Contemplative Science

ABSTRACT: Yoga, an increasingly popular discipline among Westerners, is frequently used to improve painful conditions. We investigated possible neuroanatomical underpinnings of the beneficial effects of yoga using sensory testing and magnetic resonance imaging techniques. North American yogis tolerated pain more than twice as long as individually matched controls and had more gray matter (GM) in multiple brain regions. Across subjects, insular GM uniquely correlated with pain tolerance. Insular GM volume in yogis positively correlated with yoga experience, suggesting a causal relationship between yoga and insular size. Yogis also had increased left intrainsular white matter integrity, consistent with a strengthened insular integration of nociceptive input and parasympathetic autonomic regulation. Yogis, as opposed to controls, used cognitive strategies involving parasympathetic activation and interoceptive awareness to tolerate pain, which could have led to use-dependent hypertrophy of insular cortex. Together, these findings suggest that regular and long-term yoga practice improves pain tolerance in typical North Americans by teaching different ways to deal with sensory inputs and the potential emotional reactions attached to those inputs leading to a change in insular brain anatomy and connectivity.

Villemure, C. et al (in press). Insular cortex mediates increased pain tolerance in yoga practitioners. Cerebral Cortex. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bht124

""CHANGE YOUR GENES! THROUGH MEDITATION!”

It really does sound like an infomercial, doesn’t it? Another gimmicky health ad from Ms. HydroxyCut or Mr. 5-Hour-Energy.  But before you roll your eyes, consider this.

It might be true.

Emerging research suggests a relationship between the practice of meditation and genetic changes.  Let’s consider the evidence."

"What if there were a way to use the internet – and all our web-connected phones and tablets and laptops and games consoles – to foster rather than erode our attention spans, and to replace that sense of edgy distractedness with calm?

This is the question motivating the embryonic movement known variously as "calming technology", "the slow web", "conscious computing" or ([Alex] Pang's preferred term) "contemplative computing". Its members hope that we might be able to perform a sneaky bit of jujitsu on the devices that dominate our lives: to turn the agents of distraction into agents of serenity." Oliver Burkeman, essayist and author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, investigates. 

The philosopher Daniel Dennett talks about his 16th book, “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking,” which W.W. Norton is publishing next week... 

The mind? A collection of computerlike information processes, which happen to take place in carbon-based rather than silicon-based hardware.

The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams.

The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion."

"This is Your Brain on Meditation: The Benefits of Mindfulness"

Denise Clegg, MAPP

Meditation and mindfulness practices have been associated
with a wide range of mental and physical benefits. But what is it about mindfulness and meditation that foster well-being and buffers against the adverse effects of stress, anxiety, and depression? A discussion about the growing body of research on this topic will be followed by a short, guided session of mindfulness meditation.

Speaker Bio: Denise Clegg, MAPP, is the Managing Director of the Penn Center for Neuroscience & Society (www.neuroethics.upenn.edu) and a mindfulness meditation facilitator at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work is dedicated to advancing research, programs, and policies that have a positive social impact.

Thursday, April 25, 6:00 p.m.

Franklin Square Park Pavilion, 200 N. 6th St., Philadelphia, PA 19106

The purpose of the CCARE Summer Research Institute, a six-day conference to be held in Summer 2013, is to advance research on compassion and altruism through collaboration, dialog, inquiry, education, and research.

Drawing from several disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, genetics, economics, and contemplative traditions, the CCARE Summer Research Institute aims to examine compassion, altruism and prosocial behavior from a wide perspective of scientific angles. In particular, the institute will explore and discuss the neural correlates, biological bases and antecedents of compassion; the effects of compassion on behavior, physiology, overall health, and the brain; and methods, techniques, and programs for cultivating compassion and promoting altruism within individuals and society-wide. Compassion education programs will also be integrated into the curriculum.The long-term goal of the Summer Research Institute is to support young scientists who wish to focus their research on compassion, altruism, and prosocial behavior. 

"Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California...This is the first study to show a direct relation between resting cortisol and scores on any type of mindfulness scale," said Tonya Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and first author of a paper describing the work."

ABSTRACT

Objective: Cognitive perseverations that include worry and rumination over past or future events may prolong cortisol release, which in turn may contribute to predisease pathways and adversely affect physical health. Meditation training may increase self-reported mindfulness, which has been linked to reductions in cognitive perseverations. However, there are no reports that directly link self-reported mindfulness and resting cortisol output. Here, the authors investigate this link. Methods: In an observational study, we measured self-reported mindfulness and p.m. cortisol near the beginning and end of a 3-month meditation retreat (N = 57). Results: Mindfulness increased from pre- to post-retreat.. Cortisol did not significantly change. However, mindfulness was inversely related to p.m. cortisol at pre-retreat.., and post-retreat.., controlling for age and body mass index. Pre to postchange in mindfulness was associated with pre to postchange in p.m. cortisol..Larger increases in mindfulness were associated with decreases in p.m. cortisol, whereas smaller increases (or slight decreases) in mindfulness were associated with an increase in p.m. cortisol. Conclusions: These data suggest a relation between self-reported mindfulness and resting output of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system...

Jacobs, T. et al. (in press). Self-reported mindfulness and resting cortisol in a Shamatha meditation retreat. Health Psychology. Advanced publication online. doi: 10.1037/a0031362

ABSTRACT: Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one’s ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness training improved both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts during completion of the GRE and the measure of working memory. Improvements in performance following mindfulness training were mediated by reduced mind wandering among participants who were prone to distraction at pretesting. Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences.

