meditation and neuroplasticity

A Chinese-influenced meditation technique appears to help the brain regulate behavior after as little as 11 hours of practice, according to a study released Monday.

Researchers at the University of Oregon and Dalian University of Technology charted the effects of integrative body-mind training (IBMT), a technique adapted in the 1990s from traditional Chinese medicine and practiced by thousands in China.

The research to be published in the upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences involved 45 test subjects, about half of whom received IBMT, while a control group received relaxation training.

Imaging tests showed a greater number of connections in the anterior cingulate — the part of the brain which regulates emotion and behavior — among those who practiced meditation compared to subjects in the control group.

“The importance of our findings relates to the ability to make structural changes in a brain network related to self-regulation,” said The University of Oregon’s Michael Posner, a lead author on the study.

“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,” he said.

Deficits in activation of the anterior cingulate cortex also have been associated with attention deficit disorder, dementia, depression, schizophrenia and many other disorders.

And researchers said the experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue than students in the control group.

“We believe this new finding is of interest to the fields of education, health and neuroscience, as well as for the general public,” said Dalian University’s Yi-Yuan Tang, who led the team of Chinese researchers.

IBMT emphasizes body-mind awareness using breathing techniques and mental imagery to achieve a state of “restful alertness.”

Scientists hypothesized that the changes resulted from a reorganization of white-matter tracts or by an increase of myelin that surrounds the connections.

The researchers said the findings suggest that IBMT can be used as a vehicle for understanding how training influences brain plasticity.

[via AFP]

At Staten Island’s Concord HS, the fourth ‘R’ is relaxation

June 5, 2010

Considering the library at Concord High School was jam-packed with dozens of students, it was oddly quiet.

Each person was in a mode of contemplation, reflection and meditation. They took deep breaths as they rested, hands on their laps, eyes closed.

In fact, every day for the past 10 weeks, students at this alternative high school did something their peers rarely get a chance to do — relax.

As part of a scientific experiment on mind training, the teenagers, who often come to Concord from troubled backgrounds, sat calmly for three minutes at the start of their fourth-period class. The test was to see whether brief bouts of meditation can help relieve anxiety among students who are normally cramming for exams and homework while juggling the stresses of family life.

Almost right away, their teachers and mentors noticed a difference.

“Before, they didn’t pay attention and they felt the need to be snarky in order to show they existed and to wake up. For teachers to yell at them about these things takes time out of class and makes them feel worse about themselves,” said Susan Finley, executive director of The Producers Project, which has been filming Concord High School students for seven years. “Now, when a teacher says focus, they know they can…There’s more confidence, they’re more relaxed in their own skin, and they feel more hopeful.”

Throughout the experiment, the students researched with scientists from around the country, including Dr. Tracy Dennis from Hunter College; Dr. Merlyn Hurd, a psychologist who measured students’ brainwaves; Dr. David Vago from Harvard University; and Dr. Robert Roeser from Portland State University.

At the start of the experiment, students answered a survey to answer about stress and confidence. They were then split into groups: the experimental would practice deep breathing exercises for three minutes a day; the placebo would sit and do nothing for that time; and the control would go about their daily routines. Students were given another survey at the end of the 10 weeks to measure the effects.

All the while, students studied different parts of the brain. They learned that neuroplasticity means the brain can change with life experiences and that mind training could have a deep impact on ones behavior.

They found out that mind training could help with functions of the thalamus, such as alertness and memory, and that it could benefit those with damage to their occipital lobe, which controls eyesight, by helping people deal with illusions.

Students said they felt calmer and had a better outlook on life. The research showed decreased levels of anxiety and better self-awareness.

Ndeye Ndiaye, of Mariners Harbor, said the meditation sessions were dream-like, but her mind often spiraled into a nightmare where she felt herself falling. Before it got out of hand, she focused, and was able to bring herself back to reality. She said the experiment has helped her cope with challenges, like her diabetes diagnosis, and moving to Staten Island to immerse herself in an unfamiliar community.

“Mind training has helped me to try to not think about the negatives of my past, but it has helped me to think of the positives in my future,” she said.

Kim Wilson-Hite, an English teacher, hoped the exercise would help students beyond their graduation from high school.

“If you can think about nothing, you can think about greater things and you can fix any problems in the world,” she said.

