concentration

The positive effects of mindfulness meditation on pain and working memory may result from an improved ability to regulate a crucial brain wave called the alpha rhythm, say researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This rhythm is thought to “turn down the volume” on distracting information, which suggests that a key value of meditation may be helping the brain deal with an often-overstimulating world.

The researchers report that modulation of the alpha rhythm in response to attention-directing cues was faster and significantly more enhanced among study participants who completed an eight-week mindfulness meditation program than in a control group. 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).

Om tweet om

April 22, 2011

Bodhipaksa

on practice

This photograph was taken on a recent retreat.

I love the tenderness of the little bird sitting in the Buddha’s left hand as he meditates. It says something about the gentle kind of effort that’s required in meditation.

An image I used to use in my teaching — but which I had forgotten about until this moment — was that the quality of effort we use in meditation aims toward the kind of effort we’d make in holding a baby bird. We don’t want to hold our attention so firmly that we crush our sensitivity, but we also don’t want to hold our attention so gently that the object of meditation flies away.

Meditation has the power to make dramatic changes in your physical and psychological health

April 5, 2011

Many people see meditation as an exotic form of daydreaming, or a quick fix for a stressed-out mind. My advice to them is, try it.

Meditation is difficult, at least to begin with. On my first attempt, instead of concentrating on my breathing and letting go of anything that came to mind, as instructed by my cheery Tibetan teacher, I got distracted by a string of troubled thoughts, then fell asleep. Apparently, this is normal for first-timers. Experienced meditators will assure you that it is worth persisting, however.

“Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering,” says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. “The numerous and profound methods that Buddhism has developed over the centuries can be used and incorporated by anyone. What is needed is enthusiasm and perseverance.”

It all sounds very rewarding, but what does science have to say on the subject?

Stories abound in the media about the transformative potential of meditative practice, but it is only in recent years empirical evidence has emerged. In the past…

decade, researchers have used functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of experienced meditators, such as Ricard, as well as beginners, and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behavior, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity.

A real scientific picture of meditation is now coming together. It suggests meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways. The studies are even starting to throw light on how meditation works.

