Researcher Jane Armer

Yaowarat Matchim, a former nursing doctoral student; Jane Armer, professor of nursing; and Bob Stewart, professor emeritus of education and adjunct faculty in nursing, found that breast cancer survivors’ health improved after they learned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a type of mindfulness training that incorporates meditation, yoga and physical awareness.

“MBSR is another tool to enhance the lives of breast cancer survivors,” Armer said. “Patients often are given a variety of options to reduce stress, but they should choose what works for them according to their lifestyles and belief systems.”

Researcher Yaowarat Matchim

“Mindfulness-based meditation, ideally, should be practiced every day or at least on a routine schedule,” Armer said. “MBSR teaches patients new ways of thinking that will give them short- and long-term benefits.”

Armer says the non-pharmaceutical approach works best as a complement to other treatment options such as chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

“Post diagnosis, breast cancer patients often feel like they have no control over their lives,” Armer said. “Knowing that they can control something—such as meditation—and that it will improve their health, gives them hope that life will be normal again.”

The study, “Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on Health Among Breast Cancer Survivors,” was published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research.

Material adapted from University of Missouri-Columbia.

The results were published the week of Nov. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Understanding how meditation works will aid investigation into a host of diseases, Brewer said. “Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit smoking, cope with cancer, and even prevent psoriasis,” he added.

The Yale team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on both experienced and novice meditators as they practiced three different meditation techniques.

Experienced meditators seem to switch off areas of the brain associated with wandering thoughts, anxiety and some psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Researchers used fMRI scans to determine how the brains of meditators differed from subjects who were not meditating. The areas shaded in blue highlight areas of decreased activity in the brains of meditators. Credit: courtesy of yale

The scans also showed that when the default mode network was active, brain regions associated with self-monitoring and cognitive control were co-activated in experienced meditators but not novices. This may indicate that meditators are constantly monitoring and suppressing the emergence of “me” thoughts, or mind-wandering. In pathological forms, these states are associated with diseases such as autism and schizophrenia.

The meditators did this both during meditation, and also when just resting — not being told to do anything in particular. This may indicate that meditators have developed a “new” default mode in which there is more present-centered awareness, and less “self”-centered, say the researchers.

“Meditation’s ability to help people stay in the moment has been part of philosophical and contemplative practices for thousands of years,” Brewer said. “Conversely, the hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect. This gives us some nice cues as to the neural mechanisms of how it might be working clinically.”

Other Yale researchers involved in this study were Patrick D. Worhunsky, Jeremy R. Gray and Hedy Kober.

Material adapted from Yale University.

Rising Stress Levels Affect Emotional and Physical Health
The percentage of students in the UCLA survey reporting good or above-average high school emotional health dropped from 55.3 percent in 2009 to 51.9 percent in 2010. This marks the lowest level within the past 25 years.

Dr. Charles Elder, MD, lead author of the TM study, and investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, emphasized the important implications of the findings on reduced stress. “It is vital that we start addressing the high levels of emotional stress being reported by high school and college students. Decreased stress can have a positive impact on mental health, and can also reduce the risk for hypertension, obesity, and diabetes—major risk factors for heart disease,” explained Dr. Elder.

Educational research has also linked student stress to negative school behavior and poor academic performance.

Promising Findings for Education
“These new findings on reduced stress, along with the recent research on academic achievement gains, hold tremendous promise for public education,” said Sanford Nidich, EdD, principal investigator, and professor of education at Maharishi University of Management. “There is a growing body of evidence showing Transcendental Meditation to be an easy to implement, value-added educational program that promotes emotional health and increases academic achievement in at-risk students,” said Dr. Nidich.

A total of 106 secondary school students, 87% racial and ethnic minorities, took part in the study. Results showed that over a four-month period, students practicing Transcendental Meditation as part of their schools’ Quiet Time program exhibited significant reductions in psychological distress factors compared to controls.

This graph shows a 36 percent reduction in psychological distress in 106 at-risk racial and ethnic minority students practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique compared to controls over a period of 4 months (p=.010). Significant decreases were also found in trait anxiety and depressive symptoms. Credit: Maharishi University of Management

According to James Dierke, 2008 National Association of Secondary School Principals—National Middle School Principal of the Year, “Stress is the number one enemy of public education, especially in inner-city schools. It creates tension, violence, and compromises the cognitive and psychological capacity of students to learn and grow. The TM/Quiet Time program is the most powerful, effective program I have come across in my 39 years as a public school educator for addressing this problem. It is nourishing children and providing them an immensely valuable tool for life. It is saving lives.”

A summary of the study results were as follows:

• This study evaluated change in psychological distress factors in students practicing the Transcendental Meditation program compared to non-meditating controls. A total of 106 students (68 meditating and 38 non-meditating students), took part in the study. The study included students from four public secondary schools.
• Eighty-seven percent were racial and ethnic minority students, including 26% Hispanic, 25% African American, and 19% American Indian.
• The Transcendental Meditation program was practiced in class twice a day as part of the schools’ Quiet Time program for four months prior to posttesting.
• The Transcendental Meditation program was taught in the context of school-wide Quiet Time programs in which students voluntarily chose the Quiet Time program in which they wanted to participate.
• Transcendental Meditation is a simple, natural, effortless technique that allows the mind to settle down and experience a silent yet awake state of awareness, a state of “restful alertness.” Practice of this stress-reduction program does not involve any change in beliefs, values, religion, or lifestyle.
• Compared to eyes-closed rest, research has found that Transcendental Meditation practice is characterized by decreased activation or arousal of the autonomic nervous system, as reflected in decreased breath rate and lower sympathetic nervous system activity. The Transcendental Meditation program has been shown to increase electroencephalographic (EEG) brain integration and coherence, especially in the frontal area of the brain, responsible for higher-order processing.
• Other published research on high school and college students has shown reduced psychological distress, improved positive coping ability, decreased blood pressure, reduced cardiovascular reactivity to stressful stimuli, reduced absenteeism, and decreased school suspensions.
• Results of the current study indicated significant reductions in overall psychological distress (p=.010) and trait anxiety (p=.035) compared to controls. Within-in group differences in depressive symptoms were found for meditating students (p=.003).

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management.

But how is it that a single practice can have such wide-ranging effects on well-being? A new article published in the latest issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, draws on the existing scientific literature to build a framework that can explain these positive effects.

The goal of this work, according to author Britta Hölzel, of Justus Liebig University and Harvard Medical School, is to “unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity of mindfulness, providing the ‘big picture’ by arranging many findings like the pieces of a mosaic.” By using a framework approach to understand the mechanisms of mindfulness, Hölzel and her co-authors point out that what we think of as mindfulness is not actually a single skill. Rather, it is a multi-faceted mental practice that encompasses several mechanisms.

The authors specifically identify four key components of mindfulness that may account for its effects: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and sense of self. Together, these components help us attend to and deal with the mental and physiological effects of stress in ways that are non-judgmental.

Although these components are theoretically distinct, they are closely intertwined. Improvement in attention regulation, for example, may directly facilitate our awareness of our physiological state. Body awareness, in turn, helps us to recognize the emotions we are experiencing. Understanding the relationships between these components, and the brain mechanisms that underlie them, will allow clinicians to better tailor mindfulness interventions for their patients, says Hölzel.

On the most fundamental level, this framework underscores the point that mindfulness is not a vague cure-all. Effective mindfulness meditation requires training and practice and it has distinct measurable effects on our subjective experiences, our behavior, and our brain function. The authors hope that further research on this topic will “enable a much broader spectrum of individuals to utilize mindfulness meditation as a versatile tool to facilitate change – both in psychotherapy and in everyday life.”

Material adapted from Association for Psychological Science.

Students with ADHD practiced Transcendental Meditation 10 minutes twice a day at school during a study to measure brain functioning and cognitive development. Credit: Maharishi University of Management

The first exploratory study, published in Current Issues in Education, followed a group of middle school students diagnosed with ADHD who meditated twice a day in school. After 3 months, researchers found over 50% reductions in stress, anxiety, and ADHD symptoms. During the study, a video was made of some students discussing what it felt like to have ADHD, and how those experiences changed after 3 months of regular Transcendental Meditation practice.

In this second study, lead author, neuroscientist Fred Travis, PhD, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition, joined principal investigator Sarina J. Grosswald, EdD, a George Washington University-trained cognitive learning specialist, and co-researcher William Stixrud, PhD, a prominent Silver Spring, Maryland, clinical neuropsychologist, to investigate the effects of Transcendental Meditation practice on task performance and brain functioning in 18 ADHD students, ages 11-14 years.

The study was conducted over a period of 6 months in an independent school for children with language-based learning disabilities in Washington, DC. The study showed improved brain functioning, increased brain processing, and improved language-based skills among ADHD students practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique.

A local TV news station reported on the study in-progress during the first 3 months.

What was Measured
Students were pretested, randomly assigned to Transcendental Meditation or delayed-start comparison groups, and post-tested at 3- and 6-months. Delayed-start students learned Transcendental Meditation after the 3-month post-test.

EEG measurements of brain functioning were taken while students were performing a demanding computer-based visual-motor task. Successful performance on the task requires attention, focus, memory, and impulse control.

In addition, students were administered a verbal fluency test. This test measured higher-order executive functions, including initiation, simultaneous processing, and systematic retrieval of knowledge. Performance on this task depends on several fundamental cognitive components, including vocabulary knowledge, spelling, and attention.

Theta/Beta Power Ratios and ADHD
Using EEG measurements, the relationship of theta brain waves to beta brain waves can be diagnostic of ADHD. Dr. Joel Lubar of the University of Tennessee has demonstrated that the theta/beta ratio can very accurately identify students with ADHD from those without it. While theta EEG around 4-5 Hz is commonly associated with daydreaming, drowsiness, and unfocused mental states, theta EEG around 6-8 Hz is seen when one focuses on inner mental tasks, such as memory processing, identifying, and associating.

Theta-beta power ratios during computer tasks in the TM group decreased compared to the delayed-start group after 3 months TM practice and continued to decrease at the 6-month posttest in these subjects. In the delayed-start group theta/beta power ratios increased slightly from baseline to the 3-month posttest and then decreased sharply after they learned TM (3- to 6-month posttest). Credit: Maharishi University of Management

“In normal individuals, theta activity in the brain during tasks suggests that the brain is blocking out irrelevant information so the person can focus on the task,” said Dr. Travis. “But, in individuals with ADHD, the theta activity is even higher, suggesting that the brain is also blocking out relevant information.”

And when beta activity, which is associated with focus, is lower than normal,” Travis added, “it affects the ability to concentrate on task for extended periods of time.”

“Prior research shows ADHD children have slower brain development and a reduced ability to cope with stress,” said Dr. Stixrud. “Virtually everyone finds it difficult to pay attention, organize themselves, and get things done when they’re under stress,” he explained. “Stress interferes with the ability to learn — it shuts down the brain. Functions such as attention, memory, organization, and integration are compromised.”

Why the Transcendental Meditation Technique?
“We chose the TM technique for this study because studies show that it increases brain function. We wanted to know if it would have a similar effect in the case of ADHD, and if it did, would that also improve the symptoms of ADHD,” said Dr. Grosswald.

Dr. Stixrud added, “Because stress significantly compromises attention and all of the key executive functions such as inhibition, working memory, organization, and mental flexibility, it made sense that a technique that can reduce a child’s level of stress should also improve his or her cognitive functioning.”

The Transcendental Meditation technique is an effortless, easy-to-learn practice, unique among categories of meditation. “TM does not require concentration, controlling the mind or disciplined focus—challenges for anyone with ADHD,” Grosswald added.

There is substantial research showing the effectiveness of the Transcendental Meditation technique for reducing stress and anxiety, and improving cognitive functioning among the general population. “What’s significant about these new findings,” Grosswald said, “is that among children who have difficulty with focus and attention, we see the same results. The fact that these children are able to do TM, and do it easily, shows us that this technique may be particularly well-suited for children with ADHD.”

Transcendental Meditation produces an experience of restful alertness, which is associated with higher metabolic activity in the frontal and parietal parts of the brain, indicating alertness, along with decreased metabolic activity in the thalamus, which is involved in regulating arousal, and hyperactivity.

With regular practice, this restfully alert brain state, characteristic of the Transcendental Meditation technique, becomes more present outside of meditation, allowing ADHD students to attend to tasks. “In a sense,” Dr. Travis said, “the repeated experience of the Transcendental Meditation technique trains the brain to function in a style opposite to that of ADHD.”

Improved Brain Functioning
During the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique, coherence is found across different EEG frequencies. After meditation, the brain utilizes this increased functioning ability to support the performance of a task in an integrated manner. Three months of Transcendental Meditation practice resulted in significant decreases in theta/beta ratios and increased verbal fluency. This translates into improved executive function and more efficient cognitive processing.

During the first 3 months of the study, the theta/beta ratios of the control group (delayed start) actually increased. After learning, and practicing Transcendental Meditation for 3 months, this group experienced dramatic decreases in theta/beta ratios and increased verbal fluency as well.

Student and Parent Surveys
Students reported that the Transcendental Meditation technique was enjoyable and easy to do. They felt calmer, less stressed, and better able to concentrate on their schoolwork. They also said they were happier since they started Transcendental Meditation. This correlated with reports from the parents.