[Amy Padnani SI Live]

Focus is key when training aging brains

May 26, 2010

Games geared toward working out the brain can improve cognitive functioning from middle age on. Most of us now know that we can keep our gray matter in peak form and even help stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s through mental exercises.

But change doesn’t come easy. Whether we are working on our memory or trying to meditate, brain-training exercises require a high level of mental focus to pay off in the end.

“It’s not easy to drive the brain’s connectivity,” said Michael Merzenich, an emeritus professor at UC San Francisco and a leading researcher in neuroplasticity. “You have to be engaged. I go nowhere if I’m not really paying attention to what I’m doing.”

The concept of retraining the brain as we age revolves around neuroplasticity, the ability of our brains to grow and change by creating new neural connections. As we slowly master a new activity or exercise, the brain remembers each step, and neurotransmitters that carry that information through our brains forge new pathways. This ability is the basis for the idea that we can control whether our brains are on the up-slope or down-slope as we age.

While it’s often thought that age-related cognitive decline begins after we’ve hit middle age, researchers say it can start as early as 30. And the older we get, the more likely our brains are to succumb not just to the physical decline of age but also to the lack of external stimuli, since engaging in learning new information becomes less and less likely.

Researchers have looked closely at exactly what kind of mental games and exercises are necessary to combat the slow decline.

In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2006, researchers focused on three major cognitive areas that are believed to do the most damage to “instrumental activities of daily living” once they start deteriorating — memory, reasoning and speed of processing.

The researchers provided 10 brain-training sessions, each 60 to 75 minutes long, to nearly 3,000 participants over the age of 65. The training included basic mnemonic strategies for remembering lists or written passages, finding patterns in groups of letters and dividing attention between several tasks at once. Over the next five years, they periodically provided follow-up training to randomly selected subgroups. The goal was to track what kind of long-term impact, if any, this kind of cognitive training would have.

In all three areas, the researchers found that participants showed improvement immediately after starting training. Over the course of five years, those who received supplemental training periodically fared better than those who did not. They concluded that this cognitive improvement could indeed translate into performing daily tasks like remembering grocery lists, preparing a meal and understanding information on medication labels more easily.

In addition to these hands-on training tools, many researchers have theorized that cognitive training can take place without ever looking at a computer screen or a book — in fact, it can be done using only the mind.

To test this theory, researcher Antoine Lutz observed the brain activity of eight Buddhist monks during a meditation in which they concentrated on the idea of loving-kindness and compassion. He found that before, during and after meditating, the monks had higher gamma activity than novice meditation practitioners. Gamma activity has been associated with better memory and increased ability to process information — all concerns associated with aging.

Lutz also discovered that the monks — all of whom had clocked at least 10,000 hours of meditation practice — had developed neural connections that spanned greater distances in the brain than is typical, meaning that regions of the brain that don’t usually connect were communicating. By focusing the mind in a deliberate way, Lutz concluded, the brain can physically change. The results of the study were published in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

For those of us who weren’t fortunate enough to participate in these studies, or to have devoted 10,000 hours to meditation, there is still hope. In fact, there are a number of competing software programs designed to replicate some of these exercises — as well as some from the JAMA study — at home.

At the forefront of making brain training accessible to the public is Posit Science, a company founded in 2005 by Merzenich. The company offers three different training packages to help with auditory and visual processing, as well as driving skills to reduce car accidents.

“The goal is to drive the brain in a variety of complicated ways, so that it’s operating more efficiently, rapidly and accurately,” Merzenich said.

In the book “Heal Your Mind, Rewire Your Brain,” author Patt Lind-Kyle builds off Lutz’s research by outlining ways to focus the mind in everyday activity. She advocates four main steps to harness the mind deliberately: intention, including focusing on goals to accomplish; attention, or conscientiously processing outside stimuli; receptivity, or letting your mind accept whatever it encounters; and awareness — simply being mindful of everyday moments.

Merzenich speculates that programs soon will be developed to maintain the effects of brain training and that once optimal cognitive functioning has been achieved, it will require only short periods of maintenance to sustain the effects.

Once that’s happened, and once these exercises find their way into the mainstream, he said, “There is a tremendous prospect for really helping older people.”