“Time spent earnestly investigating the nature of your mind is bound to be helpful,” says Clifford Saron at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. And you don’t need a Buddhist or spiritualist worldview to profit from meditation. “One can be an empiricist (in meditation), just by working with the nature of your experience.” Saron should know. He’s leading the Shamatha project, one of the most comprehensive scientific studies of meditation ever.
In 2007, Saron and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists followed 60 experienced meditators over an intensive three-month meditation retreat in the Colorado Rockies, watching for changes in their mental abilities, psychological health and physiology. Participants practiced for at least five hours a day using a method known as focused attention meditation, which involves directing attention on the tactile sensation of breathing. The first paper from the project was published in June 2010 (Psychological Science).
Headed by Katherine MacLean at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Md., the study measured the volunteers’ attention skills by showing them a succession of vertical lines flashed up on a computer screen. They then had to indicate, by clicking a mouse, whenever there was a line shorter than the rest. As the retreat progressed, MacLean and her colleagues found that as the volunteers became progressively more accurate and increasingly easy to stay focused on the task for long periods.
Other researchers have also linked meditation with improved attention. Last year, a team led by Antoine Lutz at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, which is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reported that after three months of training in focused attention meditation, volunteers were quicker at picking out different tones among a succession of similar ones, implying their powers of sustained concentration had improved (Journal of Neuroscience).
In 2007, Lutz’s colleague Heleen Slagter, now at the University of Amsterdam, published results from a study involving a combination of focused attention and “open monitoring” or mindfulness meditation, which involves the constant monitoring of moment-by-moment experience. After three months of meditation for between 10 and 12 hours a day her subjects showed a decreased “attentional blink,” the cognitive processing delay, usually lasting about half a second, that causes people to miss a stimulus such as a number on a screen when it follows rapidly after another (PLoS Biology).
The suggestion that meditation can improve attention is worth considering, given that focus is crucial to so much in life, from the learning and application of skills to everyday judgment and decision-making, or simply concentrating on your computer screen at work without thinking about what you will be eating for dinner. But how does dwelling on your breath for a period each day lead to such a pronounced cognitive change?
One possibility is it involves working memory, the capacity to hold in the mind information needed for short-term reasoning and comprehension. The link with meditation was established recently by Amishi Jha at the University of Miami-Coral Gables. She trained a group of American marines to focus their attention using mindfulness meditation and found that this increased their working memory (Emotion).
Feeling better
Along with enhancing cognitive performance, meditation seems to have an effect on emotional well-being. A second study from researchers with the Shamatha project concluded that meditation improves general social and emotional functioning, making study participants less anxious, and more aware of and better able to manage their emotions.
The ability to manage one’s emotions could also be key to why meditation can improve physical health. Studies have shown it to be an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse, psoriasis and in particular for recurrent depression and chronic pain.
Last year, psychologist Fadel Zeidan, at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, reported that his volunteers noticed a decreased sensitivity to pain after just a few sessions of mindfulness meditation (Journal of Pain). He believes meditation doesn’t remove the sensation of pain so much as teach sufferers to control their emotional reaction to it and reduce the stress response. He is now using fMRI in an attempt to understand why that helps.
“There’s something very empowering about knowing you can alleviate some of these things yourself,” he says.
A gym for your mind
The suggestion people can become more empathic and compassionate through meditation practice has prompted psychologist Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace, a Buddhist teacher and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, to float the idea of mental training “gymnasiums.” Like physical exercise gyms, but for the mind, these would allow people to drop in and learn to improve their emotional balance, develop their capacity for compassion and even measure their stress levels.
Others have suggested meditation could become an alternative to medication. Although this seems like a good idea, Saron is dubious. He worries thinking of meditation as a quick fix will smother some of the subtleties integral to successful practice. “When you are returning your mind to the object in hand, you have to do it with a sense of gentleness and authority, rather than develop a sense of failure when your mind wanders.”
Anyone can do it
The great thing about meditation is anyone can practice it anywhere. What’s more, you don’t have to be an expert or spend five hours a day at it to reap the benefits. The novices in Zeidan’s pain experiment reported improvements after meditating for just 20 minutes a day for three days. In a second experiment he found that similarly brief sessions can improve cognitive performance on tasks that demand continuous attention, such as remembering and reciting a series of digits (Consciousness and Cognition).
“It is possible to produce substantial changes in brain function through short-term practice of meditation,” says Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory. He says data from a new unpublished study by his lab shows “demonstrable changes in brain function” in novice meditators after just two weeks of training for 30 minutes a day. “Even small amounts of practice can make a discernible difference.”
Tribune Media Services
How to meditate
You needn’t be an expert to reap the benefits of meditation.
There are numerous meditation styles, but the two most commonly studied by researchers are focused-attention meditation, in which the aim is to stay focused on a chosen thing such as an icon, a mantra or the breath, and mindfulness or open-monitoring meditation, where practitioners try to become aware of everything that comes into their moment-by-moment experience without reacting to it.
n For focused-attention meditation, start by sitting on a cushion or chair with your back straight and your hands in your lap and eyes closed. Then concentrate your mind on your chosen object – say your breathing, or more particularly the sensation of your breath leaving your mouth or nostrils. Try to keep it there. Probably your mind will quickly wander away, to an itch on your leg, perhaps, or to thoughts of what you will be doing later. Keep bringing it back to the breath. In time this will train the mind in three essential skills: to watch out for distractions, to “let go” of them once the mind has wandered, and to re-engage with the object of meditation. With practice, you should find it becomes increasingly easy to stay focused.
n In mindfulness meditation the aim is to monitor all the various experiences of your mind – thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations – and simply observe them, rather than trying to focus on any one of them. Instead of grasping at whatever comes to mind, which is what most of us do most of the time, the idea is to maintain a detached awareness. Those who develop this skill find it easier to manage emotions in day-to-day life.

Meditation, hypnosis change ‘brain signature’

March 25, 2011

Amir Raz gets some funny looks when he talks about using hypnosis and meditation techniques to build attention spans in a hyperactive MTV world.

“Mention contemplation to a lot of people, and all they think of is some kind of (wacky) spiritualism, people sitting around a darkened room with candles, chanting,” says Raz, a McGill University professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention.

“Our ideas are shaped by Hollywood movies. So you talk about hypnosis, and people see something out of a Woody Allen movie, a guy in a turban with bushy eyebrows who wants to put you to sleep.”

But “trim away the folkloric fat,” and Raz, a cognitive psychologist who worked his way through graduate school doing magic tricks, sees mindfulness training as a valuable, drug-free tool in the struggle to foster attention skills, with positive spinoffs for controlling our emotions and even making us smarter.

“We live in a time when modern medicine is weighted heavily toward…

pharmaceuticals.

“Everyone wants a magic bullet that will help them lose 40 pounds, or a surgical procedure that will cure all our ills,” says Raz, who will be speaking Wednesday about the chemical benefits of brain science and chicken soup as part of McGill’s Mini-Science lecture series.