At the end of the research, the parents completed a questionnaire to assess their perceptions of changes in five ADHD-related symptoms in their children from the beginning to the end of the study. There were positive and statistically significant improvements in the five areas measured: a) Ability to focus on schoolwork, b) Organizational abilities, c) Ability to work independently, d) Happiness, and e) Quality of sleep. Credit: Maharishi University of Management

At the end of the research, the parents completed a questionnaire to assess their perceptions of changes in five ADHD-related symptoms in their children from the beginning to the end of the study. There were positive and statistically significant improvements in the five areas measured: a) Ability to focus on schoolwork, b) Organizational abilities, c) Ability to work independently, d) Happiness, and e) Quality of sleep.

Promising Results
The combined results were significant. There was a 48% reduction in the theta/beta power ratios and a 30% increase in brain coherence after the 6-month period. Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals decrease theta/beta power ratios by 3% and neurofeedback by 25%.

“These are very encouraging findings,” said Dr. Stixrud. “Significant improvement in the theta/beta ratio without medication and without having to use any expensive equipment is a big deal, as is significant improvement in student happiness and student academic functioning reported by the parents.”

“While stimulant medication is very beneficial for some of my clients with ADHD,” Stixrud added, “the number of children who receive great benefit from medicine with minimal side-effects is relatively small. The fact that TM appears to improve attention and executive functions, and significantly reduces stress with no negative side-effects, is clearly very promising.” Stixrud said he hoped these findings would lead to more research on the use of Transcendental Meditation with children and adolescents.

In conclusion, these findings warrant additional research to assess the impact of Transcendental Meditation practice as a non-drug treatment for ADHD, and to track meditating students’ improved academic achievements.

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management.

Download / Reference
Travis, Grosswald, & Strixrud (2011). ADHD, Brain Functioning, and Transcendental Meditation Practice. Mind & Brain, The Journal of Psychiatry (Vol 2, No 1)

Eileen Luders, a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues used a type of brain imaging known as diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI, a relatively new imaging mode that provides insights into the structural connectivity of the brain. They found that the differences between meditators and controls are not confined to a particular core region of the brain but involve large-scale networks that include the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes and the anterior corpus callosum, as well as limbic structures and the brain stem.

The study appears in the current online edition of the journalNeuroImage.

“Our results suggest that long-term meditators have white-matter fibers that are either more numerous, more dense or more insulated throughout the brain,” Luders said. “We also found that the normal age-related decline of white-matter tissue is considerably reduced in active meditation practitioners.”

The study consisted of 27 active meditation practitioners (average age 52) and 27 control subjects, who were matched by age and sex. The meditation and the control group each consisted of 11 men and 16 women. The number of years of meditation practice ranged from 5 to 46; self-reported meditation styles included Shamatha, Vipassana, and Zazen, styles that were practiced by about 55 percent of the meditators, either exclusively or in combination with other styles.

Results showed pronounced structural connectivity in meditators throughout the entire brain’s pathways. The greatest differences between the two groups were seen within the corticospinal tract (a collection of axons that travel between the cerebral cortex of the brain and the spinal cord); the superior longitudinal fasciculus (long bi-directional bundles of neurons connecting the front and the back of the cerebrum); and the uncinate fasciculus (white matter that connects parts of the limbic system, such as the hippocampus and amygdala, with the frontal cortex).

“It is possible that actively meditating, especially over a long period of time, can induce changes on a micro-anatomical level,” said Luders, herself a meditator.

As a consequence, she said, the robustness of fiber connections in meditators may increase and possibly lead to the macroscopic effects seen by DTI.

“Meditation, however, might not only cause changes in brain anatomy by inducing growth but also by preventing reduction,” Luders said. “That is, if practiced regularly and over years, meditation may slow down aging-related brain atrophy, perhaps by positively affecting the immune system.”

But there is a “but.” While it is tempting to assume that the differences between the two groups constitute actual meditation-induced effects, there is still the unanswered question of nature versus nurture.

“It’s possible that meditators might have brains that are fundamentally different to begin with,” Luders said. “For example, a particular brain anatomy may have drawn an individual to meditation or helped maintain an ongoing practice — meaning that the enhanced fiber connectivity in meditators constitutes a predisposition towards meditation, rather than being the consequence of the practice.”

Still, she said, “Meditation appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain at large. Collecting evidence that active, frequent and regular meditation practices cause alterations of white-matter fiber tracts that are profound and sustainable may become relevant for patient populations suffering from axonal demyelination and white-matter atrophy.”

But, Luders said, more research is needed before taking meditation into clinical trial studies.

Other authors of the study included Kristi Clark, Katherine L. Narr and Arthur W. Toga.

Material adapted from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences.

“My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says.

Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson, who did this research as an undergraduate student together with a team of University of Wisconsin-Stout faculty and students, wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.

At the beginning of the study, each participant had an EEG, a measurement of the brain’s electrical activity. They were told: “Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath.”

Then 11 people were invited to take part in meditation training, while the other 10 were told they would be trained later. The 11 were offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practice as much as they could between sessions, but there was not any particular requirement for how much they should practice.

After five weeks, the researchers did an EEG on each person again. Each person had done, on average, about seven hours of training and practice. But even with that little of meditation practice, their brain activity was different from the 10 people who had not trained yet. People who had done the meditation training showed a greater proportion of activity in the left frontal region of the brain in response to subsequent attempts to meditate. Other research has found that this pattern of brain activity is associated with positive moods.

The shift in brain activity “was clearly evident even with a small number of subjects,” says Christopher Moyer, one of Anderson’s coauthors at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “If someone is thinking about trying meditation and they were thinking, ‘It’s too big of a commitment, it’s going to take too much rigorous training before it has an effect on my mind,’ this research suggests that’s not the case.” For those people, meditation might be worth a try, he says. “It can’t hurt and it might do you a lot of good.”

“I think this implies that meditation is likely to create a shift in outlook toward life,” Anderson says. “It has really worked for me.”

Material adapted from Association for Psychological Science.

Reference
Anderson et al. (soon to be published study). “Frontal EEG Asymmetry Associated with Positive Emotion is Produced by Very Brief Meditation Training.” Psychological Science.

“Cancer patients and those who suffer from chronic conditions, such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease, often deal with cycles of pain that do not respond well to medications,” said Steven Hickman, PsyD, director of the Center for Mindfulness and assistant clinical professor in the UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry. “With MBSR, we teach students how to use their brain to work differently with pain and increase mobility.”

Hickman suggests that the experience of pain and illness varies widely from patient to patient for reasons that are not always objective or physically-explainable. The answer, he believes, comes from the emotional distress that is provoked and manifested differently in each person.

“Given two patients with the same disease or type of injury, we know from experience that they may report wildly different levels of pain. If this difference can’t be explained by medical reasons, it must be something else,” said Hickman. “One person may be angry or afraid, and the other is stoic and reserved, yet each has different amounts of physical pain. Recognizing this difference is crucial to the relief of suffering, because it means that at least part of the perception of pain is how you relate to it.”

According to Hickman, the relationship with pain and disease is cultivated and maintained in the mind so the mind is the logical place to go to potentially change that relationship in a healthier direction.

Lorraine Chase decided to try MBSR after her doctor recommended it as a way to manage her tinnitus, a condition involving a chronic ringing in the ears. She was skeptical at first – although familiar with meditation, she was not sure why being mindful of pain or ringing in the ears would have any benefit. Six months after going through the training with Hickman, she began to notice the results when she ceased having migraine headaches. Later, when diagnosed with breast cancer, she used what she had learned from MBSR to help her make difficult treatment decisions.

“Instead of wasting energy on being angry about having cancer, I decided to spend my energy on getting well,” said Chase.

As many people do when they are not feeling well, Chase would often get angry when she got sick. Through mindfulness training she came to understand how one chooses to deal with pain can make a difference on how one perceives pain. “Mindfulness helps relieve the suffering of the pain without changing the fact of the pain. I might say to my doctor that I’m in constant pain but when I go into mindfulness, when I really listen to myself, I realize that, yes, I’m in pain but it changes, it moves, it might flare but it’s not constant,” she added.

Constant pain was something that Bonnie Cohen Rooney was facing after experiencing a series of spinal surgeries in 2000 that included a prolonged stint in the ICU. At 46, Cohen Rooney, a self-described active “high achiever,” found herself overwhelmed with pain, fear, and uncertainty about her future. Through MBSR training, she learned several strategies to deal with pain including how to use breath to control it. By imagining her breath as a healing force, Cohen Rooney found she could relax her body and “release pain” while turning down its intensity.

“I close my eyes and turn my attention inward and focus on the breath,” said Cohen Rooney. “I visualize that the air being breathed in brings with it healing and calm and the exhaling breath releases the pain and the tension. My body relaxes and a sense of tranquility follows.”

Hickman said that the MBSR techniques are helpful in regard to dealing with issues of food and eating, recovering from addiction, attention deficit disorder, anxiety and general stress. Patients and families who would like to learn more about MBSR can visit the UCSD Center for Mindfulness website at http://mindfulness.ucsd.edu

Material adapted from University of California, San Diego Health Sciences.

Veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars showed a 50 percent reduction in their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after just eight weeks of practicing the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation technique, according to a pilot study published in the June 2011 issue of Military Medicine.

The study evaluated five veterans, ages 25- to 40-years-old, who had served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both from 10 months to two years involving moderate or heavy moderate combat.

The study found that Transcendental Meditation produced significant reductions in stress and depression, and marked improvements in relationships and overall quality of life. Furthermore, the authors reported that the technique was easy to perform and was well accepted by the veterans.

By the fourth week of practicing TM, OEF/OIF veterans with PTSD experienced dramatic reductions in PTSD symptoms according to the Clinically-Administered PTSD Scale (the gold standard of PTSD testing). They also reported decreased depression and improved quality of life—showing a greater ability to return to their lives after the war. These findings replicated an earlier study examining TM as a treatment for Vietnam veterans with PTSD. (Credit: Roth Media)

The Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) was the primary measure for assessing the effectiveness of TM practice on PTSD symptoms. CAPS is considered by the Department of Veterans Affairs as the “gold standard” for PTSD assessment and diagnosis for both military Veteran and civilian trauma survivors.

The paper’s senior researcher, Norman Rosenthal, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and director of research at Capital Clinical Research Associates in Rockville, Maryland. Dr. Rosenthal was the first to describe seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and pioneered the use of light therapy as a treatment.

An Interview with Researchers Drs. Norman Rosenthal and Sarina Grosswald

Researchers Drs. Norman Rosenthal and Sarina Grosswald discuss the reduction of PTSD symptoms in veterans practicing Transcendental Meditation. Credit - David Lynch Foundation

“Even though the number of veterans in this study was small, the results were very impressive,” Rosenthal said. “These young men were in extreme distress as a direct result of trauma suffered during combat, and the simple and effortless Transcendental Meditation technique literally transformed their lives.”

The findings were similar to those from a randomized controlled study of Vietnam veterans conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In that study, published in the Journal of Counseling and Development in 1985, after three months of twice-daily TM practice, the veterans had fewer symptoms than those receiving conventional psychotherapy of the day. In fact, most of the TM-treated subjects required no further treatment.

“Even though the combat experiences of OEF/OIF veterans and Vietnam veterans are quite different, the fact that our study corroborates the results of the previous study tells us that this technique has the potential to be an effective tool against PTSD and combat stress, regardless of combat situation,” explained Sarina Grosswald, EdD, co-researcher on the study.

Rosenthal hypothesizes that Transcendental Meditation helps people with PTSD because regular practice produces long-term changes in sympathetic nervous system activity, as evidenced by decreased blood pressure, and lower reactivity to stress. “Transcendental Meditation quiets down the nervous system, and slows down the ‘fight-or-flight’ response,” he said. People with PTSD show overactive fight-or-flight responses, making them excellent candidates for Transcendental Meditation.

Rosenthal points out that there is an urgent need to find effective and cost-effective treatments for veterans with combat-related PTSD. “The condition is common, affecting an estimated one in seven deployed soldiers and Marines, most of whom do not get adequate treatment. So far, only one treatment — simulation exposure to battleground scenes — has been deemed effective, but it requires specialized software and hardware, trained personnel and is labor intensive.

“Based on our study and previous findings, I believe Transcendental Meditation certainly warrants further study for combat-related PTSD,” says Rosenthal.

Material adapted from Roth Media.

Reference / Abstract
Rosenthal, J., et al. (2011). Effects of Transcendental Meditation in Veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Pilot Study. Military Medicine

The report will appear in the journal Brain Research Bulletin and has been released online.

“Mindfulness meditation has been reported to enhance numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory recall,” says Catherine Kerr, PhD, of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, co-lead author of the report. “Our discovery that mindfulness meditators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.”

Brain cells use particular frequencies or waves to regulate the flow of information in much the same way that radio stations broadcast at specific frequencies. One frequency, the alpha rhythm, is particularly active in the cells that process touch, sight and sound in the brain’s outmost layer, called the cortex, where it helps to suppress irrelevant or distracting sensations and regulate the flow of sensory information between brain regions.