Mrazek, M.D. et al. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, doi: 10.1177/0956797612459659

Until now, little was scientifically known about the human potential to cultivate compassion — the emotional state of caring for people who are suffering in a way that motivates altruistic behavior.

A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, recently published online in the journal Psychological Science, is the first to investigate whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.

"Our fundamental question was, 'Can compassion be trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset?'" says Helen Weng, a graduate student in clinical psychology and lead author of the paper. "Our evidence points to yes."

..."It's kind of like weight training," Weng says. "Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion 'muscle' and respond to others' suffering with care and a desire to help."

Compassion training was compared to a control group that learned cognitive reappraisal, a technique where people learn to reframe their thoughts to feel less negative. Both groups listened to guided audio instructions over the Internet for 30 minutes per day for two weeks. "We wanted to investigate whether people could begin to change their emotional habits in a relatively short period of time," says Weng.

ABSTRACT: Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals’ capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses to suffering. In healthy adults, we found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore, increased altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and in DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens. These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing.

Weng, H.Y. et al. (in press). Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering. Psychological Science. doi: 10.1177/0956797612469537

Picture credit: Doug Savage, Savage Chickens.

"Consider the anger that arises in a heated argument with your romantic partner, or the dreadful anxious anticipation in the dentist's waiting room prior to a root canal procedure. Our daily lives are densely populated with events that make us emotional. Luckily, however, we developed numerous ways to control or regulate our emotions in order to adapt (Gross, 2007;Koole, 2009 for reviews). A central remaining challenge to explain adaptation, involves understanding how individuals choose between the different emotion regulation strategies in order to fit with differing situational demands. Specifically, when is the aforementioned romantic partner or dental patient more likely to “put aside” or disengage from the emotional situation, and when are they more likely to “make sense” or engage with their emotional reactions?

In this opinion article we concentrate on the intersection between affective science and decision making as manifested in emotion regulation choice, defined as the act of making an autonomous choice between different regulation strategies that are available in a particular context."

Sheppes, G. & Levin, Z. (in press). Emotion regulation choice: Selecting between cognitive regulation strategies to control emotion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00179

A clever film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College went viral this week (http://www.theglossary.com/). The filmmakers, known as The Glossary, comment, ”the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.” The video is an abridged version of the full speech, which The Wall Street Journal, among others, published after his death in 2008 (click the fish pic for the full text - well worth it). With 2.5 million hits on Youtube in 4 days, the Glossary's film and DFW's words have resonated with a diversity of people, many of whom recognize similar themes from their study of Buddhism and/or meditation. 

DFW reflects, for instance, "As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience." 

Of our treasured, tortured "freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation," he concludes: "This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom."

The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry is a new peer-reviewed, scholarly journal for all those who design, research, teach, and assess contemplative and introspective methods and practices in college and university settings. Contemplative and introspective practices cultivate a critical, first-person focus and create new opportunities for students to engage with course material. TheJournal promotes the understanding, development, and application of these methods in order to serve a vision of higher education as an opportunity for cultivating personal and social awareness and an exploration of meaning, purpose and values.

"We hear it all the time: Meditation can improve our creative thinking, our energy, stress levels and even our success...

Studies show that meditation is associated with improvement in a variety of psychological areas, including stress, anxiety, addiction, depression, eating disorders and cognitive function, among others. There's also research to suggest that meditation can reduce blood pressure, pain response, stress hormone levels and even cellular health. But what does it actually do to the body?"

How can science, philosophy and a work of pure imagination meet to deepen our understanding of the physical world?

Referring to a character in a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, philosopher William Eggington comments, "What [Borges' character] Funes shows is that, at its most basic level, any observation requires a synthesis of impressions over time. Furthermore, the process by which the synthesis takes place, the media through which it is processed, and the entity doing the synthesizing are all essential aspects of the knowledge being produced. This is, in a nutshell, the first part of Kant’s 1781 opus magnum, “The Critique of Pure Reason.” ...Kant’s insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our mindsmust already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thusthere is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all." 

ABSTRACT: Relatively short telomere length may serve as a marker of accelerated aging, and shorter telomeres have been linked to chronic stress. Specific lifestyle behaviors that can mitigate the effects of stress might be associated with longer telomere lengths. Previous research suggests a link between behaviors that focus on the well-being of others, such as volunteering and caregiving, and overall health and longevity. We examined relative telomere length in a group of individuals experienced in Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), a practice derived from the Buddhist tradition which utilizes a focus on unselfish kindness and warmth towards all people, and control participants who had done no meditation. Blood was collected by venipuncture, and Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes. Quantitative real time PCR was used to measure relative telomere length (RTL) (Cawthon, 2002) in fifteen LKM practitioners and 22 control participants. There were no significant differences in age, gender, race, education, or exposure to trauma, but the control group had a higher mean body mass index (BMI) and lower rates of past depression. The LKM practitioners had longer RTL than controls at the trend level (p=.083); among women, the LKM practitioners had significantly longer RTL than controls, (p=.007), which remained significant even after controlling for BMI and past depression. Although limited by small sample size, these results offer the intriguing possibility that LKM practice, especially in women, might alter RTL, a biomarker associated with longevity.

Hoge, E. A. et al (in press). Loving-Kindness meditaiton practice associated with longer telomeres in women. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. Advance online publication doi: 10.1016/j.bbi/2013.04.005

"Meditation yields a surprising number of health benefits, including stress reduction, improved attention, better memory, and even increased creativity and feelings of compassion. But how can something as simple as focusing on a single object produce such dramatic results? Here’s what the growing body of scientific evidence is telling us about meditation and how it can change the way our brains function."