“We live in an impatient society, and we want results immediately. But that’s not realistic, and without behavioural modification, likely to provide only temporary relief.”

In his lab at McGill, Raz explores ways meditation and braintraining exercises can be used to help people pay more attention to what’s happening around them, skills which will come in handy in sharpening the mind, controlling emotions and blocking out distractions.

“We live in a high-speed world, where events change rapidly, but our bodies may not be biologically crafted for that,” said Raz, whose especially curious about the effects attention training can have on children.

“We need to train ourselves to prioritize and manage what gets our attention. It’s like learning to control our email. Otherwise, life becomes one big interruption.”

He cites studies in which young children age 4 to 7 were asked to play computer games expressly designed to stretch the parts of their brains that regulate attention. Researchers found that non-verbal aspects of the intelligence quotients went up and the youngsters were better able to focus. But they also noticed other changes, with participants exhibiting “brain signatures” more like those of adults, reflected in improved mental processing and greater control of emotions.

“We’re not elated, we don’t win a trophy every day. We need to build resilience,” said Raz, who would like to see some form of attention training built into the school curriculum to help children focus, ignore distractions and learn social cues they won’t pick up sending text messages.

“With quality stimulation, people are better able to regulate emotions, prevent depression and obsessive behaviours. We’re less likely to explode when someone disagrees with you or shatter when things don’t go your way.”

Lately, he’s begun to worry about the potential impact of global positioning systems and other devices on spatial memory. “Attention systems expand based on usage.”

Raz sees behavioural modification techniques used in concert with medications, “some of which are over-hyped or at large cost in side effects.”

“Too often, drugs become the default and people discount other options.

“There are attentional ways to regulate. Some prefer the drug route. It’s a question of whether you want to regulate or self-regulate.”

pcurran@montrealgazette.com

Amir Raz is speaking Wednesday at 6 p.m. in McGill’s Bronfman building, 1001 Sherbrooke St. W. as part of McGill’s Mini-Science series. For information on fees and registration, visit www.mcgill.ca/science/mini

Meditation upon arising

November 20, 2010

Saddhamala

on practice

Our minds are very busy and often seem to have a “mind” of their own. If you have meditated, you are aware of how busy the mind can be.

We sit down to meditate and attempt to quiet the mind. We focus on our breathing and try to make the breath the focus of our concentration. Did I say “concentration”? When we are quiet, sitting in meditation rather than doing what we usually do, we realize how difficult quieting the mind can be.

We start thinking about the myriad of things we have to do, a comment someone made, an action someone took, a worry, a story line, what the weather will be like, what time it is, what to cook for dinner, what we need to do at work, what we will do for the weekend — the list goes on and on.

So, upon rising, when you are most rested (if you have had a good night’s sleep), before you get out of bed, quietly tune in to the mind. Listen to what your mind is telling you. Is your mind filled with the dream you had just before waking? What is the feeling tone of your thoughts? Are you geared up for the day with a list of things to do?

Whatever is on your mind, begin your day with an intention to be mindful, to pay attention to one thing at a time, one task at a time. Take a few deep breaths and remember that no matter what you are doing, no matter where you are, you can breathe and quiet your mind for a moment.

Each time you do this, you are training your mind to be still, and with practice, those still moments make a big difference.

People spend ‘half their waking hours daydreaming’

November 14, 2010

People spend nearly half of their waking hours not thinking about what they are actually doing, according to a US study conducted via the iPhone.

More than 2,200 volunteers downloaded an app which then surveyed them about their thoughts and mood at random times of day and night.

The Science study suggested minds wander, even from demanding tasks, at least 30% of the time.

Losing Focus? Studies Say Meditation May Help

August 6, 2010

The idea that meditation is good for you is certainly not new, but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly why meditating so reliably improves mental and physical health. One old theory is that meditation is just like exercise: it trains the brain as if gray matter were a bundle of muscles. You work those muscles and they get stronger.

A recent paper in the journal Psychological Science tries to identify brain functions that are actually enhanced by meditating. The study shows that intensive meditation can help people focus their attention and sustain it — even during the most boring of tasks. But while participants who meditated were able to pick up visual cues better than a control group, it was not clear whether meditating helped them process the new information in a meaningful way.

The study, which was authored by 13 researchers and led by Katherine MacLean of the University of California, Davis, begins by noting that everyone gets tired after concentrating. It also notes that research going back to the 1970s has established…

that Buddhist monks who have regularly meditated for years perform better than most of us on concentration tests. In the past five years, other studies have shown that meditation also yields substantial gains in concentration for laypeople who take up the practice.