Previous studies have suggested that attention can be used to regulate the alpha rhythm and, in turn, sensory perception. When an individual anticipates a touch, sight or sound, the focusing of attention toward the expected stimulus induces a lower alpha wave height in cortical cells that would handle the expected sensation, which actually “turns up the volume” of those cells. At the same time the height of the alpha wave in cells that would handle irrelevant or distracting information increases, turning the volume in those regions down. Because mindfulness meditation – in which practitioners direct nonjudgmental attention to their sensations, feelings and state of mind – has been associated with improved performance on attention-based tasks, the research team decided to investigate whether individuals trained in the practice also exhibited enhanced regulation of the timing and intensity of alpha rhythms.

The study tested 12 healthy volunteers with no previous experience in meditation. Half completed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program developed at the University of Massachusetts. The other half were asked not to engage in any type of meditation during the study period. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that detects the location of brain activity with extreme precision, the researchers measured participants’ alpha rhythms before, during and after the eight-week period. Specifically, they measured alpha rhythms in the brain area that processes signals from the left hand while participants were asked to direct their attention to either their left hand or left foot. Participants’ abilities to adjust the alpha rhythm in cortical cells associated with the hand, depending on where their attention was directed, were recorded during the milliseconds immediately after they received an attention cue.

Although all participants had showed some attention-related alpha rhythm changes at the beginning of the study, at the end of the eight weeks, those who completed the mindfulness meditation training made faster and significantly more pronounced attention-based adjustments to the alpha rhythm than the non-meditators did. “This result may explain reports that mindfulness meditation decreases pain perception,” says Kerr. “Enhanced ability to turn the alpha rhythm up or down could give practitioners’ greater ability to regulate pain sensation.”

The study also sheds light on how meditation may affect basic brain function, explains Stephanie Jones, PhD, of the Martinos Center, co-lead author of the paper. “Given what we know about how alpha waves arise from electrical currents in sensory cortical cells, these data suggest that mindfulness meditation practitioners can use the mind to enhance regulation of currents in targeted cortical cells. The implications extend far beyond meditation and give us clues about possible ways to help people better regulate a brain rhythm that is dysregulated in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and other conditions.” Kerr is an instructor in Medicine and Jones an instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

Material adapted from Massachusetts General Hospital.

According to research conducted over the last three decades; only about one-fourth of us would say, “Sure. Thanks.” The rest would say, “But that’s not fair. You have lots. Why are you only giving me a few?” In fact, people will even turn down any reward rather than accept an ‘unfair’ share.

Unless they are Buddhist meditators, in which case – fair or not – more than half will take what is offered, according to new research by Ulrich Kirk, research assistant professor with the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech; Jonathan Downar, assistant professor with the Neuropsychiatry Clinic and the Centre for Addition and Mental Health at the University of Toronto; and Montague, published in the April 2011 issue of Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience.

Read Montague is professor and director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Credit - Virginia Tech

The research “highlights the clinically and socially important possibility that sustained training in mindfulness meditation may impact distinct domains of human decision making,” the researchers write.

The research came about when Montague wondered whether some people are capable of ignoring the social consideration of fairness and can appreciate a reward based on its intrinsic qualities alone. “That is,” he said, “can they uncouple emotional reaction from their actual behavior?”

Using computational and neuroimaging techniques, Montague studies the neurobiology of human social cognition and decision-making. He and his students recruited 26 Buddhist meditators and 40 control subjects for comparison and looked at their brain processes using functional MRI (fMRI) while the subjects played the “ultimatum game,” in which the first player propose how to divide a sum of money and the second can accept or reject the proposal.

The researchers hypothesized that “successful regulation of negative emotional reactions would lead to increased acceptance rates of unfair offers” by the meditators. The behavioral results confirmed the hypothesis.

But the neuroimaging results showed that Buddhist meditators engaged different parts of the brain than expected. Kirk, Downar, and Montague explained that “The anterior insula has previously been linked to the emotion of disgust, and plays a key role in marking social norm violations, rejection, betrayal, and mistrust. In previous studies of the ultimatum game, anterior insula activity was higher for unfair offers, and the strength of its activity predicted the likelihood of an offer being rejected.

In the present study, this was true for controls. However, in meditators, the anterior insula showed no significant activation for unfair offers, and there was no significant relationship between anterior insula activity and offer rejection. Hence, meditators were able to uncouple the negative emotional response to an unfair offer, presumably by attending to internal bodily states (interoception) reflected by activity in the posterior insula.”

The researchers conclude, “Our results suggest that the lower-level interoceptive representation of the posterior insula is recruited based on individual trait levels in mindfulness. When assessing unfair offers, meditators seem to activate an almost entirely different network of brain areas than do normal controls. Controls draw upon areas involved in theory of mind, prospection, episodic memory, and fictive error. In contrast, meditators instead draw upon areas involved in interoception and attention to the present moment. …This study suggests that the trick may lie not in rational calculation, but in steering away from what-if scenarios, and concentrating on the interoceptive qualities that accompany any reward, no matter how small.”

Material adapted from Virginia Tech.

Download / Reference
Kirk U, Downar J and Montague P (2011). Interoception drives increased rational decision-making in meditators playing the Ultimatum Game. Front. Neurosci. 5:49. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2011.00049

“We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent.”

For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

Both before and after meditation training, study participants’ brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging – arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) – that captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function. During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants’ right legs. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120° Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.

The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant’s pain ratings were reduced with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.

At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is. The scans taken before meditation training showed activity in this area was very high. However, when participants were meditating during the scans, activity in this important pain-processing region could not be detected.

The research also showed that meditation increased brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and the orbito-frontal cortex. “These areas all shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals that are coming in from the body,” said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist.

“Consistent with this function, the more that these areas were activated by meditation the more that pain was reduced. One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing.”

Zeidan and colleagues believe that meditation has great potential for clinical use because so little training was required to produce such dramatic pain-relieving effects. “This study shows that meditation produces real effects in the brain and can provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain without medications,” Zeidan said.

Material adapted from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

“The results of the study provide support to a recent trend in education focusing on student mind/body development for academic achievement,” said Dr. Ronald Zigler, study co-author and associate professor at Penn State, Abington. “We need more programs of this kind implemented into our nation’s public schools, with further evaluation efforts.”

This graph shows the increased math achievement in meditating students. Credit - Maharishi University of Management (click to enlarge)

Among the students with the lowest levels of academic performance, “below basic” and “far below basic,” the meditating students showed a significant improvement in overall academic achievement compared to controls, which showed a slight gain.

“This initial research, showing the benefits of the Quiet Time/Transcendental Meditation program on academic achievement, holds promise for public education” said Sanford Nidich, EdD, lead author and professor of education at Maharishi University of Management. “The findings suggest that there is an easy-to-implement, value-added educational program which can help low-performing minority students begin to close the achievement gap,” said Dr. Nidich.

This graph shows the increased English achievement in meditating students. Credit - Maharishi University of Management (click to enlarge)

Faculty surveyed as part of the project reported the Quiet Time/Transcendental Meditation program to be a valuable addition to the school. They reported the students to be calmer, happier, and less hyperactive, with an increased ability to focus on schoolwork. In terms of the school environment, faculty reported less student fights, less abusive language, and an overall more relaxed and calm atmosphere since implementation of the program.

Study Facts

• This study evaluated change in academic achievement in public middle school students practicing the Transcendental Meditation program compared to non-meditating controls. A total of 189 students (125 meditating and 64 non-meditating students), who were below proficiency level at baseline in English and math, were evaluated for change in academic achievement, using the California Standards Tests (CST).
• Ninety-seven percent were racial and ethnic minority students.
• The Transcendental Meditation program was practiced in class twice a day as part of the school’s Quiet Time program for three months prior to posttesting.
• The Transcendental Meditation program was taught in the context of a school-wide Quiet Time program in which students voluntarily chose the Quiet Time program in which they wanted to participate.
• The Transcendental Meditation technique is a simple, natural, effortless technique that allows the mind to settle down and experience a silent yet awake state of awareness, a state of “restful alertness.” Practice of this stress reduction program does not involve any change in beliefs, values, religion, or lifestyle.
• Compared to eyes-closed rest, research has found that Transcendental Meditation practice is characterized by decreased activation or arousal of the autonomic nervous system, as reflected in decreased breath rate and lower sympathetic nervous system activity. The Transcendental Meditation program has been shown to increase electroencephalographic (EEG) brain integration and coherence, especially in the frontal area of the brain, responsible for higher-order processing.
• Other published research on high school and college students has shown reduced psychological distress, improved positive coping ability, decreased blood pressure, reduced cardiovascular reactivity to stressful stimuli, reduced absenteeism, and decreased school suspensions.
• Results of the current study indicated improvement for meditating students compared to controls on English scale scores (p = .002) and math scale scores (p < .001). A greater percentage of meditating students improved at least one performance level in math and English compared to controls (p values < .01).
• A matched-control subgroup of 50 students in each group yielded similar results.

Facts on Academic Achievement

• According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 68% of eight grade students nationally are below proficiency level in reading and 66% are below proficiency in math, based on 2009 data.
• Nearly 1.3 million students did not graduate from high school in 2010.
• For further facts please see the National Assessment of Educational Progress: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subjectareas.asp. Also see Alliance for Excellence in Education website http://www.all4ed.org/files/UnitedStates.pdf

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management.

This lesson in living, based on the teachings of Buddha, is given by Karen Hilsberg, from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health in California in the US, in an article published online in Springer’s journal, Mindfulness.

Her moving, personal account describes how mindfulness – or a special kind of awareness that is attentive and warmly engaged with each moment of life – helped her cope with her husband’s cancer, and the impact of his illness and death on both herself and her young family. The rigorous practice of mindfulness through daily meditation, weekly Buddhist group (sangha) meetings, and daily deep relaxation helped Hilsberg to be honest and objective about what was happening in her life.

Mindfulness taught her some valuable coping strategies and lessons in living, which helped her to put things into perspective and stay grounded in the present. She learned to ask for help from others; she was no longer alone due to the moral and ethical support she received. However seemingly unbearable her experiences were, they would not last.

Karen Hilsberg concludes: “The practice of mindfulness, the teachings and the sangha have encouraged me to continually use the realities of my own life experiences to find peace in the present moment. I have learned for myself that peace does not come from outside conditions, but that my true serenity can only come from within me. And life goes on and on – we are alive and breathing, and this is a miracle.”

Material adapted from Springer.

Download / Reference
Hilsberg, KR (2011). Lessons in living. Mindfulness. DOI 10.1007/s12671-011-0051-8

They found that dancers who devote enormous time and effort to developing awareness of and precise control over their muscles – a theme coincidentally raised in the new ballet movie “Black Swan” – do not have a stronger mind-body connection than do most other people.

By contrast, veteran practitioners of Vipassana or mindfulness meditation – a technique focused on observing breathing, heartbeat, thoughts, and feelings without judgment – showed the closest mind-body bond, according to the study recently published in the journal Emotion.

“We all talk about our emotions as if they are intimately connected to our bodies – such as the ‘heartache of sadness’ and ‘bursting a blood vessel’ in anger,” said Robert Levenson, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and senior author of the study. “We sought to precisely measure how close that connection was, and found it was stronger for meditators.”

The results offer new clues in the mystery of the mind-body connection. Previous studies have linked the dissociation of mind and body to various medical and psychiatric diseases.

“Ever have the experience of getting home from work and realizing you have a blistering headache?” said Jocelyn Sze, a doctoral student in clinical science at UC Berkeley and the lead author of the study. “The headache probably built up throughout the day, but you might have been intentionally ignoring it and convincing yourself that you felt fine so that you could get through the demands of the day.”

Increasingly, mindfulness meditation is being used to treat physical and psychological problems, researchers point out. “We believe that some of these health benefits derive from meditation’s capacity to increase the association between mind and body in emotion,” Levenson said.

For the experiment, the researchers recruited volunteers from meditation and dance centers around the San Francisco Bay Area and via Craigslist. The study sample consisted of 21 dancers with at least two years of training in modern dance or ballet and 21 seasoned meditators with at least two years of Vipassana practice. A third “control group” was made up of 21 moderately active adults with no training in dance, meditation, Pilates, or professional sports.

Participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 40, were wired with electrodes to measure their bodily responses while they watched emotionally charged scenes from movies and used a rating dial to indicate how they were feeling.

Although all participants reported similar emotional reactions to the film clips, meditators showed stronger correlations between the emotions they reported feeling and the speed of their heartbeats. Surprisingly, the differences between dancers and the control group were minimal.

Researchers theorize that dancers learn to shift focus between time, music, space, and muscles and achieve heightened awareness of their muscle tone, body alignment, and posture.

“These are all very helpful for becoming a better dancer, but they do not tighten the links between mind and body in emotion,” Levenson said.

By contrast, meditators practice attending to “visceral” body sensations, which makes them more attuned to internal organs such as the heart. “These types of visceral sensations are a primary focus of Vipassana meditation, which is typically done sitting still and paying attention to internal sensations,” Sze said.

The study was published in the December 2010 issue of Emotion. In addition to Sze and Levenson, coauthors are UC Berkeley psychologists Joyce W. Yuan and Anett Gyurak, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Material adapted from University of California – Berkeley.