[via Jewish Journal]

Meditation may protect your brain

March 24, 2010

For thousands of years, Buddhist meditators have claimed that the simple act of sitting down and following their breath while letting go of intrusive thoughts can free one from the entanglements of neurotic suffering.

Now, scientists are using cutting-edge scanning technology to watch the meditating mind at work. They are finding that regular meditation has a measurable effect on a variety of brain structures related to attention — an example of what is known as neuroplasticity, where the brain physically changes in response to an intentional exercise.

A team of Emory University scientists reported in early September that experienced Zen meditators were much better than control subjects at dropping extraneous thoughts and returning to the breath. The study, ‘Thinking about Not-Thinking:’ Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing During Zen Meditation, published by the online research journal PLoS ONE, found that “meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation.”

The same researchers reported last year that longtime meditators don’t lose gray matter in their brains with age the way most people do, suggesting that meditation may have a neuro-protective effect. A rash of other studies in recent years meanwhile have found, for example, that practitioners of insight meditation have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for attention and control) and that experienced Tibetan monks practicing compassion meditation generate unusually strong and coherent gamma waves in their brains.

“There are a lot of potential applications for this,” said Milos Cekic, a member of the Emory research team and himself a longtime meditator. He suspects the simple practice of focusing attention on the breath could help patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions characterized by excessive rumination.

Meanwhile, a meditation-derived program developed at the University of Massachusetts called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is gaining popularity for treatment of anxiety and chronic illnesses at medical centers around the U.S.

As far back as the 1960s, Japanese scientists who used electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure the brain waves of Zen monks found characteristic patterns of activity. But the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s gave researchers a chance to see brains functioning in real time. Functional MRIs measure the blood flow in different parts of the brain, which correlates with how active they are.

The Emory team, which also included Giuseppe Pagnoni and Ying Guo, wanted to see whether Zen meditators were indeed better than novices at controlling the flow of thought, as meditators themselves report. Cekic and Pagnoni asked a dozen seasoned Zen meditators — including several monks — and a dozen control subjects to perform a simple cognitive task while undergoing an fMRI scan. The Zen practitioners all had at least three years of daily practice experience, while the control group members had none.

Inside the scanner, the subjects were all asked to follow their breathing while looking at a screen on which words or wordlike combinations of letters were flashed at irregular intervals. Students had to decide whether they were seeing a real word or a made-up word and signal by pressing a button and then return to focusing on their breathing.

The random word or letter combinations engaged what is sometimes called the “default semantic network,” a resting state in which words and thoughts arise spontaneously — what we experience as mind wandering, Cekic said. Practitioners of zazen (seated Zen meditation) are taught to notice when the mind has started to wander and quickly return attention to the breath.

When the word or letter combinations flashed on the screen, the experienced meditators were quickly able to leave the default state and return to their breathing, Cekic says. “You have these extended reverberations in the semantic network after you give people a word,” Cekic said. “The meditators pretty much turn it off as soon as it’s physiologically possible, while the non-meditators don’t.”

This is the second set of findings to have come from the fMRI experiments, Cekic said. Although people lose neurons — gray matter — and have more trouble concentrating as they age, the study published last year by the Emory team found this wasn’t true of the Zen practitioners.

“What we saw in the meditators was pretty much a straight line,” Cekic said. “There was no decrease with age in their gray-matter volume.” There was also no decline in attention — in fact, the effect of meditation on gray matter was most pronounced in the putamen, a brain structure linked to attention. “We can’t say causally that meditation prevents cell death, but we did see in our sample that the meditators did not see a gray matter loss with age,” Cekic said.

Meanwhile, Harvard University researcher Sara Lazar made headlines in 2005 when she reported that Western practitioners of insight meditation — a non-judgmental awareness of present-moment experience that resembles zazen — had significantly thicker tissue in their prefrontal cortex and insula than non-meditators.

Lazar, who practices insight meditation and yoga, performed fMRI scans on 20 experienced meditators and 15 controls with no meditation experience. Lazar said that because earlier research had mostly been conducted on monks, she wanted to see whether the once-a-day meditation sessions typical of most American meditators might affect brain structures.

Unlike earlier research, which had focused on brain waves or measured neural blood flow, Lazar’s experiment yielded the first concrete evidence linking meditation practice to changed brain structure. “The nice thing about (studying) the structure is it’s something solid,” she said. “It’s not performance on a task. It’s your brain.”