In the new study, 60 enthusiasts who signed up to attend a three-month meditation retreat were randomized into two groups. The first group of 30 got to go to the Shambhala Mountain Center, a pricey hideaway in Red Feather Lakes, Colo., just south of the Wyoming state line. The other group of 30 had to wait three months to attend a second retreat at the Shambhala Center; this second group served as the study’s control group. The researchers gave the two groups concentration tests before the retreat began, halfway through and then again after the sabbatical ended. During the retreats, the attendees underwent at least five hours a day of meditative practice.

That’s an extraordinary commitment to meditation that most of us can’t relate to. (The attendees even paid $5,300 for the privilege of attending the retreats.) But while all the participants were highly willing, the strength of this new study lies in comparing their mental performance before, during and after they began meditative practice.

And the results are clear: it’s not wanting to meditate but actually meditating that improves your brain’s performance. The participants were all asked to watch a series of lines flash on a computer screen and click a mouse when they saw a line that was shorter than the others. It was a boring test, and that was the point: in order to concentrate on those little line changes, they had to focus intently. Those who were meditating at the retreat were significantly more likely than those in the wait-list group to see increasingly small differences in the lines. Their abilities improved as meditative training continued. As the paper puts it, their powers of “visual discrimination” had appreciably increased.

Which suggests that meditation can help you concentrate. But the study found that while meditators were more accurate, they were not faster: those who had meditated saw differences in the lines more often than those who hadn’t, but they didn’t react any faster than the control group when both saw the same line discrepancies on the screen. That’s important because it suggests that meditation helps your brain do something automatic — process visual stimuli — but not something more complicated: react when it happens.

I couldn’t quite afford to attend the Shambhala Mountain retreat, but recently, I decided to try a small, five-minute-a-day mindfulness regimen recommended to me by the University of Washington psychology professor Marsha Linehan. One of the simple techniques Linehan uses to improve patients’ mood and concentration is to ask them to sit on a park bench or at a street corner — any public place — and direct their eyes forward as strangers walk by. The idea is to avoid looking at the passersby even if they are interesting — you just let them walk by. You notice them, but you keep your mind focused on not watching them, not following them. I have been practicing this technique at New York City’s congested High Line park for the past few weeks. The results have been extraordinary: I focus better at work; I don’t dread cleaning after my cats as much; I actually look forward to confronting the crowds at the High Line.

Past research suggests that meditation doesn’t have to be intensive to have an effect. One recent study by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte found that students were able to improve their performance on tests of cognitive skill after just four days of meditation training for only 20 minutes per day. On one particularly challenging computer test of sustained attention, students who meditated did 10 times better than a control group. They also did significantly better on timed information-processing tasks that were designed to induce deadline stress.

Still, meditation isn’t a panacea. Recently, I got into a silly office-politics spat, and I still blow some of my deadlines. But Linehan hopes this exercise and other mindfulness practices will help patients disentangle themselves from overwhelming or burdensome thoughts — including, in some cases, suicidal thoughts. I find that I can calm myself through my short mindfulness exercise, but a few hours later, I may get just as stressed about a pointed where’s-the-story e-mail from an editor.

In the end, meditation may help keep your brain focused and help you absorb more information than you otherwise would. But it is not likely to help you evaluate all that extra information your brain is taking in.

[John Cloud, Time]

The benefits of “uni-tasking”

August 5, 2010

Bodhipaksa

on practice

I’ve been meaning to mention an article I read recently in the Harvard Business Review, called How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking. It’s by Peter Bregman, and it explains, as the title suggests, how and why he stopped multitasking and started paying attention to one thing at a time (what I’ve called “uni-tasking”).

Bregman lists some of the benefits he experienced, and I’ve summarized those below (but do go and read the full article, which expands on these points).

He found life more enjoyable, especially when it came to spending time with his children. And he noticed the simple beauties of life.
He found that he could concentrate better and made significant progress in tasks that required high-level cognitive processing.
He was more relaxed.
He no longer wished to waste time.
He had more patience and felt less rushed.
And lastly, “there was no downside.”

He also includes a bunch of links to some cool research. For example, he points out that our productivity goes down by as much as 40% when we multitask. Multitaskers think they’re being more efficient, but they’re not.

I’d compare this perceptual disconnect to drunk driving. People who drink drive badly — but their intoxication often prevents them from recognizing this, to the point where some people believe they drive better drunk than sober! I think multitasking prevents us from seeing that multitasking is an ineffective strategy.

Meditation seems to aid concentration

August 3, 2010