In order to understand the impact of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy on psychiatric disorders, a systematic review was conducted. Systematic reviews involve standardizing the quantitative findings of outcome studies and then pooling their results. They can encapsulate a body of knowledge and inform us about the state of the research in a particular topic area.

This systematic review only included studies that involved mindfulness (e.g., those that were coupled with acceptance and commitment therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy were excluded) and research designs had to have control groups, though not necessarily randomization to conditions. Altogether, thirty-nine studies, involving 1,140 participants, met inclusion criteria for the review.

In the studies, mindfulness seems to have been applied to an array of problems to include mood disorders (depression and bipolar disorder) and anxiety. Unfortunately, there were not enough studies on many particular disorders so results of studies could not generally be pooled. The only area in which studies could be combined involved recurrent depression (e.g., one in which participants had suffered at least three past depressive episodes). In four studies taken together, adding mindfulness therapy to standard care (which was different in studies but could include psychotherapy and/or medication) appeared to reduce future episodes of depression (relapse).

Due to few studies, methodological problems existing within these studies, and the fact that they differed too much to pool together, the effect on other psychiatric disorders could not be assessed well. More studies are therefore needed to address the impact of mindfulness therapy on mental health problems other than recurrent depression. However, an important conclusion of this systematic review was that Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy added to standard care can result in lower relapse rates.

Jacqueline Corcoran, Ph.D.

Reference / Abstract
Chiesa, A., & Serretti, A. (2010). Mindfulness based cognitive therapy for psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychiatry Research. Doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2010.08.011.

“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 They observed 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 (magnetic resonance) images were taken of the brain structure of 16 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.

Material adapted from Massachusetts General Hospital.

Download / Reference
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 – 30 January 2011 (Vol. 191, Issue 1, Pages 36-43, DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006)

“Our previous research found that Zen meditators have lower pain sensitivity. The aim of the current study was to determine how they are achieving this,” says senior author Pierre Rainville, researcher at the Université de Montréal and the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal.

“Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated that although the meditators were aware of the pain, this sensation wasn’t processed in the part of their brains responsible for appraisal, reasoning or memory formation. We think that they feel the sensations, but cut the process short, refraining from interpretation or labelling of the stimuli as painful.”

Training the brain

Rainville and his colleagues compared the response of 13 Zen meditators to 13 non-meditators to a painful heat stimulus. Pain perception was measured and compared with functional MRI data. The most experienced Zen practitioners showed lower pain responses and decreased activity in the brain areas responsible for cognition, emotion, and memory (the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus). In addition, there was a decrease in the communication between a part of the brain that senses the pain and the prefrontal cortex.

“Our findings lead to new insights into mind/brain function,” says first author, Joshua Grant, a doctoral student at the Université de Montréal. “These results challenge current concepts of mental control, which is thought to be achieved by increasing cognitive activity or effort. Instead, we suggest it is possible to self-regulate in a more passive manner, by ‘turning off’ certain areas of the brain, which in this case are normally involved in processing pain.”

“The results suggest that Zen meditators may have a training-related ability to disengage some higher-order brain processes, while still experiencing the stimulus,” says Rainville. “Such an ability could have widespread and profound implications for pain and emotion regulation and cognitive control. This behaviour is consistent with the mindset of Zen and with the notion of mindfulness.”

Material adapted from University of Montreal.

Reference
“A non-elaborative mental stance and decoupling of executive and pain-related cortices predicts low pain sensitivity in Zen meditators” was authored by Joshua A. Grant, Jérôme Courtemanche and Pierre Rainville from the Université de Montréal. Pain.

The study compared the effectiveness of pharmacotherapy with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) by studying people who were initially treated with an antidepressant and then, either stopped taking the medication in order to receive MBCT, or continued taking medication for 18 months.

“With the growing recognition that major depression is a recurrent disorder, patients need treatment options for preventing depression from returning to their lives.” said Dr. Zindel Segal, Head of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Clinic in the Clinical Research Department at CAMH.

“Data from the community suggest that many depressed patients discontinue antidepressant medication far too soon, either because of side effect burden, or an unwillingness to take medicine for years. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a non-pharmacological approach that teaches skills in emotion regulation so that patients can monitor possible relapse triggers as well as adopt lifestyle changes conducive to sustaining mood balance.

Study participants who were diagnosed with major depressive disorder were all treated with an antidepressant until their symptoms remitted. They were then randomly assigned to come off their medication and receive MBCT; come off their medication and receive a placebo; or stay on their medication. The novelty of this design permits comparing the effectiveness of sequencing pharmacological and psychological treatments versus maintaining the same antidepressant treatment over time.

Participants in MBCT attended 8 weekly group sessions and practiced mindfulness as part of daily homework assignments. Clinical assessments were conducted at regular intervals, and over an 18 month period, relapse rates for patients in the MBCT group did not differ from patients receiving antidepressants (both in the 30% range), whereas patients receiving placebo relapsed at a significantly higher rate (70%).

“The real world implications of these findings bear directly on the front line treatment of depression. For that sizeable group of patients who are unwilling or unable to tolerate maintenance antidepressant treatment, MBCT offers equal protection from relapse,” said Dr. Zindel Segal. “Sequential intervention – offering pharmacological and psychological interventions – may keep more patients in treatment, and thereby reduce the high risk of recurrence that is characteristic of this disorder.”

Material adapted from Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

The treatment called UPLIFT (Using Practice and Learning to Increase Favorable Thoughts) is a home-based depression prevention and treatment program. Based on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, the weekly program was designed for group delivery via the phone or Web. It involves eight, hour-long sessions focused on increasing knowledge about depression, epilepsy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and mindfulness.

Forty participants were randomly assigned to participate in the intervention or waitlist groups. Depressive symptoms and other outcomes were measured at baseline, after eight weeks, and after 16 weeks.

Depressive symptoms decreased by 64 percent in the intervention group but only by 15 percent in the waitlist group. There was no significant difference in results between participants who received the intervention via telephone or Internet.

“The Project UPLIFT intervention was effective in teaching people with epilepsy the knowledge and skills associated with reducing their symptoms of depression,” says lead study author Nancy Thompson, PhD, associate professor of behavioral science and health education at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. “Addressing the mental health needs of this population is important as many people with epilepsy – between 32 percent and 48 percent – report being depressed as well as feeling isolated and stigmatized.”

Future studies of the UPLIFT program will target other populations at risk of depression, such as caregivers or persons with disabilities, who may benefit from a home-based treatment. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded the Project UPLIFT pilot study.

In addition to Thompson, study authors were Elizabeth Reisinger Walker, Natasha Obolensky, Ashley Winning, Christina Barmon, and Colleen Dilorio, of the Rollins School of Public Health; and Michael Compton of the Emory School of Medicine.

Material adapted from Emery University.

The effect appears to be attributable to psychological changes that increase a person’s ability to cope with stress and maintain feelings of well-being.

“We have found that meditation promotes positive psychological changes, and that meditators showing the greatest improvement on various psychological measures had the highest levels of telomerase,” said Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.

“The take-home message from this work is not that meditation directly increases telomerase activity and therefore a person’s health and longevity,” Saron said. “Rather, meditation may improve a person’s psychological well-being and in turn these changes are related to telomerase activity in immune cells, which has the potential to promote longevity in those cells. Activities that increase a person’s sense of well-being may have a profound effect on the most fundamental aspects of their physiology.”

The study, with UC Davis postdoctoral scholar Tonya Jacobs as lead author, was published online Oct. 29 in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology and will soon appear in print. It is a product of the UC Davis-based Shamatha Project, led by Saron, one of the first long-term, detailed, matched control-group studies of the effects of intensive meditation training on mind and body.

“This work is among the first to show a relation between positive psychological change and telomerase activity. Because the finding is new, it should serve to inspire future studies to replicate and extend what we found,” Jacobs said.

Elizabeth Blackburn, professor of biology and physiology at UCSF, is a co-author of the paper. Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for discovering telomeres and telomerase. Other co-authors include UCSF colleagues Elissa Epel, associate professor of psychiatry; assistant research biochemist Jue Lin; and Owen Wolkowitz, professor of psychiatry.

Telomeres are sequences of DNA at the end of chromosomes that tend to get shorter every time a cell divides. When telomeres drop below a critical length, the cell can no longer divide properly and eventually dies.

Telomerase is an enzyme that can rebuild and lengthen telomeres. Other studies suggest that telomerase activity may be a link between psychological stress and physical health.

The research team measured telomerase activity in participants in the Shamatha Project at the end of a three-month intensive meditation retreat. Telomerase activity was about one-third higher in the white blood cells of participants who had completed the retreat than in a matched group of controls.

The retreat participants also showed increases in such beneficial psychological qualities as perceived control (over one’s life and surroundings), mindfulness (being able to observe one’s experience in a nonreactive manner) and purpose in life (viewing one’s life as meaningful, worthwhile and aligned with long-term goals and values). In addition, they experienced decreased neuroticism, or negative emotionality.

Using statistical modeling techniques, the researchers concluded that high telomerase activity was due to the beneficial effects of meditation on perceived control and neuroticism, which in turn were due to changes in mindfulness and sense of purpose.

The Shamatha Project is the most comprehensive longitudinal study of intensive meditation yet undertaken.

The intensive meditation retreat took place at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colo. The study included 30 participants each in the retreat and control groups. Participants received ongoing instruction in meditation techniques from Buddhist scholar, author, and teacher B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. They attended group meditation sessions twice a day and engaged in individual practice for about six hours a day.

A control group of 30 people matched for age, sex, education, ethnicity and meditation experience was assessed at the same time and in the same place, but did not otherwise attend meditation training at that time.

The Shamatha Project has drawn the attention of scientists and Buddhist scholars alike, including the Dalai Lama, who has endorsed the project.

Saron and his colleagues are now analyzing and publishing other findings from the project. In a paper published this summer in Psychological Science, Katherine MacLean, a recent UC Davis Ph.D. graduate now at Johns Hopkins University, reported that meditators were better at making fine visual distinctions and sustaining attention over a long period.

The group’s next research article, currently in press in the journal Emotion, will describe a meditation-related reduction in impulsive reactions, which was linked in turn to enhancement in positive psychological functioning. UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Baljinder Sahdra is the lead author on that paper.

Material adapted from University of California – Davis.

In the study, people who took an eight-week class in mindfulness meditation training reduced their fatigue and depression and improved overall quality of life compared to people with MS who received only usual medical care. The positive effects continued for at least six months.

“People with MS must often confront special challenges of life related to profession, financial security, recreational and social activities, and personal relationships, not to mention the direct fears associated with current or future physical symptoms and disability. Fatigue, depression and anxiety are also common consequences of having MS.” said study author Paul Grossman, PhD, of the University of Basel Hospital in Switzerland. “Unfortunately, the treatments that help slow the disease process may have little direct effect on people’s overall quality of life, fatigue or depression. So any complementary treatments that can quickly and directly improve quality of life are very welcome.”

For the study, 150 people with mild to moderate MS were randomly assigned to receive either the eight-week meditation training or only usual medical care for MS. The class focused on mental and physical exercises aimed at developing nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, or mindfulness. The training included weekly classes lasting two and a half hours, plus one all-day retreat and 40 minutes per day of homework assignments.

“MS is an unpredictable disease,” Grossman said. “People can go for months feeling great and then have an attack that may reduce their ability to work or take care of their family. Mindfulness training can help those with MS better to cope with these changes. Increased mindfulness in daily life may also contribute to a more realistic sense of control, as well as a greater appreciation of positive experiences that continue be part of life.”

Participants in the mindfulness program showed extremely good attendance rates (92%) and reported high levels of satisfaction with the training. Furthermore, very few (5%) dropped out of the course before completion. Those who went through the mindfulness program improved in nearly every measure of fatigue, depression and quality of life, while those who received usual medical care declined slightly on most of the measures. For example, those with mindfulness training reduced their depressive symptoms by over 30 percent compared to those with no training.

Improvements among mindfulness participants were particularly large for those who showed significant levels of depression or fatigue at the beginning of the study. About 65 percent of participants showed evidence of serious levels of depression, anxiety or fatigue at the start of the study, and this risk group was reduced by a third at the end of training and six months later.

The other benefits of the training were also still apparent six months after the training ended, although they were sometimes reduced compared to right after finishing the training. Reductions in fatigue, however, were stable from the end of treatment to six months later.

An accompanying editorial pointed out that because there was not an active control group (using a different type of intervention), it is unclear that the good results were specifically a result of mindfulness training. However, the editorialists noted that the present study was the largest of its type, and was well-conducted.

Material adapted from American Academy of Neurology.

After the trial period, the 14 and 15 year-old boys were found to have increased well-being, defined as the combination of feeling good (including positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, interest and affection) and functioning well.

Professor Felicia Huppert of the Well-being Institute at the University of Cambridge said: “More and more we are realizing the importance of supporting the overall mental health of children. Our study demonstrates that this type of training improves well-being in adolescents and that the more they practice, the greater the benefits. Importantly, many of the students genuinely enjoyed the exercises and said they intended to continue them – a good sign that many children would be receptive to this type of intervention.

“Another significant aspect of this study is that adolescents who suffered from higher levels of anxiety were the ones who benefited most from the training.”