Lazar says it’s too soon to tell whether meditation causes new gray matter to form or whether it protects against the normal decline of brain volume. The greatest contrasts were seen between the cortical tissue of meditators and control subjects who were in their 40s and 50s, she says, while the insula, which integrates sensory processing, was thicker in meditators of all ages.

Future research will require longitudinal studies — following subjects through time — to see whether or not meditation is causing the neural changes. “Maybe meditators are weird,” Lazar said, suggesting that perhaps people with unusual brains are especially drawn to meditation.

Where does all this lead?

Andrew Newberg, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has written such popular books as Why We Believe What We Believe and who has conducted brain scans of meditating Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns engaged in contemplative prayer, believes the science shows meditation works.

“The overwhelming evidence is that meditation has benefits,” he said. “If it makes your mind clearer and helps you focus your attention better, it should help people.”

For more than a decade, Newberg has plumbed spiritual mysteries, using fMRI and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to measure blood flow in the brains of not only meditators but people in the throes of other religious experiences, including speaking in tongues, as well.

“The fascinating thing to me is that when people have these mystical experiences, they not only describe it as real, but they describe it as more real than our everyday experience,” he said. It raises the question of just what is real.

“I recognize that studying some of the things I study may get me to an answer,” he added. “A lot of this has been my own spiritual journey, which has become a lot more meditative and contemplative.”

[via Miller-McCune News]

How disease, therapy, drugs and meditation reshape the brain

March 11, 2010

Leading neuroscientists will gather at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the 16th annual symposium on emotion in April to discuss how the human brain changes in response to disease and treatment.

The brain is a very plastic organ and we now know that changes in the structure and function of the brain are associated with learning, psychiatric illness and treatment, and positive intrapersonal growth. Topics include brain changes wrought by depression; brain mechanisms underlying the placebo response, how the brain is altered in individuals prone to bullying and aggression, and how meditation influences well-being through its influences on brain plasticity.

“It’s a world-class lineup of researchers who will present their latest work on the neuroplasticity of the brain as it relates to helping people make significant behavioral and emotional changes as well as in treating individuals with more severe mental illness,” says Dr. Ned Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and chair of the HealthEmotions Research Institute.

“Neuroplasticity of Emotion: Psychopathology & Treatment” will be held in the Ebling Auditorium on the UW-Madison campus April 21 and 22. Scientists who will be presenting their research include:

Dr. Ron Duman, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, Yale School of Medicine, will discuss how stress and depression can kill neurons in the brain.
Dr. John Krystal, chair of psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, will talk about how treatment with medications that affect neuroplasticity can be used to facilitate the effects of talk therapy in patients with anxiety disorders.
Dr. Richard Davidson, Vilas Professor of psychiatry and psychology at the UW, will discuss his studies on well-being and how meditation affects the neural circuitry involved in emotion and cognition.
Dr. Richard Tremblay, professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, will talk about the developmental origin of aggression and preventive factors.
Jennifer Beer, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas, will discuss how the frontal lobe is involved in modulating social behavior by self-monitoring.
Jon Kar-Zubieta, professor of psychiatry at the Univeristiy of Michigan, will discuss how molecular changes in the brain mediate the placebo response.

“The meeting is absolutely unique in that it allows the speakers to have an hour to present their work and an additional hour is dedicated to the discussion of each presentation,” Kalin says.

The discussion is led by UW students who have participated this semester in a course focused on the work of the presenting scientists. The HealthEmotions Research Institute provides travel scholarship awards to support the expenses of up to 45 trainees from the US and around the world to come to Madison to participate in the meeting. The institute encourages students from all levels – undergraduate, graduate, medical, residents in psychiatry and post-doctoral PhD candidates – to attend.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for students at all levels to interact with world- class scientists and to meet UW-Madison faculty,” Kalin says. “All interested UW faculty and students are invited to attend.” For more information about the meeting, travel scholarships, and registration for the 16th Annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion, see https://www.healthemotions.org/symposium/.

Mental exercise like meditation can literally change our minds

September 28, 2009

Read the rest of this article…

Vancouver Sun: Richard Davidson, one of the world’s top brain scientists, believes mental exercise, specifically meditation, can literally change our minds.

