, than just resting without any specific mental technique.
Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.


Meditation Helps Increase Attention Span

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2010) — It's nearly impossible to pay attention to one thing for a long time. A new study looks at whether Buddhist meditation can improve a person's ability to be attentive and finds that meditation training helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see.

The research was inspired by work on Buddhist monks, who spend years training in meditation. "You wonder if the mental skills, the calmness, the peace that they express, if those things are a result of their very intensive training or if they were just very special people to begin with," says Katherine MacLean, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Her co-advisor, Clifford Saron, did some research with monks decades ago and wanted to study meditation by putting volunteers through intensive training and seeing how it changes their mental abilities.

About 140 people applied to participate; they heard about it via word of mouth and advertisements in Buddhist-themed magazines. Sixty were selected for the study. A group of thirty people went on a meditation retreat while the second group waited their turn; that meant the second group served as a control for the first group. All of the participants had been on at least three five-to-ten day meditation retreats before, so they weren't new to the practice. They studied meditation for three months at a retreat in Colorado with B. Alan Wallace, one of the study's co-authors and a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar.

The people took part in several experiments; results from one are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. At three points during the retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.
Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day.

The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding. "Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training," says MacLean. "People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."

This experiment is one of many that were done by Saron, MacLean and a team of nearly 30 researchers with the same group of participants. It's the most comprehensive study of intensive meditation to date, using methods drawn from fields as diverse as molecular biology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Future analyses of these same volunteers will look at other mental abilities, such as how well people can regulate their emotions and their general well-being.

Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical



Lis Faenza is a Performance expert with a passion for communicating the latest scientific findings about consciousness. You can subscribe to Lis' free newsletter at her website: http://www.thebucketrevolution.com