For the experiment, students in six classes were trained in mindful awareness – mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way of paying attention. It means consciously bringing awareness to our experience, in the present moment, without making judgments about it*. Students in the five control classes attended their normal religious studies lessons.

The training consisted of four 40 minute classes, one per week, which presented the principles and practice of mindfulness. The classes covered the concepts of awareness and acceptance, and taught the schoolboys such things as how to practice bodily awareness by noticing where they were in contact with their chairs or the floor, paying attention to their breathing, and noticing all the sensations involved in walking.

The students were also asked to practice outside the classroom and were encouraged to listen to a CD or mp3 file for eight minutes a day. These exercises are intended to improve concentration and reduce stress.

All participants completed a short series of online questionnaires before and after the mindfulness project. The questionnaires measured the effect of the training on changes in mindful awareness, resilience (the ability to modify responses to changing situations) and psychological well-being.

The researchers found that although it was a short program, the students who participated in the mindfulness training had increased levels of well-being which were proportional to the amount of time the students spent practicing their new skills.

Professor Huppert continued: “We believe that the effects of mindfulness training can enhance well-being in a number of ways. If you practice being in the present, you can increase positive feelings by savoring pleasurable on-going experiences. Additionally, calming the mind and observing experiences with curiosity and acceptance not only reduces stress but helps with attention control and emotion regulation – skills which are valuable both inside and outside the classroom.”

The success of this initial study has recently led to the creation of an exciting 8 week mindfulness curriculum for schools in both the state and private sectors. This new curriculum, which includes games and video clips, should have even greater benefits.

Material adapted from University of Cambridge.

*As described in the Mental Health Foundation Report ‘Be Mindful’ 2010.

IBMT was adapted from traditional Chinese medicine in the 1990s in China, where it is practiced by thousands of people. It is now being taught to undergraduates involved in research on the method at the University of Oregon (UO).

The new research – published online the week of August 16-21 ahead of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – involved 45 UO students (28 males and 17 females); 22 subjects received IBMT while 23 participants were in a control group that received the same amount of relaxation training. The experiments involved the use of brain-imaging equipment in the UO’s Robert and Beverly Lewis Center for Neuroimaging.

A type of magnetic resonance called diffusion tensor imaging allowed researchers to examine fibers connecting brain regions before and after training. The changes were strongest in connections involving the anterior cingulate, a brain area related to the ability to regulate emotions and behavior. The changes were observed only in those who practiced meditation and not in the control group. The changes in connectivity began after six hours of training and became clear by 11 hours of practice. The researchers said it is possible the changes resulted from a reorganization of white-matter tracts or by an increase of myelin that surrounds the connections.

“The importance of our findings relates to the ability to make structural changes in a brain network related to self regulation,” said Posner, who last fall received a National Medal of Science. “The pathway that has the largest change due to IBMT is one that previously was shown to relate to individual differences in the person’s ability to regulate conflict.”

In 2007 in PNAS, Tang, a visiting scholar at the UO, and Posner documented that doing IBMT for five days prior to a mental math test led to low levels of the stress hormone cortisol among Chinese students. The experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue than students in a relaxation control group.

In 2009 in PNAS, Tang and Chinese colleagues, with assistance from Posner and UO psychology professor Mary K. Rothbart, found that IBMT subjects in China had increased blood flow in the right anterior cingulate cortex after receiving training for 20 minutes a day over five days. Compared with the relaxation group, IBMT subjects also had lower heart rates and skin conductance responses, increased belly breathing amplitude and decreased chest respiration rates.

The latter findings suggested the possibility that additional training might trigger structural changes in the brain, leading to the new research, Tang and Posner said. The researchers currently are extending their evaluation to determine if longer exposure to IBMT will produce positive changes in the size of the anterior cingulate.

Deficits in activation of the anterior cingulate cortex have been associated with attention deficit disorder, dementia, depression, schizophrenia and many other disorders. “We believe this new finding is of interest to the fields of education, health and neuroscience, as well as for the general public,” Tang said.

In their conclusion, the researchers wrote that the new findings suggest a use of IBMT as a vehicle for understanding how training influences brain plasticity.

IBMT is not yet available in the United States beyond the research being done at the UO. The practice avoids struggles to control thought, relying instead on a state of restful alertness, allowing for a high degree of body-mind awareness while receiving instructions from a coach, who provides breath-adjustment guidance and mental imagery and other techniques while soothing music plays in the background. Thought control is achieved gradually through posture, relaxation, body-mind harmony and balanced breathing. A good coach is critical, Tang said.

Material adapted from University of Oregon.

Reference
Yi-Yuan Tang, Qilin Lu, Xiujuan Geng, Elliot A. Stein, Yihong Yang, Michael I. Posner. Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011043107

Methods
The primary study assessed PVT reaction times before and after 40 minute periods of mediation, nap, or a control activity using a within subject cross-over design. This study utilized novice meditators who were current university students (n=10). Novice meditators completed 40 minutes of meditation, nap, or control activities on six different days (two separate days for each condition), plus one night of total sleep deprivation on a different night, followed by 40 minutes of meditation. A second study examined sleep times in long term experienced meditators (n=7) vs. non-meditators (n=23). Experienced meditators and controls were age and sex matched and living in the Delhi region of India at the time of the study. Both groups continued their normal activities while monitoring their sleep and meditation times.

Results
Novice meditators were tested on the PVT before each activity, 10 minutes after each activity, and one hour later. All ten novice meditators improved their PVT reaction times immediately following periods of meditation, and all but one got worse immediately following naps. Sleep deprivation produced a slower baseline reaction time (RT) on the PVT that still improved significantly following a period of meditation. In experiments with long-term experienced meditators, sleep duration was measured using both sleep journals and actigraphy. Sleep duration in these subjects was lower than control non-meditators and general population norms with no apparent decrements in PVT scores.

Conclusions
These results suggest that meditation provides at least a short-term performance improvement even in novice meditators. In long term meditators, multiple hours spent in meditation are associated with a significant decrease in total sleep time when compared with age and sex matched controls who did not meditate. Whether meditation can actually replace a portion of sleep or pay-off sleep debt is under further investigation.

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Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need.

Material adapted from:
Prashant Kaul, Jason Passafiume, R. Craig Sargent, & Bruce F. O’Hara (2010). Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 6:47.

The negativity bias shows up in lots of ways. For example, studies have found that:

• In a relationship, it typically takes five good interactions to make up for a single bad one.
• People will work much harder to avoid losing $100 than they will work to gain the same amount of money.
• Painful experiences are much more memorable than pleasurable ones.

In your own mind, what do you usually think about at the end of the day? The fifty things that went right, or the one that went wrong? Like the guy who cut you off in traffic, what you wish you had said differently to a co-worker, or the one thing on your To Do list that didn’t get done . . .

In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. That shades “implicit memory” – your underlying expectations, beliefs, action strategies, and mood – in an increasingly negative direction.

And that’s just not fair, since probably most of the facts in your life are positive or neutral. Every day, lots of good things happen, such as a lovely sunset, someone is nice to you, you finish a batch of emails, or you learn something new. And lots of other good things are ongoing aspects of your world (e.g., your children are healthy, life is peaceful in your corner of the planet) or yourself (e.g., personal qualities like determination, sincerity, fairness, kindness).

Besides the sheer injustice of it, acquiring a big pile of negative experiences in implicit memory banks naturally makes a person more anxious, irritable, and blue. Plus it makes it harder to be patient and giving toward others.

In evolution, Mother Nature only cares about passing on genes – by any means necessary. She doesn’t care if we happen to suffer along the way – from subtle worries to intense feelings of sorrow, worthlessness, or anger – or create suffering for others.

The result: a brain that is tilted against lasting contentment and fulfillment.

But you don’t have to accept this bias! By tilting toward the good – “good” in the practical sense of that which brings more happiness to oneself and more helpfulness to others – you merely level the playing field.

You’ll still see the tough parts of life. In fact, you’ll become more able to change them or bear them if you tilt toward the good, since that will help put challenges in perspective, lift your energy and spirits, highlight useful resources, and fill up your own cup so you have more to offer to others.

And now, tilted toward absorbing the good, instead of positive experiences washing through you like water through a sieve, they’ll collect in implicit memory deep down in your brain. In the famous saying, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The more you get your neurons firing about positive facts, the more they’ll be wiring up positive neural structures.

Taking in the good is a brain-science savvy and psychologically skillful way to improve how you feel, get things done, and treat others. It is among the top five personal growth methods I know. In addition to being good for adults, it’s great for children, helping them to become more resilient, confident, and happy.

Here’s how to take in the good – in three simple steps.

1. Look for good facts, and turn them into good experiences.
Good facts include positive events – like the taste of good coffee or getting an unexpected compliment – and positive aspects of the world and yourself. When you notice something good, let yourself feel good about it.

Try to do this at least a half dozen times a day. There are lots of opportunities to notice good events, and you can always recognize good things about the world and yourself. Each time takes just 30 seconds or so. It’s private; no one needs to know you are taking in the good. You can do it on the fly in daily life, or at special times of reflection, like just before falling asleep (when the brain is especially receptive to new learning).

Notice any reluctance to feeling good. Such as thinking that you don’t deserve to, or that it’s selfish, vain, or even shameful to feel pleasure. Or that if you feel good, you will lower your guard and let bad things happen.

Barriers to feeling good are common and understandable – but they get in the way of you taking in the resources you need to feel better, have more strength, and have more inside to give to others. So acknowledge them to yourself, and then turn your attention back to the good news. Keep opening up to it, breathing and relaxing, letting the good facts affect you.

It’s like sitting down to a meal: don’t just look at it – taste it!

2. Really enjoy the experience.
Most of the time, a good experience is pretty mild, and that’s fine. But try to stay with it for 20 or 30 seconds in a row – instead of getting distracted by something else.

As you can, sense that it is filling your body, becoming a rich experience. As Marc Lewis and other researchers have shown, the longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory.

You are not craving or clinging to positive experiences, since that would ultimately lead to tension and disappointment. Actually, you are doing the opposite: by taking them in and filling yourself up with them, you will increasingly feel less fragile or needy inside, and less dependent on external supplies; your happiness and love will become more unconditional, based on an inner fullness rather than on whether the momentary facts in your life happen to be good ones.

3. Intend and sense that the good experience is sinking into you.
People do this in different ways. Some feel it in their body like a warm glow spreading through their chest like the warmth of a cup of hot cocoa on a cold wintry day. Others visualize things like a golden syrup sinking down inside, bringing good feelings and soothing old places of hurt, filling in old holes of loss or yearning; a child might imagine a jewel going into a treasure chest in her heart. And some might simply know conceptually, that while this good experience is held in awareness, its neurons are firing busily away, and gradually wiring together

Any single time you do this will make only a little difference. But over time those little differences will add up, gradually weaving positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self.

(For more on Taking in the Good, please see Chapter 4 in Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom)

* * *

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, he teaches at universities and meditation centers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His work has been featured on the BBC and in Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report, and other major magazines.

Rick’s most recent book is Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom and is being published in ten additional languages. An authority on self-directed neuroplasticity, he edits the Wise Brain Bulletin and has a weekly e-newsletter, Just One Thing. His articles have appeared in Tricycle Magazine, Insight Journal, and Inquiring Mind.

He enjoys rock-climbing and taking a break from emails. He and his wife have two children. For more information, please see his full profile at www.RickHanson.net. You can find him on the social web at http://www.facebook.com/BuddhasBrain and http://www.YouTube.com/BuddhasBrain

These categories include:

1. Focused attention – concentrating on an object or emotion;
2. Open monitoring – being mindful of one’s breath or thoughts;
3. Automatic self-transcending – meditations that transcend their own activity – a new category introduced by the authors.

Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG.

“The idea is that meditation is, in a sense, a ‘cognitive task,’ and EEG frequencies are known for different tasks,” said Fred Travis, Ph.D., co-author, and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management.

Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma activity, included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist (loving kindness and compassion), Buddhist (Zen and Diamond Way), and Chinese (Qigong) traditions.

Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist (Mindfulness, and ZaZen), Chinese (Qigong), and Vedic (Sahaja Yoga) traditions.

Automatic self-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic (Transcendental Meditation) and Chinese (Qigong) traditions.

Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects.

“Meditations differ in both their ingredients and their effects, just as medicines do. Lumping them all together as “essentially the same” is simply a mistake,” said Jonathan Shear, Ph.D., co-author, professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of several books and publications on meditation.

“Explicit differences between meditation techniques need to be respected when researching physiological patterns or clinical outcomes of meditation practices,” said Dr. Travis. “If they are averaged together, then the resulting phenomenological, physiological, and clinical profiles cannot be meaningfully interpreted.”

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management.

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.

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.

Material adapted from Association for Psychological Science.

That is the issue raised by a very interesting comment regarding my previous post, The Brain in a Bucket. So I have taken the liberty of posting the comment here (hoping that’s OK in blog etiquette; still learning as I go), and then responding.

Here is the comment:

I was pondering your statement that long term meditators show a thickening in certain areas of the brain. As I understand it, the volume of the skull is fixed in adults. This would seem to require that if one part thickens, another part must be reduced. I am curious as to whether anyone has considered what the implications of a loss of volume in these other areas might be? I enjoyed your article, and look forward to more on the topic of neurology and meditation.

