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(Feb. 7, 2003) -- Once viewed as a somewhat suspect practice by many Westerners, meditation is becoming mainstream. The ancient discipline is increasingly being embraced within traditional medical circles as a powerful healing tool, and now new research may help explain why it works.
A University of Wisconsin, Madison, study, reported in the February issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, shows that meditation not only has clear effects in areas of the brain focused on emotion, but it also may strengthen the ability of a person to ward off illness.
Researcher Richard J. Davidson, PhD, and colleagues measured brain electrical activity among 25 subjects before, immediately after, and four months following their participation in an eight-week training course in what's called mindfulness meditation. The stress-reduction program emphasizes awareness of sensations and thoughts during meditation, but students learn to avoid acting on their emotions. This type of meditation differs from the more commonly known form called transcendental meditation, which focuses solely on just one thing, such as a sensation or a phrase.
The group attended weekly classes and participated in a seven-hour retreat. Following the instruction, they were asked to practice mindfulness meditation for an hour a day, six days a week. A comparison group of 16 people received no instruction and did not meditate.
Measurement of brain electrical activity showed the meditation group had increased activation in the left, frontal region of their brains - an area linked to reduced anxiety and a positive emotional state.
To test immune function (the ability of a person to ward of illness), the meditators were given flu shots at the end of the eight-week training session, along with the non-meditators. Blood tests taken one and two months after the shots were given showed the meditation group had higher levels of protection than those who did not meditate, as measured by antibodies produced against the flu virus.
"To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a reliable effect of meditation on immune function [within the body]," Davidson and colleagues write. "The observation that the magnitude of change in immune function was greater for those subjects showing the larger shift toward left-sided [brain] activation further supports [the study's] earlier associations."
Cardiologist Herbert Benson, MD, has spent the last 30 years studying the effects of meditation and is founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He says that the study offers further evidence that meditation produces measurable benefits. But he rejects the idea that any one type of meditation or relaxation technique is inherently better than another.
"Any practice that can evoke the relaxation response is of benefit, be it meditation, yoga, breathing or repetitive prayer," Benson says. "There is no reason to believe that one is better than the other. The key is repetition, but the repetition can be a word, sound, mantra, prayer, breathing or movement."
Benson says stress management can benefit 60% to 90% of people who see doctors for illness. It is increasingly being added to traditional therapies for the treatment of patients with life-threatening illnesses like cancer and AIDS.
"The relaxation response helps decrease metabolism, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, and slows breathing and brain waves," he says. "Just about any condition that is either caused or made worse by stress can be helped with meditation."
Sources:
• Psychosomatic Medicine, February 2003
• Richard Davidson, PhD, Vilas Professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Herbert Benson, MD, president, Mind/Body Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.
In the first scientific article to come from its pioneering studies of long-term Buddhist meditation practitioners, a UW-Madison team has found that long-term meditators (or "adepts") show markedly different patterns of brain electrical oscillations compared to a group with no previous meditative experience, when both of them generated a standard meditative practice.
The researchers, led by psychology and psychiatry professor Richard Davidson and Waisman Center scientist Antoine Lutz, say the findings suggest that mental training of the sort involved in meditation relies on mechanisms in the brain — called neural synchrony — involved in the global coordination of brain activity and could induce both short-term and long-term change in the brain. The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study focused on a comparison of brain-oscillation patterns, reflecting neural synchrony, between a group of eight long-term Buddhist practitioners of traditional Tibetan meditation and a group of 10 healthy student volunteers who had no experience in meditation but who were taught meditation before the experiment. Neural synchrony is a mechanism by which groups of neurons, oscillating at different frequencies, fire in phase. The transient coordination of these neural circuits across the brain is comparable to the coordination of jazz musicians who are playing and improvising together. The UW team focused on the "gamma-band" rhythms, a range of fast-frequency oscillations that is associated with higher mental activity such as attention, learning and conscious perception. The subjects in the study were asked to generate a standard meditation state several times, alternating with a resting state. The type of meditation each group pursued involves the voluntary generation of compassion and loving kindness. It does not involve concentration on particular objects, memories or images, but instead, encourages the practitioner to generate loving kindness and compassion toward all feeling beings without thinking about anyone in particular. This "nonreferential" meditative state is designed to permeate the mind without focusing on any one person or being. Three findings emerged from the study. First, the research team found that the two groups had significantly different baseline brain-wave patterns in the resting state before the meditation began. Compared to the control group, the Buddhist monks had a higher ratio of "gamma-band" rhythms to slower oscillatory rhythms. This suggests that long-term meditation practice changes the baseline state of the brain. Second, the difference between the two groups increased sharply during meditation and remained higher than the baseline after meditation. Third, following each period of meditation in the post-meditation baseline state, the practitioners continued to display high-amplitude gamma synchrony compared with the controls. These findings indicate that mental training to increase compassion and loving kindness has profound effects on brain function. The results further suggest that these qualities are not fixed characteristics of people, but rather can be improved through practice and training. |
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