“Our data shows mental practice can induce long-lasting changes in the brain,” said Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His startling scientific research on the impact of meditation on brain function has implications that go beyond the physical.

Buddhist monks believe mental attributes and positive emotions such as compassion, loving kindness and empathy are skills that can be cultivated.

Science is beginning to back that up.

Davidson started meditating in 1974, when he was a Phd student at Harvard. Back then, meditation was seen as a somewhat faddish eastern import right up there with the dashiki and the Jesus sandal.

“The culture at the time was not so receptive,” Davidson said, “nor were the scientific methods so well-developed.”

It was when he met the Dalai Lama in 1992 that he “decided to come out of the closet with my interest in meditation.”

He became excited about the possibility of applying rigorous scientific study to the practice of meditation.

“I made a commitment to do my best to take the tools we have so well honed in studying fear and anxiety and apply them to kindness and compassion.”

Davidson began an ongoing study of the brains of Buddhist monks, the so-called “Olympians” of meditation, each of whom had accomplished at least 10,000 hours of meditation.

“The work was framed within the research on neuro-plasticity, the understanding that the brain is built to change in response to experience,” Davidson said.

Just as an injured brain can adapt by mapping out new neuron pathways to accomplish tasks, “brain circuits [for] regulation of emotion and attention are malleable by the environment and are potential targets of training,” he said.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery, Davidson showed that compassion meditation, even in short-term practitioners, induced significant changes in patterns of functional activity in the brain.

“The most important thing is hard-nosed evidence,” Davidson said. “We were able to measure the results through experiments we did.”

Davidson, who has published his findings on meditation in the world’s most prestigious science journals, believes that even the so-called “happiness set-point” of a person’s brain can be altered for the better.

The potential applications include non-pharmacological interventions or supplemental treatment for depression, as well as behavioural and stress-related issues.

Davidson hopes to convince educators to include meditation training as part of core curriculum in Grades K-12.

“It’s very clear that disruptive behaviour, bullying, ADD dramatically affect learning and have led to progressive declines in North American institutes,” he said.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, also began meditating while in college and is a proponent of mindfulness, a form of secular meditation.

Goleman said in an interview: “Mindfulness seems to strengthen an array of neurons in the left prefrontal cortex, which inhibits the stress reaction driven by the amygdala, that triggers the cascade of stress hormones in the fight or flight response.”

Regular practice is key. “It’s exactly like building up a muscle. What you begin to notice as you strengthen it is the absence of the negative state.”

By cultivating the mindfulness muscle, Goleman believes we will develop greater emotional intelligence. We can become more self-aware, better at handling distressing emotions, and more empathetic, a combination that creates greater social effectiveness.

“Meditation is both calming and focusing, which are two essential elements for well-being,” Goleman said.

Dr. Adrianne Ross is a Vancouver mindfulness and meditation leader who first turned to the practice when she experienced a serious illness.

She has practiced meditation in different forms for more than 30 years, studied with mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn, and taught the practice for more than a decade.

“The mindfulness program is for people who aren’t sure they’re interested in Buddhism, but want to learn to meditate,” Ross said.

“It helps you to be able to live more fully and more effectively, so you’re causing less harm to yourself and the people around you and you’re happier.”

Mindfulness can be practised while driving, or standing in line at the bank, Ross said, — but it is not a panacea.

“Some people have depression that comes back. Some of us have the chemistry or life experience that make [difficult] thoughts come, but it can help us work with the thoughts,” Ross said.

“Some people have severe illness. It won’t make the illness go away, but helps them live a full life.

Ross has seen patients become happier and more accepting, in spite of difficult circumstances.

It begins with “learning to be with the breath,” Ross said. Bringing focus to the breath and body. You don’t try to eliminate your thoughts, but focus with “loving kindness” and watch your habitual thoughts — the ones that might hijack you emotionally.

“You learn to recognize my mind is really spinning right now, you’re aware of what it’s doing, you’re not lost in what’s happening. Then if your mind is not going in a useful direction you have a choice.”

Davidson, who still meditates regularly, said he doesn’t measure his own brain systematically. He doesn’t have to. “My practice has given me a kind of equanimity and balance,” he said.

“It may be a period of time, but by 2050 I believe mental exercise will be understood as being as important as physical exercise.”