While the size of the skull is indeed fixed in adulthood, we can both lose gray matter volume due to the normal effects of aging and gain it through mental training of one kind or another. For instance, one study showed that the hippocampus (really hippocampi, since there is one on each side of the brain, but convention is usually to refer to neural regions in the singular), of London taxi drivers is thicker after their training, which makes sense since the hippocampus is deeply involved with spatial memory.

But the size of these changes in volume is very small, so they do not “bump up against” the skull. For example, the increased thickness in the brains of meditators – seen in one of the cooler studies in this field – amounted – to about 1/200th of an inch. This may not seem like much but is a BIG change in the density of synaptic networks when you can fit about 5000 synapses in the width of a human hair.

The point is that small changes in daily activities – meditating instead of sleeping in, driving a cab instead of working in an office – can make changes in the brain that seem small but actually create big changes in the mind. And that fact opens the door to amazing opportunities.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist, author, and teacher. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, he founded the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, and teaches at universities and meditation centers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His work has been featured on the BBC and in Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report, and other major magazines.

Rick’s most recent book is Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (with Rick Mendius, M.D.; Foreword by Dan Siegel, M.D. and Preface by Jack Kornfield, Ph.D.), which has been praised by numerous scholars, therapists, and teachers, including Tara Brach, Ph.D., Roger Walsh, Ph.D., Sharon Salzberg, and Fred Luskin, Ph.D. An authority on self-directed neuroplasticity, he edits the Wise Brain Bulletin, and his articles have appeared in Tricycle Magazine, Insight Journal, and Inquiring Mind; his Your Wise Brain blog is on Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and other major websites. He has a chapter – 7 Facts about the Brain That Incline the Mind to Joy – in Measuring the Immeasurable, as well as several audio programs with Sounds True. His first book was Mother Nurture: A Mother’s Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships (Penguin, 2002)

Rick is currently a trustee of Saybrook University. He also served on the board of Spirit Rock Meditation Center for nine years, and was President of the Board of FamilyWorks, a community agency. He began meditating in 1974, trained in several traditions, and leads a weekly meditation gathering in San Rafael, CA. He enjoys rock-climbing and taking a break from emails. He and his wife have two children. For more information, please see his full profile at www.RickHanson.net. You can find him on the social web at http://www.facebook.com/BuddhasBrain and http://www.YouTube.com/BuddhasBrain

The type of meditation practiced 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 Manchester’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.”

Material adapted from University of Manchester by CFisher.

Dyspnea outcomes were measured with the Modified Borg Scale (MBS) for self-reported evaluation of dyspneic symptoms. Physiological parameters measured were pulse oxygen saturation (SpO2), end-tidal CO2 (EtCO2), heart rate (HR), and respiratory rate (RR). Post-test qualitative data were obtained via interview for subjective patient experience.

The results revealed that the combination of guided imagery with music produced a significant decrease in Borg Scale scores. It also significantly increased end-tidal CO2, decreased respiratory rate, and decreased heart rate. Additionally, 90% of subjects gave positive qualitative reviews of the guided imagery plus music intervention. Pulse oxygen saturation did not change significantly over time.

Music alone was also found to be effective, but not as effective as guided imagery plus music. The soothing non-musical intervention was not found to be effective.

The authors conclude that this study demonstrates that guided imagery with theta music is a useful intervention for palliative care of patients with dyspnea and should be considered for low-cost end-of-life palliative care for dyspnea.

Belleruth Naparstek, LISW, BCD
www.belleruthnaparstek.com

Citation
Lai WS, Chao CS, Yang WP, Chen CH. Efficacy of Guided Imagery With Theta Music for Advanced Cancer Patients With Dyspnea: A Pilot Study. Biological Research for Nursing. 2010 May 7. [Epub ahead of print]

Now, a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte shows that a single hour of training spread out over a three day period can produce the same kind of analgesic effect. The research appears in an article by UNC Charlotte psychologists Fadel Zeidan, Nakia S. Gordon, Junaid Merchant and Paula Goolkasian, in the current issue of The Journal of Pain.

“This study is the first study to demonstrate the efficacy of such a brief intervention on the perception of pain,” noted Fadel Zeidan, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UNC Charlotte and the paper’s lead author. “Not only did the meditation subjects feel less pain than the control group while meditating but they also experienced less pain sensitivity while not meditating.”

Over the course of three experiments employing harmless electrical shocks administered in gradual increments, the researchers measured the effect of brief sessions of mindfulness meditation training on pain awareness measuring responses that were carefully calibrated to insure reporting accuracy. Subjects who received the meditation training were compared to controls and to groups using relaxation and distraction techniques. The researchers measured changes in the subjects’ rating of pain at “low” and “high” levels during the different activities, and also changes in their general sensitivity to pain through the process of calibrating responses before the activities.

While the distraction activity – which used a rigorous math task to distract subjects from the effects of the stimulus – was effective in reducing the subject’s perception of “high” pain, the meditation activity had an even stronger reducing effect on high pain, and reduced the perception of “low” pain levels as well.

Further, the meditation training appeared to have an effect that continued to influence the patients after the activity was concluded, resulting in a general lowering of pain sensitivity in the subjects – a result that indicated that the effect of the meditation was substantially different from the effect of the distraction activity.

The finding follows earlier research studies that found differences in pain awareness and other mental activities among long-time practitioners of mindfulness meditation techniques.

“We knew already that meditation has significant effects on pain perception in long-term practitioners whose brains seem to have been completely changed — we didn’t know that you could do this in just three days, with just 20 minutes a day,” Zeidan said.

In assessing the first experiment, the researchers were not terribly surprised to discover that meditation activity appeared to be affecting the experimental subjects’ perception of pain because the researchers assumed that the change was mainly due to distraction, a well-known effect. However, subsequent findings began to indicate that the effect continued outside of the periods of meditation.

“When we re-calibrated their pain thresholds after the training had started and we found that they felt less pain, compared to the control subjects,” Zeidan noted. “This was totally surprising because a change in general sensitivity was not part of our hypothesis at all.”

“We were so surprised after the first experiment that we did two more. We thought that no one was going to listen to us because no one had done this before… and we got a robust finding across the three experiments.”

Zeidan stresses that the effect the researchers measured in the meditation subjects was a lessening of pain but not a lessening of sensation. The calibration results showed little change in the meditation subjects’ sensitivity to the sensation of electricity, but a significant change in what level of shock was perceived to be painful.

“The short course of meditation was very effective on pain perception,” Zeidan said. “We got a very high effect size for the periods when they were meditating.

“In fact, it was kind of freaky for me. I was ramping at 400-500 milliamps and their arms would be jolting back and forth because the current was stimulating a motor nerve. Yet they would still be asking, ‘A 2?’ (‘2’ being the level of electrical shock that designates low pain) – it was really surprising,” he said.

Zeidan suspects that the mindfulness training lessens the awareness of and sensitivity to pain because it trains subjects’ brains to pay attention to sensations at the present moment rather than anticipating future pain or dwelling on the emotions caused by pain, and thus reduces anxiety.

“The mindfulness training taught them that distractions, feelings, emotions are momentary, don’t require a label or judgment because the moment is already over,” Zeidan noted. “With the meditation training they would acknowledge the pain, they realize what it is, but just let it go. They learn to bring their attention back to the present.”

Though the results are in line with past findings regarding mindfulness practitioners, Zeidan says that the findings are important because they show that meditation is much easier to use for pain management than it was previously believed to be because a very short, simple course of training is all that is required in order to achieve a significant effect. Even self-administered training might be effective, according to Zeidan.

“What’s neat here is that this is the briefest known way to promote a meditation state and yet it has an effect in pain management. People who want to make use of the technique might not need a meditation facilitator – they might be able to get the necessary training off the internet, “Zeidan said. “All you have to do is use your mind, change the way you look at the perception of pain and that, ultimately, might help alleviate the feeling of that pain.”

Material adapted from UNC Charlotte by CFisher.

Though many people would like to boost their cognitive abilities, the monk-like discipline required seems like a daunting time commitment and financial cost for this benefit.

Surprisingly, the benefits may be achievable even without all the work. Though it sounds almost like an advertisement for a “miracle” weight-loss product, new research now suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than we previously believed. Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as “mindfulness” found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day.

“In the behavioral test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training,” said Fadel Zeidan, a post-doctoral researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and a former doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where the research was conducted.

“Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training – are really surprising,” Zeidan noted. “It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation.”

The study appears in the April 2 issue of Consciousness and Cognition. Zeidan’s co-authors are Susan K. Johnson, Zhanna David and Paula Goolkasian from the Department of Psychology at UNC Charlotte, and Bruce J. Diamond from William Patterson University. The research was also part of Zeidan’s doctoral dissertation. The research will also be presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s annual meeting in Montreal, April 17-20.

The experiment involved 63 student volunteers, 49 of whom completed the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned in approximately equivalent numbers to one of two groups, one of which received the meditation training while the other group listened for equivalent periods of time to a book (J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit) being read aloud.

Prior to and following the meditation and reading sessions, the participants were subjected to a broad battery of behavioral tests assessing mood, memory, visual attention, attention processing, and vigilance.

Both groups performed equally on all measures at the beginning of the experiment. Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind.

“The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed,” Zeidan noted. “In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better.”

Particularly of note were the differing results on a “computer adaptive n-back task,” where participants would have to correctly remember if a stimulus had been shown two steps earlier in a sequence. If the participant got the answer right, the computer would react by increasing the speed of the subsequent stimulus, further increasing the difficulty of the task. The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one.

“Findings like these suggest that meditation’s benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation’s first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,” Zeidan said.

“Further study is warranted,” he stressed, noting that brain imaging studies would be helpful in confirming the brain changes that the behavioral tests seem to indicate, “but this seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing – most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance – within a week’s time.”

The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated “mindfulness” training regime modeled on basic “Shamatha skills” from a Buddhist meditation tradition, conducted by a trained facilitator. As described in the paper, “participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let ‘it’ go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath.” Subsequent training built on this basic model, teaching physical awareness, focus, and mindfulness with regard to distraction.

Zeidan likens the brief training the participants received to a kind of mental calisthenics that prepared their minds for cognitive activity.

“The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one’s awareness of mental processes as they’re happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion. This can lead to better, more efficient performance on the intended task.”

“This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it’s not necessarily permanent,” Zeidan cautions. “This doesn’t mean that you meditate for four days and you’re done – you need to keep practicing.”

Material adapted from University of North Carolina at Charlotte by CFisher.

MFT is a three-year master’s degree program in the human development department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Although most extensively described in the Buddhist tradition, McCollum teaches mindfulness as a secular practice, compatible with all religious beliefs. Mindfulness meditation involves deliberately focusing one’s attention on present experience – thoughts, physical sensations, emotions – and doing one’s best to stay present with those experiences without judging them or avoiding the difficult aspects.

Extensive research on mindfulness in health care points to benefits to be gained from the practice. For novice therapists, another advantage is that mindfulness meditation helps them to switch out of problem solving into being more present, more empathetic, and more compassionate, all important aspects of the therapeutic process, said McCollum. He has practiced mindfulness for over 20 years and began to introduce the practice into the Virginia Tech MFT curriculum about five years ago after seeing students struggle to be emotionally available to clients. McCollum has been a Virginia Tech faculty member in the National Capital Region since 1992.

Rachel Cramer, an MFT student from Arlington, Va., explained how mindfulness meditation has helped in her interaction with clients. “Thinking back on starting out in the therapist’s chair, one of the hardest things for me was to learn to be quiet. Although I thought I understood active listening intellectually, the actual practice of listening without trying to form a response or a counter-argument or an intervention, and just to sit and take in what the other person was saying peacefully, was a huge challenge for me. I think that is where the practice of mindfulness was the most helpful to me. Just having the experience of quieting my inner cacophony in a disciplined way gave me an experience to draw on when sitting with a client.

“In a strange way,” Cramer continued, “mindfulness practice helped me get to the point where I could be most quiet and centered when hearing the most difficult things. Without the exposure to mindfulness practice in my first techniques class, I’m not sure I could really have learned to ‘sit with someone’s pain’ just as a witness, without trying to fix the unfixable. This experience also shaped my use of mindfulness, or at least quiet and measured breathing, as a way to help clients slow their own processes down. Slowing them down made a lot more sense to me after I had experienced the value of this myself.”

Mindfulness meditation begins in the first year of clinical training. At this juncture, students have taken theory and practice courses but are just beginning actual clinical rotations. They are encountering a variety of issues common to beginning clinicians, such as dealing with anxiety, using a theoretical model effectively, and learning clinic procedures. As a course requirement (but not graded), students keep weekly journals which are read by the instructors over the course of the semester and then returned to them.

According to McCollum, the educational purpose of these journals is to provide an avenue for students to both communicate and reflect on their experience and to provide some accountability for their weekly practice of mindfulness meditation. Although asked to practice for five to 10 minutes daily, there is no penalty for not practicing. “We ask them simply to report their experience, including why they did not practice meditation during a given week. Students are explicitly and frequently encouraged to include both positive and negative experiences, as this is part of mindfulness practice: to accept whatever experience is happening,” McCollum said.

