More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 11 - December 13, 2020
More specifically, the brain’s threat radar, the amygdala, signals the HPA axis (that’s the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal circuitry, if you must know) to release epinephrine, an important freeze-fight-or-flight brain chemical, along with the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn raises the body’s energy expenditure to respond to the stressor.
anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which modulates inflammation and also connects our thoughts and feelings and controls autonomic activity, including heart rate.
cortisol, that hormonal precursor of diseases made worse by chronic stress, like diabetes, hardening of the arteries, and asthma.
Looks like there’s biological confirmation of what meditators say: it gets easier to handle life’s upsets.
Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
Blood samples before and after revealed that the meditators, but not those taking relaxation, had reductions in a key pro-inflammatory cytokine.
And, fMRI scans showed, the greater their increase in connectivity between the prefrontal region and the default areas that generate our
inner stream of chat, the greater the reductions in the cytokine. Presumably, putting the brakes on destructive self-talk that floods us with thoughts of hopelessness and depression—understandable in the unemployed—also lowered cytokine levels. How w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
late Burmese monk and meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita.
After genetic scientists mapped the entire human genome, they realized it wasn’t enough to just know if we had a given gene or not. The real questions: Is that gene expressed? Is it manufacturing the protein for which it is designed? And how much? Where is the “volume control” on the gene set? This meant there was another important step: finding what turns our genes on or off. If we’ve inherited a gene that gives us a susceptibility to a disease like diabetes, we may never develop the malady if, for example, we have a lifelong habit of getting regular exercise and not eating sugar. Sugar turns
...more
itself.
After the day of practice the meditators had a marked “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes—something that had never been seen before in response to a purely mental practice. Such a drop, if sustained over a lifetime, might help
combat diseases with onsets marked by chronic low-grade inflammation. As we’ve said, these include many of the world’s major health problems, ranging from cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, and diabetes to cancer.
a mental exercise, meditation, could be a driver of benefits at the level of genes. Genetic science would have to change its assumptions about how the mind can help manage the body.
Loneliness, for instance, spurs higher levels of pro-inflammatory genes; MBSR can not only lower those levels—but also lessen the feeling of being lonely.
Telomeres are the caps at the end of DNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live. The longer the telomere, the longer the life span of that cell will be. Telomerase is the enzyme that slows the age-related shortening of telomeres; the more telomerase, the better for health and longevity. A meta-analysis of four randomized controlled studies involving a total of 190 meditators found practicing mindfulness was associated with increased telomerase activity.
The more present to their immediate experience, and the less mind-wandering during concentration sessions, the greater the telomerase benefit.
panchakarma, Sanskrit for “five treatments,”
Comparing each to a nonmeditator of the same age and sex, the meditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly. And this was while they were just sitting still, waiting for a cognitive test to start. Over the course of a single day that difference in breath rate translates to more than 2,000 extra breaths for the nonmeditators—and more than 800,000 extra breaths over the course of a year. These extra breaths are physiologically taxing, and can exact a health toll as time goes on.
As practice continues and breathing becomes progressively slower, the body adjusts its physiological set point for its respiratory rate accordingly. That’s a good thing. While chronic rapid breathing signifies ongoing anxiety, a slower
breath rate indicates reduced autonomic activity, better mood, ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Compared with nonmeditators, her group reported, meditators had greater cortical thickness in areas important for sensing inside one’s own body and for attention, specifically the anterior insula and zones of the prefrontal cortex.
The results: certain areas of the brain seemed to enlarge in meditators, among them: The insula, which attunes us to our internal state and powers emotional self-awareness, by enhancing attention to such internal signals. Somatomotor areas, the main cortical hubs for sensing touch and pain, perhaps another benefit of increased bodily awareness. Parts of the prefrontal cortex that operate in paying attention and in meta-awareness,
awareness, abilities cultivated in almost all forms of meditation. Regions of the cingulate cortex instrumental in self-regulation, another skill practiced in meditation. The orbitofrontal cortex, also part of the circuitry for self-regulation.
meditation slows the usual shrinkage of our brain as we age: at age fifty, longtime meditators’ brains are “younger” by 7.5 years compared to brains of nonmeditators of the same age.
Bonus: for every year beyond fifty, the brains of practitioners were younger than their peers’ by one month and twenty-two days.
Meditation, the researchers conclude, helps preserve the brain...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
meditators showed greater cortical gyrification (the folding at the top of the neocortex) and so had more brain growth.28 The longer the meditator had practiced, the more folding.
kriya
These practices can vary greatly in the particular mental skill being deployed by a meditator, for example open presence where anything can come into the mind versus
a tight focus on one thing only, or methods that manage breathing versus those that ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
temporoparietal junction,
TPJ has been found particularly active when we take another person’s perspective.
More right-side activity than left correlated with negative moods like depression and anxiety; relatively more left-side activity was associated with buoyant moods like energy and enthusiasm.
what changes is your relation to any and all emotions, rather than the ratio of positive to negative ones. With high levels of meditation practice, emotions seem to lose their power to pull us into their melodrama.
The sounder studies, we found, focus on lessening our psychological distress rather than on curing medical syndromes or looking for underlying biological mechanisms.
Still, might meditation offer biological relief? Consider the Dalai Lama, now in his eighties, who goes to bed at 7:00 p.m. and gets a full night’s sleep before he awakens around 3:30 for a four-hour stint of spiritual practice, including meditation. Add another hour of practice before he goes
to bed and that gives him five hours a day of contemplative time.
That deep dive into the mind had yielded many insights, including one about the lightness of thoughts when viewed through the lens of mindfulness. That insight mirrors a principle in cognitive therapy of “decentering,” observing thoughts and feelings without being overly identified with them. We can reappraise our suffering.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression,
His research had revealed that for people with depression so severe that drugs or even electroshock treatments were no help, this mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) cut the rate of relapse by half—more than any medication.
JAMA journals (the official publications of the American Medical Association),
mindfulness
could lessen anxiety and depression, as well as pain.
Those patients who, after treatments, showed a greater increase in the activity of their insula had 35 percent fewer relapses.
The reason? In a later analysis, Segal found the best outcomes were in those patients most able to “decenter,” that is, step outside their thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming and going, rather than getting carried away by “my thoughts and feelings.” In other words, these
patients were more mindful. And the more time they put into mindfulness practice, the lower their odds...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In 2015, 12.5 percent of the US population aged twelve to seventeen had at least one major depressive episode the previous year. This translates to about 3 million teens.
Social anxiety, which can look like anything from stage fright to shyness at gatherings, turns out to be a surprisingly common emotional problem, affecting more than 6 percent of the US population, around 15 million people.11
After the eight-week MBSR course the patients reported feeling less anxiety, a good sign. But you may recall the next step, which makes the study more intriguing: the patients also went into a brain scanner while doing a breath awareness