Meditation may increase gray matter

May 15, 2009

ScienceDaily — Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers — people have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain?

Meditate.

That’s the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group. Read more here.

Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.

“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior,” said Eileen Luders, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”

Research has confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, many people who meditate regularly have reduced levels of stress and bolstered immune systems. But less is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.

The researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.

The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators.

Because these areas of the brain are closely linked to emotion, Luders said, “these might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators’ the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.”

What’s not known, she said, and will require further study, are what the specific correlates are on a microscopic level — that is, whether it’s an increased number of neurons, the larger size of the neurons or a particular “wiring” pattern meditators may develop that other people don’t.

Because this was not a longitudinal study — which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward — it’s possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said.

However, she also noted that numerous previous studies have pointed to the brain’s remarkable plasticity and how environmental enrichment has been shown to change brain structure.

Six ways to boost brainpower

March 11, 2009

Scientific American: Scientists are finding that the adult human brain is far more malleable than they once thought. Your behavior and environment can cause substantial rewiring of your brain or a reorganization of its functions. Activities such as listening to music, playing video games and meditating may boost cognitive performance as well. Read more here.

By Emily Anthes

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb sensations, feeling pain, itching or other impulses coming from limbs that no longer exist. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran worked with patients who had so-called phantom limbs, including Tom, a man who had lost one of his arms.

Ramachandran discovered that if he stroked Tom’s face, Tom felt like his missing fingers were also being touched. Each part of the body is represented by a different region of the somatosensory cortex, and, as it happens, the region for the hand is adjacent to the region for the face. The neuroscientist deduced that a remarkable change had taken place in Tom’s somatosensory cortex.

Ramachandran concluded that because Tom’s cortex was no longer getting input from his missing hand, the region processing sensation from his face had slowly taken over the hand’s territory. So touching Tom’s face produced sensation in his nonexistent fingers.

This kind of rewiring is an example of neuroplasticity, the adult brain’s ability to change and remold itself. Scientists are finding that the adult brain is far more malleable than they once thought. Our behavior and environment can cause substantial rewiring of the brain or a reorganization of its functions and where they are located. Some believe that even our patterns of thinking alone are enough to reshape the brain.

Researchers now know that neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) is a normal feature of the adult brain. Studies have shown that one of the most active regions for neurogenesis is the hippocampus, a structure that is vitally important for learning and long-term memory.

Neurogenesis also takes place in the olfactory bulb, which is involved in processing smells. But not all the neurons that are born survive; in fact, most of them die. To survive, the new cells need nutrients and connections with other neurons that are already thriving. Scientists are currently identifying the factors that affect the rate of neurogenesis and the survival of new cells. Mental and physical exercise, for instance, both boost neuron survival.

METHOD 1: EXERCISE
Mice that run on wheels increase the number of neurons in their hippocampus and perform better on tests of learning and memory. Studies of humans have revealed that exercise can improve the brain’s executive functions (planning, organizing, multitasking, and more). Exercise is also well known for its mood-boosting effects, and people who exercise are less likely to get dementia as they age. Among those who are already aged, athletic senior citizens have better executive function than do those who are sedentary; even seniors who have spent their entire lives on the couch can improve these abilities just by starting to move more in their golden years.

A variety of mechanisms might be responsible for this brain boost. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, which also increases the delivery of oxygen, fuel and nutrients to those hard-working neurons. Research has shown that exercise can increase levels of a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which encourages growth, communication and survival of neurons.

Of course, all this research does nothing to help explain dumb jocks.

On the Frontier
New research suggests a little music can make your workout better yet. Volunteers completed two workout sessions. In one, they sweated to the sweet sound of silence; in the other, they listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. After each workout, participants completed assessments of their mood and verbal skills. Exercise alone was enough to boost both, but verbal scores improved twice as much when the exercisers had tunes to listen to. Maybe you can get your insurance company to pay for a new iPod.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> Exercise also improves sleep quality, a pile of studies suggests. And immune function. Is there anything it can’t do?

>> You don’t need to be Chuck Norris (thankfully) to get the brain benefits of exercise. Studies of senior citizens have shown that as little as 20 minutes of walking a day can do the trick.