Thirteen students gave permission for McCollum to use their journals for a research paper, “Using Mindfulness Meditation to Teach Beginning Therapists Therapeutic Presence: A Qualitative Study,” which he coauthored with Diane R. Gehart, professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at California State University, Northridge. The paper was recently accepted for publication in a future issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

Of the 13 students included in the study, there are seven men and six women ranging in age from 22 to 60. In terms of diversity, one described himself as gay, one identified as Armenian, another Latino, and the remainder as White or Caucasian.

A variety of themes emerged through thematic analysis of these students’ journal entries, including the effects of meditation practice, the ability to be present, balancing being and doing modes in therapy, and the development of acceptance and compassion for themselves and for their clients.

Among the study’s findings:

• Mindfulness helped students be present in their sessions. They were able to attend to their inner experience during what was happening with the clients in front of them, and further bring these two domains together in the therapist-client interaction. However, the students also made clear that this was not a process of becoming absorbed. They described instances where they were able to remain present with intense or difficult material in sessions without becoming “infected” with it; that is, in contact but not overwhelmed, a theme referred to as “centered.”
• The students credited several “effects” of their mindfulness practice with their ability to be present as therapists. They felt they were calmer in general and specifically in their therapy sessions; were more aware of their inner chatter and could either decrease or disconnect from it, and were able to slow down their perceived inner pace or sense of hurry. Finally, some of them used brief periods of formal practice to allow themselves to set aside thoughts and feelings associated with the previous session or with their lives outside of the clinic and focus their attention on what was happening in the current client session.
• The students’ experience of presence seems to have formed a foundation for them to shift their mode of being in the session. Being did not become their sole mode in therapy sessions but they appeared to reach more balance between the two modes. What helped them make this shift was seeing the positive effects on the clients of their changed presence. For most students, this came through interaction with clients in the session; some actually meditated with their clients and were encouraged when clients found this a useful experience.
• The students reported explicitly experiencing a sense of compassion and acceptance. As they came to accept themselves in the therapist role, they were better able to accept their clients. Some students came to a stance of compassion that was consistent with the traditional meditation literature – seeing commonality between their own struggles and their clients’ struggles and recognizing their shared humanity.

“Our findings suggest that mindfulness meditation may be a useful addition to clinical training,” said McCollum.

Continued contact with students who have graduated from the program also provides McCollum with evidence for its effectiveness. One of these is Courtney Powell who earned a MFT master’s degree in 2008 and currently resides in San Antonio, Tx.

“When I first thought back about the mindfulness experience, I wasn’t sure how much it still applied. I thought, ‘I don’t practice daily, and I don’t use it as often as I should.’ Then I realized that I was wrong. I do practice daily and I do use the experience often. However, it’s no longer a conscience practice. It’s something I’ve incorporated into who I am and how I deal with the struggles and frustrations I face every day. When I look back and who I was before the mindfulness experience, I realize how I ‘became’ the stress I experience. I would think about how stress had affected me in the past and how it would affect my future. I would get more frustrated and more irritated… Now, while I experience as much stress as I did before, I am more aware of my present experience and the stress seems outside of who I am. I worry less about how I have experienced it in the past and how it will impact my future. I am also not negative about the experience. I’m aware of it, I notice it, and for the most part, I’m able to let it go.”

She continued, “I think that it was important for someone like Dr. McCollum, who truly believes and clearly practices mindfulness, to teach it to us because we could see an example of how it works. He also encouraged us to use the practices with clients and seeing the impact it had on their life experiences was also very powerful.”

Material adapted from Virginia Tech by CFisher.

Participants were randomly allocated to the Transcendental Meditation program or health education control group, and assessed with a standard test for depression – Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression (CES-D) – over 9 to 12 months.

“Clinically meaningful reductions in depressive symptoms were associated with practice of the Transcendental Meditation program,” said Sanford Nidich, EdD, lead author and senior researcher at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management. “The findings of these studies have important implications for improving mental health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality,” said Dr. Nidich.

(click to enlarge) This graph shows the reduced symptoms of depression through Transcendental Meditation in older adults at risk for CVD. Combined Study #1 and #2. N=112. (Credit: Maharishi University of Management)

Participants in both studies who practiced the Transcendental Meditation program showed significant reductions in depressive symptoms compared to health education controls. The largest decreases were found in those participants who had indications of clinically significant depression, with those practicing Transcendental Meditation showing an average reduction in depressive symptoms of 48%. Measurements with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) Rating Scale were taken at baseline, 3-month posttest, and 9-12 month posttest, comparing Transcendental Meditation to health education controls.

(click to enlarge) This graph shows the reduced symptoms of depression through Transcendental Meditation in older adults with indications of clinically significant depression. Combined Study #1 and #2. N=36. (Credit: Maharishi University of Management)

“These results are encouraging and provide support for testing the efficacy of Transcendental Meditation as a therapeutic adjunct in the treatment of clinical depression,” said Hector Myers, PhD, study co-author and professor and director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at U.C.L.A.

The results of these studies are timely. For older Americans, depression is a particularly debilitating disease, with approximately 20% suffering from some form of depression. Overall, 18 million men and women suffer from depression in the United States. Depression is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, with even a moderate level of depressive symptoms associated with increased cardiac events.

“The clinically significant reductions in depression without drugs or psychotherapy in these studies suggest the Transcendental Meditation program may improve mental and associated physical health in older high risk subjects,” said Robert Schneider MD FACC, director of MUM’s Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention.

“The importance of reducing depression in the elderly at risk for heart disease cannot be overestimated,” said Gary P. Kaplan MD PhD, Clinical Associate Professor of Neurology NYU School of Medicine. “Any technique not involving extra medication in this population is a welcome addition. I look forward to further research on the Transcendental Meditation technique and prevention of depression in other at-risk elderly populations, including those with stroke and other chronic diseases.”

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management by CFisher.

The paper describes the concept of a “Prevention Wing of the Military,” a group of military personnel that practices the advanced TM-Sidhi program twice daily as a group. A group that reaches a critical threshold in size has been scientifically shown to reduce collective societal stress.

Old defense approach: the military fails to address social stress. (Credit: Center for Advanced Military Science)

The paper hypothesizes that war, terrorism, and crime are caused by collective societal stress. The absence of collective stress translates into the absence of tension between countries, between religious groups, or even within individual terrorists. The paper proposes that, by applying this non-lethal and non-destructive technology, any military can reduce societal stress and prevent enemies from arising. If IDT prevents the emergence of enemies, the military has no one to fight, so the nation becomes invincible.

Over 50 scientific studies have found that when 1% of a given population practices Transcendental Meditation, or when sufficiently large groups practice the TM-Sidhi program together twice daily, measurable positive changes take place throughout society as a whole. The studies show decreased violence, crime, car accidents, and suicides, and improved quality of life in society. The paper reviews IDT research, such as a study published in the Yale University-edited Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that an intervention by a civilian group in Israel resulted in a 76% reduction in war deaths in neighboring Lebanon. Seven subsequent, consecutive experiments over a two-year period during the peak of the Lebanon war found:

• war-related fatalities decreased by 71% (p < 0.0000000001)
• war-related injuries fell by 68% (p < 0.000001)
• the level of conflict dropped by 48% (p < 0.00000001)
• cooperation among antagonists increased by 66% (p < 0.000001)

A follow-up study published in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality found that the likelihood that these combined results were due to chance is less than one in a quintillion. A global-scale study published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation documented a 72% drop in international terrorism when IDT groups were large enough to affect the global population. Terrorism returned to previous levels after the experiment.

New Invincible Defense Technology approach addresses social stress, thereby ending war, terrorism and violence. (Credit: Center for Advanced Military Science)

IDT’s causal mechanism is not completely understood. An explanation of the causality of IDT in biological terms was proposed in a study in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality (Walton et al 2005, 17: 339-373). Serotonin, a powerful neurotransmitter, has been shown to produce feelings of happiness, contentment, and even euphoria. Research indicates that low levels of serotonin correlate with aggression, poor emotional moods and violence. The study indicated that when the size of a group of IDT experts changed, serotonin production of people in the nearby community changed correspondingly. Since results were statistically significant, this study offers a plausible neurophysiologic mechanism that may explain reduced aggression and hostility in a whole society.

An increase in serotonin activity and a decrease in cortisol appear to be associated with the experience of transcendental consciousness in the advanced individual TM practitioner. During the practice of TM, practitioners experience transcendental consciousness, a proposed fourth state of consciousness with brain activity distinctly different from waking, sleeping and dreaming. The state of transcendental consciousness produces coherence in the brain, and scientists speculate that this enlivens coherence within the unified field. Apparently, the effect is amplified through group practice. Theoretical physicists allude to the unified field as the basis of all laws of nature. IDT appears to work from this fundamental level. Therefore, through the unified field, there is increased coherence in the non-TM practitioner’s brain as well. This increased coherence materially involved serotonin.

The paper’s author is David R. Leffler, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Military Science at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, USA. “This paper introduces a new role for the military: ‘Prevention Wings’ whose purpose is to prevent enemies from arising,” said Dr. Leffler. “This new approach, derived from the ancient Vedic tradition of India, is supported by over 50 scientific studies. IDT can create victory before war, and can assist in peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding.” The size of the Prevention Wing would usually be 2%-3% of a nation’s military personnel.

Land-based Prevention Wings were successfully field tested by the militaries of Mozambique and Ecuador in the 1990s. The paper explains that sea-based Prevention Wings are theoretically possible. For example, carrier battle groups supporting IDT experts could be deployed to the Persian Gulf to reduce tensions in the Middle East, without directly penetrating borders.

“Since the military’s primary job is to fully protect its country from attack by enemies, both foreign and domestic, all branches of the armed forces should also consider this approach,” said Dr. Leffler. The paper concludes that preventing enemies from arising is both doable and economical.

Military-related institutions have shown interest in Invincible Defense Technology. Dr. Leffler first presented his review paper at the “International Sociological Association Research Committee 01 Seoul National University & Korea Military Academy International Conference on Armed Forces & Conflict Resolution in a Globalized World” in Seoul, Korea, in 2008. He also presented the paper at the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses. Dr. Leffler also spoke at the “5th Annual Countering IEDs – Assessing the IED Threat and its Evolution on the Battlefield and in the Homeland” conference in Washington, DC.

Material adapted from Center for Advanced Military Science (CAMS) by CFisher.

The trial was sponsored by a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health–National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and was conducted at The Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

The nine-year, randomized control trial followed 201 African American men and women, average age 59 years, with narrowing of arteries in their hearts who were randomly assigned to either practice the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation technique or to participate in a control group which received health education classes in traditional risk factors, including dietary modification and exercise. All participants continued standard medications and other usual medical care.

The study found:

• A 47 percent reduction in the combination of death, heart attacks, and strokes in the participants
• Clinically significant (5 mm Hg average) reduction in blood pressure associated with decrease in clinical events
• Significant reductions in psychological stress in the high-stress subgroup

According to Robert Schneider, M.D., FACC, lead author and director of the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention, “Previous research on Transcendental Meditation has shown reductions in blood pressure, psychological stress, and other risk factors for heart disease, irrespective of ethnicity. But this is the first controlled clinical trial to show that long-term practice of this particular stress reduction program reduces the incidence of clinical cardiovascular events, that is heart attacks, strokes and mortality.”

“This study is an example of the contribution of a lifestyle intervention – stress management – to the prevention of cardiovascular disease in high-risk patients,” said Theodore Kotchen, M.D., co-author of the study, professor of medicine, and associate dean for clinical research at the Medical College. Other investigators at the Milwaukee site included Drs. Jane Kotchen and Clarence Grim.

Dr. Schneider said that the effect of Transcendental Meditation in the trial was like adding a class of newly discovered medications for the prevention of heart disease. “In this case, the new medications are derived from the body’s own internal pharmacy stimulated by the Transcendental Meditation practice,” he said.

Material adapted from Medical College of Wisconsin by CFisher.

This study was conducted at American University with 298 university students randomly allocated to either the Transcendental Meditation technique or wait-list control over a three-month intervention period. A subgroup of 159 subjects at risk for hypertension was analyzed separately. At baseline and after three months, blood pressure, psychological distress, and coping ability were assessed.

For the students at risk for developing hypertension, significant improvements were observed in blood pressure, psychological distress and coping. Compared to the control group, students practicing the Transcendental Meditation program showed reductions of 6.3 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure and 4.0 mm Hg in diastolic blood pressure. These reductions are associated with a 52% lower risk for development of hypertension in later years.

The findings are timely. Today, an estimated 18 million students are dealing with mental health issues on college campuses. Statistics from colleges nationwide indicate there has been a 50% increase in the diagnosis of depression, and more than twice as many students are on psychiatric medications as a decade ago. According to recent national surveys of campus therapists, more students than ever are seeking psychiatric help on college campuses all across the United States.

“This is the first randomized controlled study to show in young adults at risk for hypertension reductions in blood pressure that were associated with changes in psychological distress and coping,” said Sanford Nidich, EdD, lead author and senior researcher at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management. “Previous research has shown that psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, and anger contribute to the development of hypertension in young adults,” said Dr. Nidich.

College students are particularly prone to psychological distress caused by interpersonal and social problems, pressures to succeed academically, financial strains, and uncertain futures. For the entire sample in this study, there was a significant improvement in students’ mental health.

