04/11/1910 Report 21
Do people can strengthen brain circuits associated with happiness and positive behavior, just so that we can strengthen our muscles with exercise?
Richard Davidson, who for decades has been practicing Buddhist meditation, a form of mental exercise, insists that we can.
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and Davidson, who has meditated since he visited India when he graduated from Harvard in 70's, is convinced that, beyond their own experience.
As a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, became leader of a relatively new field, called contemplative neuroscience, the science that studies the effects of meditation on the brain.
During the last decade, Davidson and colleagues have produced evidence for the theory of meditation, the ancient Eastern practice of sitting by focusing on certain objects, can improve the brain.
"We all know that if we make some kind of regular exercises can strengthen muscle groups in a predictable way," said Davidson, in his office at the University of Wisconsin, where his research team has studied Buddhist monks and other meditators with brain scans.
"Strengthening the neural systems is not fundamentally different," he said. "Basically replaced by other mental habits." Neuroscientists who study meditation say they get this habit can strengthen brain circuits responsible for maintaining the concentration and to generate empathy.
A recent study by Davidson's team found that novice meditators stimulated limbic systems, the brain's emotional network, during the meditation practice of compassion, an ancient practice of Tibetan Buddhism.
That's not a big surprise, since compassion meditation aims to create a specific emotional state of intense empathy, sometimes called "love and kindness."
But the study also found that expert meditators (monks with over 10,000 hours of practice) showed a significantly higher activity of the limbic system. The monks seemed to have permanently changed their brains to be more empathetic.
A previous study by some of the same researchers found that experienced meditators involved substantial changes in the base of the brain functions, that is, had changed the way their brains functioned even outside of meditation.
These changes include rapid activation of the left anterior brain region that is believed responsible for generating positive emotions. The researchers found the transformation into rookies who registered an eight-week mindfulness meditation, a Buddhist technique.
But most brain research about meditation are still preliminary, and expect to be corroborated by other scientists. The psychological benefits of meditation and their use in treatments for conditions as diverse as depression and chronic pain are more recognized.
serious brain science about meditation emerged only in the last decade, since the MRI allow scientists to observe the brain and monitor changes in relatively real time.
early 90's, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrew Newberg, said brain scans of experienced meditators showed that the prefrontal cortex, the brain area that is home care, had higher performance during meditation, while the brain region that focuses on orientation to time and space, called the superior parietal lobe, the dark.
Newberg said their findings explain why the meditators are able to concentrate intensely while describing feelings of concern for this practice.
The effects of meditation on the brain and its future
Neuroscience studying meditation gained more credibility in the scientific community since its early scans.
One sign of this is the increased funding of all National Institutes of Health (NIH) U.S., which helped establish new research centers in the contemplative Stanford, Emory and Wisconsin, where he is building first laboratory with a meditation room for brain imaging.
The NIH could not provide figures on the amounts donated to research on meditation, but subsidies on complementary and alternative medicine, including studies on meditation, increased $ 300 million in 2007 to about $ 541 million in 2011 .
"The original investigation undertaken by the likes of Davidson in the 1990 looked intriguing, but it took time for them to be convincing about the fact that the processes of the brain during meditation really change," said Josephine Briggs, director of the Center National Alternative Medicine Complementary and NIH.
In a 2007 study, Davidson compared the attention skills of novice meditators with experts in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Participants in both groups had to practice mindfulness meditation at a fixed point on a screen while researchers performed MRI scans of their brains.
capabilities to challenge the attention of the participants, scientists interrupted his meditation with the distracting sounds. The brain scans found that both novice and experienced meditators activated a network of brain regions related to attention during meditation, but the experienced meditators showed more activation in some regions.
inexperienced meditators showed increased activation in brain regions that have shown a negative correlation with sustained attention. The more experienced meditators were able to activate their network of care to maintain the concentration at the point. The study suggested they had changed the structure of their brains.
scans functional MRI (fMRI) showed that experienced meditators had a smaller neural response to distracting noises that interrupted meditation. In fact, the more hours of experience had the meditator, their networks were less active during emotional sounds distracting, as the scans, this means that the concentration is easiest for them.
Recently, meditation neuroscience studies have focused on compassion meditation, which involves the generation of empathy through the merger, without relating it to other objects. Practitioners call compassion meditation without reference.
neuroscientist The new interest in this practice stems, especially the request of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibetan Buddhists, for whom meditation compassion is a timeworn tradition.
The Dalai Lama had organized the trip of Tibetan monks to American universities were studied by scanning, and spoke at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the largest gathering of scientists who study the brain.
The Dalai Lama said he supports studying the neuroscience of meditation, although the scientists removed the origins Buddhist meditation, treating it simply as a mental exercise that almost anyone can do.
"This is not a religious project," said Davidson. "Meditation is a mental activity that can be understood in secular terms. "
Still, the nascent field faces challenges. Researchers have scanned brains just a few hundred to study meditation, a very small study sample.
"There are a number of doctoral graduates found personal value in meditation and was inspired to study it scientifically," said Davidson. "They are the best universities and want to make a career with this."
added that in 10 years, "we will see how research on meditation becomes part of the mainstream."
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