METHOD 2: DIET
The brain needs fuel just as the body does. So what will really boost your brainpower, and what will make you lose your mind? Saturated fat, that familiar culprit, is no better for the brain than it is for the body. Rats fed diets high in saturated fat underperformed on tests of learning and memory, and humans who live on such diets seem to be at increased risk for dementia.

Not all fat is bad news, however. The brain is mostly fat—all those cell membranes and myelin coverings require fatty acids—so it is important to eat certain fats, particularly omega-3 fats, which are found in fish, nuts and seeds. Alzheimer’s disease, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders may be associated with low levels of omega-3 fatty acids.

Fruits and vegetables also appear to be brain superfoods. Produce is high in substances called antioxidants, which counteract atoms that can damage brain cells. Researchers have found that high-antioxidant diets keep learning and memory sharp in aging rats and even reduce the brain damage caused by strokes. That’s food for thought.

On the Frontier
It’s not just what you eat that affects the brain. It’s also how much. Research has shown that laboratory animals fed calorie-restricted diets—anywhere from 25 to 50 percent less than normal—live longer than other animals do. And it turns out they also have improved brain function, performing better on tests of memory and coordination. Rodents on calorie-restricted diets are also better able to resist the damage that accompanies Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> Some of the best brain foods: walnuts, blueberries and spinach.

>> It is especially important that babies get enough fat. Babies who don’t get enough of the stuff have trouble creating the fatty myelin insulation that helps neurons transmit signals. Luckily for babies, breast milk is 50 percent fat.

>> Populations that traditionally eat diets high in omega-3 fatty acids tend to have lower rates of disorders of the central nervous system.

METHOD 3: STIMULANTS
Stimulants are substances that rev up the nervous system, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, energy, breathing and more. Caffeine is probably the most famous of the group. (It is actually the most widely used “drug” in the world.) By activating the central nervous system, caffeine boosts arousal and alertness. In high doses, though, this stimulation can go too far, causing jitters, anxiety and insomnia.

Cocaine and amphetamines are less benign. Although they work on the brain through different mechanisms, they have similar effects. Taking them increases the release of some of the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters—including dopamine and serotonin—and produces a rush of euphoria. They also increase alertness and energy.

That all sounds pretty good, but cocaine and amphetamines are extremely addictive drugs and in high doses they can cause psychosis and withdrawal. The withdrawal symptoms are nasty and can lead to depression, the opposite of that euphoric feeling. And of course, an overdose can kill you.

On the Frontier
Although high doses of caffeine can undoubtedly have unpleasant effects (ranging from irritability to the most unpleasant of all: death in rare cases), small to moderate amounts can boost our mental functioning in ways researchers are now measuring.

One study showed that the equivalent of two cups of coffee can boost short-term memory and reaction time. Functional MRI scans taken during the study also revealed that volunteers who had been given caffeine had increased activity in the brain regions involving attention. In addition, research suggests caffeine can protect against age-related memory decline in older women.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> Three quarters of the caffeine we ingest comes from coffee. Try to limit yourself to fewer than 100 cups a day. That much coffee contains about 10 grams of caffeine, enough to cause fatal complications.

>> One of fiction’s most famous stimulant users is the great caper cracker Sherlock Holmes. Many of the detective’s capers include descriptions of the relief he found from injecting cocaine. It must be tough to make sure justice is done.

METHOD 4: VIDEO GAMES
Video games could save your life. Surgeons who spend at least a few hours a week playing video games make one-third fewer errors in the operating room than nongaming doctors do. Indeed, research has shown that video games can improve mental dexterity, while boosting hand-eye coordination, depth perception and pattern recognition. Gamers also have better attention spans and information-processing skills than the average Joe has. When nongamers agree to spend a week playing video games (in the name of science, of course), their visual-perception skills improve. And strike your notions of gamers as outcasts: one researcher found that white-collar professionals who play video games are more confident and social.

Of course, we cannot talk about the effects of video games without mentioning the popular theory that they are responsible for increasing real-world violence. A number of studies have reinforced this link. Young men who play a lot of violent video games have brains that are less responsive to graphic images, suggesting that these gamers have become desensitized to such depictions. Another study revealed that gamers had patterns of brain activity consistent with aggression while playing first-person shooter games.

This does not necessarily mean these players will actually be violent in real life. The connections are worth exploring, but so far the data do not support the idea that the rise of video games is responsible for increased youth violence.