“Hypertension is a common risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adulthood. Yet, decades of research show that high blood pressure begins in youth. This well-controlled clinical trial found that blood pressure can be effectively lowered in students with a stress-reducing intervention. This has major implications for the prevention of hypertension, heart attacks and strokes in adulthood,” said Robert Schneider MD, FACC, specialist in clinical hypertension, Director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention and study co-author.

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management by CFisher.

Specifically, the study found the TM technique:

• Produces a unique state of “restful alertness,” as seen in the markedly higher alpha power in the frontal cortex and lower beta and gamma waves in the same frontal areas during TM practice.
• Creates greater alpha coherence between the left and right hemispheres of the brain suggesting the brain is working as a whole.
• Enhances an individual’s sense of “self” by activating what neuroscientists call the “default mode network” in the brain. (This is considered the natural ground state of the brain, glimpsed by neuroscientists during eyes-closed rest but more fully activated during Transcendental Meditation practice.)

(click to enlarge) These raw EEG tracings during eyes-closed rest (left) and Transcendental Meditation (right) represent 18 tracings over 6 seconds. The top tracings are from frontal sensors; the middle tracings are from central sensors; the bottom tracings are from parietal and occipital sensors (back). Note the high-density alpha activity in posterior leads during eyes-closed rest, and the global alpha bursts across all brain areas during Transcendental Meditation practice. Credit: Cognitive Processing, Volume 11 (2010), Issue 1

“The finding of significant brain wave differences between students practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique and those simply resting with their eyes closed is especially convincing because subjects were randomly assigned to conditions, and testing was conducted by a researcher unaware of the experimental condition to which the subject had been assigned,” said David Haaga, Ph.D., coauthor and professor of psychology at American University.

(click to enlarge) These are eLORETA images of sources of alpha EEG during TM compared to eyes-closed rest in the default mode network (the white areas). Credit: Cognitive Processing, Volume 11 (2010), Issue 1

“Research has already shown that simply closing one’s eyes and relaxing increases the default mode. A significant additional finding of this new study is that activity in the default mode increases during TM compared to simple eyes-closed rest,” said Fred Travis, Ph.D., lead author and director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management. “Different meditation techniques entail various degrees of cognitive control. Thus, activation patterns of the default mode network could give insight into the nature of meditation practices.”

Previous published research, funded by the NIH, shows TM practice decreases high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, cholesterol, stroke, and heart failure.

Material adapted from Maharishi University of Management by CFisher.

“In addition to having lower levels of inflammation before they were stressed, we also saw lower inflammatory responses to stress among the expert yoga practitioners in the study,” explained Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry and psychology and lead author of the study.

“Hopefully, this means that people can eventually learn to respond less strongly to stressors in their everyday lives by using yoga and other stress-reducing modalities.”

For this study at Ohio State University and just reported in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, the researchers assembled a group of 50 women, age 41 on average. They were divided into two groups – “novices,” who had either taken yoga classes or who practiced at home with yoga videos for no more than 6 to 12 sessions, and “experts,” who had practiced yoga one of two times weekly for at least two years and at least twice weekly for the last year.

Each of the women was asked to attend three sessions in the university’s Clinical Research Center at two-week intervals. Each session began with participants filling out questionnaires and completing several psychological tests to gauge mood and anxiety levels.

Each woman also was fitted with a catheter in one arm through which blood samples could be taken several times during the research tasks for later evaluation.

Participants then performed several tasks during each visit designed to increase their stress levels including immersing their foot into extremely cold water for a minute, after which they were asked to solve a series of successively more difficult mathematics problems without paper or pencil.

Following these “stressors,” participants would either participate in a yoga session, walk on treadmill set at a slow pace (.5 miles per hour) designed to mirror the metabolic demands of the yoga session or watch neutral, rather boring videos. The treadmill and video tasks were designed as contrast conditions to the yoga session.

Once the blood samples were analyzed after the study, researchers saw that the women labeled as “novices” had levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-6 that were 41 percent higher than those in the study’s “experts.”

“In essence, the experts walked into the study with lower levels of inflammation than the novices, and the experts were also better able to limit their stress responses than were the novices,” Kiecolt-Glaser explained.

The researchers did not find the differences they had expected between the novices and experts in their physiological responses to the yoga session.

Co-author Lisa Christian, an assistant professor of psychology, psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology, suggested one possible reason: “The yoga poses we used were chosen from those thought to be restorative or relaxing. We had to limit the movements to those novices could perform as well as experts.

“Part of the problem with sorting out exactly what makes yoga effective in reducing stress is that if you try to break it down into its components, like the movements or the breathing, it’s hard to say what particular thing is causing the effect,” said Christian, herself a yoga instructor. “That research simply hasn’t been done yet.”

Ron Glaser, a co-author and a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics, said that the study has some fairly clear implications for health. “We know that inflammation plays a major role in many diseases. Yoga appears to be a simple and enjoyable way to add an intervention that might reduce risks for developing heart disease, diabetes and other age-related diseases” he said. “This is an easy thing people can do to help reduce their risks of illness.”

Bill Malarkey, an professor of internal medicine and co-author on the study, pointed to the inflexibility that routinely comes with aging. “Muscles shorten and tighten over time, mainly because of inactivity,” he said. “The stretching and exercise that comes with yoga actually increases a person’s flexibility and that, in turn, allows relaxation which can lower stress.”

Malarkey sees the people’s adoption of yoga or other regular exercise as one of the key solutions to our current health care crisis. “People need to be educated about this. They need to be taking responsibility for their health and how they live. Doing yoga and similar activities can make a difference.”

As a clinician, he says, “Much of my time is being spent simply trying to get people to slow down.”

The researchers’ next step is a clinical trial to see if yoga can improve the health and reduce inflammation that has been linked to debilitating fatigue among breast cancer survivors. They’re seeking 200 women to volunteer for the study that’s funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Material adapted from Ohio State University by CFisher

In some forms of meditation, you can analyze the thought processes that pass through your mind. When you concentrate deeply on the thoughts and situations of your life, you can reach the point at which you find your own answers to your problems.

Health care professionals recommended many types of meditation as a way of cleansing the mind and emotions of negative thoughts. By meditating, you can benefit from improved concentration and memory. It also helps to help you develop a greater understanding of stressful situations in your daily life so that you can have a greater understanding of the real cause of the problem. This helps you approach your problems with less stress because you do not impulsively become angry. This, in turn, helps you get along with others much better.

Your body also benefits from meditation. When your mind is clear, you are better able to bring healing to the parts of your body that are ill. Meditating helps to improve the overall functioning of your immune system so that your body can fight off disease. As your body becomes more relaxed, your blood pressure lowers and your heart can pump the blood to the organs of the body.

The aim of meditation is to give you a sense of inner peace that you will use throughout your day in all your dealings. This is why it is recommended that you meditate in the morning as soon as you awake. The positive feelings that you bring into your mind and body will then help you cope with your day.

Guided Meditation Through The Journey to the Wild Divine Biofeedback System
Want to know more about the Journey to the Wild Divine and Healing Rhythms biofeedback systems for home and professional use? Meditation experts, such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Dean Ornish, and others, walk you through the meditation process (Healing Rhythms) or you can play fascinating, beautiful video games designed to train specific meditative states (Journey to the Wild Divine).

You can watch demonstration videos here.

Best Regards,
Wild Divine Team

Material adapted from The Wild Divine Team by CFisher.

Transcendental meditation is a relatively new form of meditating in comparison with Yoga and Buddhist meditation. It was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1957 as a way of developing the mind so that a person can rise above, or “transcend”, beyond the noise and stress of daily life. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a student of the famous Hindu Guru, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. From 1958 onwards, he traveled the world teaching his spiritual regeneration and enlightenment.

Transcendental meditation had its beginnings in the Far East and then spread to the western world. After three years of traveling and teaching, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi realized that he needed to train his followers so that they could spread this form of meditation even further.

The first international training course was held in Rishikesh, India in 1961. As more and more people all over the world realized the benefits of this form of meditation, scientists began researching it and by 1970 the first scientific papers were published espousing the technique. Since then there have been hundreds of such documents published, all of which show that transcendental meditation:

• helps to reduce the stress levels in the body leading to overall good health
• helps to increase a person’s creativity
• helps to heighten the intelligence level of the meditator
• brings about self-realization
• could actually help you to live longer

Transcendental meditation does not have any religious affiliation, but it did have a political association in the Natural Law Party. This political party was formed in 1992 with the goal of using the principles of the meditation as a way of finding ways to solve the problems of society – crime, injustice, economics and environmental issues.

A basic transcendental meditation courses are generally expensive and in spite of the high cost, an estimated five million people all over the world have taken these courses. There are also advanced courses available for extra costs. This process of meditation is relatively easy to learn in the seven-step procedure used in the four days of the course. Each day begins with a two hour lecture and the instruction starts with a ceremony performed by the instructor after which the students learn the technique and start practicing.

The principle behind the technique of transcendental meditation is that the source of all thoughts is the deepest level of the subconscious and is far beyond what the normal senses can experience. In this meditation, the practitioner takes one thought or sound and focuses on this so that it can be experienced in the deepest possible way.

The Maharishi compared it to a bubble of water that starts deep in the water and is only visible when it reaches the surface. He said that our thoughts are the same way – they start in the subconscious and rise to the conscious level of the mind.

In January, 2008, the Maharishi retired as the chairman of the transcendental meditation organization. He passed away the following month in Vlodrop, Netherlands, where he had lived for almost 20 years, coordinating his centers of teaching through an organization known as the Global Country of World Peace.

Wild Divine

Wild Divine:republished with permission

Integrative Body-Mind Training
Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT) is an Eastern meditative practice shown to improve attention and self-regulation in a relatively short period of time (Tang, Ma, Wang, Fan, Feng, Lu, Yu, Sui, Rothbart, Fan, & Posner, 2007).  This training method, developed and studied in China since the 1990s, is derived from traditional Chinese medicine, as well as other forms of meditation and mindfulness practices.  Tang et al. explain that the rapid effects of IBMT training may result from its integrated mind-body components, which include relaxation, breathing, imagery, and mindfulness training.  IBMT is practiced while listening to an audio compact disc (CD) and being physically coached by an experienced IBMT mentor. 

In Tang et al.’s study, a randomly assigned group who practiced IBMT for 5 days (20 minutes per day) showed improved attention and improved stress management compared to a control group who received general relaxation training.  On specific assessment measures, the experimental (IBMT) group evidenced lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue ratings, increased vigor, decreased cortisol (stress hormone), and increased immunoreactivity.  This seems remarkable considering the brief training period.

Nature Exposure
IBMT and nature exposure are both techniques that have been categorized as attention state training models (Tang & Posner, 2009).  Attention state training (AST) pertains to a change in conscious awareness that may result from meditative or nature exposure experiences.  Attention training (AT), comparatively, involves executive control mechanisms and may, for example, include mental effort and control on a working memory task.  Tang and Posner note that nature exposure is based on Kaplan’s attention restoration theory, which posits that mental fatigue may occur following a person’s sustained effort to maintain focused attention over time on cognitive tasks.  The premise of the attention restoration theory model is that a person can restore mental efficiency by decreasing directed, voluntary attention, and by increasing involuntary attention.  In other words, a person may become mentally fatigued as he or she sustains effortful attention on work-related tasks (computer, e-mail, documents, meetings, etc.), but can restore mental efficiency by increasing the involuntary attention that occurs via nature exposure.  Tang and Posner cited a recent study in which subjects assigned to an experimental group exposed to nature scenes demonstrated improved executive functioning compared to a control group exposed to urban scenes.  The main difference between IBMT and nature exposure, according to Tang and Posner, is that nature exposure is performed with one’s eyes open, whereas, IBMT practitioners practice with eyes closed and progressively use breathing and imagery techniques to accrue a set of experiences that enable the person to achieve deeper and deeper states from one session to the next.

Mindfulness
The practice of mindfulness is involved in both IBMT and nature exposure.  Mindfulness involves a divergence from conscious awareness being focused on the past or the future, thus enabling one to center awareness of thoughts, emotions, and/or actions in the present.  Studies show that mindfulness training can help reduce pain, decrease stress, improve cognition, and increase positive mood (Tang & Posner, 2009).  Other findings indicate mindfulness meditation has beneficial effects on brain and immune functioning (Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumacher, Rosenkranz, Muller, Santorelli, Urbanowski, Harrington, Bonus, & Sheridan, 2003)

What’s Next?
IBMT may soon be introduced to Western culture and may be an effective method for improving attention and self-regulation that may appeal to many due to its rapid results in a brief period of time.  As such, IBMT could be a promising adjunctive technique that practitioners may wish to incorporate into multi-modal treatment plans for certain individuals.

Mark Johnson, M.A.

References
Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S. F., Urbanowski, F., Harrington, A., Bonus, K., & Sheridan, J. F. (2003).  Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation, Psychosomatic Medicine, 65, 564-570.

Tang, Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feng, S., Lu, Q., Yu, Q., Sui, D., Rothbart, M. K., Fan, M. & Posner, M.  (2007).  Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation, PNAS, 104, 43, 17152-17156.

Tang, Y. & Posner, M.  (2009)  Attention training and attention state training, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 5, 222-227.