On the Frontier
Video games activate the brain’s reward circuits but do so much more in men than in women, according to a new study. Researchers hooked men and women up to functional MRI machines while the participants played a video game designed for the study. Both groups performed well, but the men showed more activity in the limbic system, which is associated with reward processing. What is more, the men showed greater connectivity between the structures that make up the reward circuit, and the better this connection was in a particular player, the better he performed. There was no such correlation in women. Men are more than twice as likely as women are to say they feel addicted to video games.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> Video games are a $10-billion industry in the U.S.

>> In 2003 a 16-year-old boy shot and killed two police officers and a police dispatcher. Two years later the families of the victims filed suit against the company that made the massively popular video game Grand Theft Auto. The lawsuit alleges that the perpetrator was inspired by his obsession with the controversial video game.

METHOD 5: MUSIC
When you turn on Queen’s Greatest Hits, the auditory cortex analyzes the many components of the music: volume, pitch, timbre, melody and rhythm. But there’s more to music’s interaction with the brain than just the raw sound. Music can also activate your brain’s reward centers and depress activity in the amygdala, reducing fear and other negative emotions.

A highly publicized study suggested that listening to Mozart could boost cognitive performance, inspiring parents everywhere to go out and buy classical CDs for their children. The idea of a “Mozart effect” remains popular, but the original study has been somewhat discredited, and any intellectual boost that comes from listening to music seems to be tiny and temporary. Nevertheless, music does seem to possess some good vibrations. It can treat anxiety and insomnia, lower blood pressure, soothe patients with dementia, and help premature babies to gain weight and leave the hospital sooner.

Music training can bolster the brain. The motor cortex, cerebellum and corpus callosum (which connects the brain’s two sides) are all bigger in musicians than in nonmusicians. And string players have more of their sensory cortices devoted to their fingers than do those who don’t play the instruments. There is no agreement yet on whether musical training makes you smarter, but some studies have indeed shown that music lessons can improve the spatial abilities of young kids.

On the Frontier
Music lessons and practice during childhood increase the sensitivity of the brain stem to the sounds of human speech. According to a recent study, the brain stem is involved in very basic encoding of sound, and lots of exposure to music can help fine-tune this system, even in kids without particular musical gifts.

So buck up, tone-deaf children of the world! Think of it like eating vegetables: chewing on that clarinet is good for you.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> The auditory cortex is activated by singing a song in your head. The visual cortex is activated by merely imagining a musical score.

>> Playing classical and soothing music can increase the milk yield of dairy cows.

METHOD 6: MEDITATION
Forget apples. If reams of scientific studies are to be believed (and such studies usually are), an om a day can keep the doctor away. Meditation, or the turning of the mind inward for contemplation and relaxation, seems to help all types of conditions—anxiety disorders, sure, but it can also reduce pain and treat high blood pressure, asthma, insomnia, diabetes, depression and even skin conditions.

And regular meditators say they feel more at ease and more creative than nonmeditators do.
Researchers are now illuminating the actual brain changes caused by meditation by sticking meditators into brain-imaging machines. For one, although the brain’s cells typically fire at all different times, during meditation they fire in synchrony. Expert meditators also show spikes of brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that has generally been associated with positive emotions. And those who had the most activity in this area during meditation also had big boosts in immune system functioning.

Meditation can increase the thickness of the cerebral cortex, particularly in regions associated with attention and sensation. (The growth does not seem to result from the cortex growing new neurons, though—it appears that the neurons already there make more connections, the number of support cells increases, and blood vessels in that area get bigger.)

On the Frontier
Meditation can increase focus and attention, improving performance on cognitive tasks. Researchers spent three months training volunteers in the practice of Vipassana meditation, which centers on minimizing distractions. Then the volunteers were asked to perform a task in which they had to pick a few numbers out of a stream of letters. People who had undergone meditation training were much better at identifying numbers that briefly flashed onto a computer screen. They also seemed to be able to do this without exerting as much mental energy.

Cocktail Party Tidbits
>> Monks who take part in these scientific studies have typically spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation. That’s more than a year.

>> In 2005 the Dalai Lama was a distinguished speaker at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual conference, the world’s largest gathering of brain researchers.

Meditation or medication?

October 31, 2007