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January 2 - January 17, 2022
But when Richie’s group repeated this study with people taking the MBSR training (a total of just under thirty hours) plus a bit of daily at-home practice, they failed to find any strengthening of connection between the prefrontal region and the amygdala during the challenge of upsetting images.
the ability to manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators compared to those who have only done the MBSR training.
But when Richie’s group divided the seasoned meditators into those with the least hours of practice (lifetime average 1,849 hours) and the most (lifetime average 7,118), the results showed that the more hours of practice, the more quickly the amygdala recovered from distress.22 This rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience. In short, equanimity emerges more strongly with extended practice.
The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice. Other mindfulness training shows a similar benefit,
More daily practice seems associated with lessened stress reactivity. Experienced Zen practitioners can withstand higher levels of pain, and have less reaction to this stressor. A three-month meditation retreat brought indicators of better emotional regulation, and long-term practice was associated with greater functional connectivity between the prefrontal areas that manage emotion and the areas of the amygdala that react to stress, resulting in less reactivity. And an improved ability to regulate attention accompanies some of the beneficial impact of meditation on stress reactivity.
“loving-kindness” refers to wishing that other people be happy; its near cousin “compassion” entails the wish that people be relieved of suffering. Both outlooks (which we’ll just refer to as “compassion”) can be strengthened through mind training—and
called metta in Pali and loosely translated into English as “loving-kindness”—an unconditional benevolence and goodwill—a quality of love akin to the Greek agape.3 In the format for loving-kindness that Sharon helped bring to the West, you silently repeat phrases like “May I be safe,” “May I be healthy,” and “May my life unfold with ease,” first wishing this for yourself, then for people you love, then for neutral people, and finally for all beings—even those whom you find difficult or who have harmed you.
This version of loving-kindness sometimes includes the compassionate wish that people be free from suffering, too.
At one point Sharon told the Dalai Lama that many Westerners felt loathing toward themselves. He was astonished—he’d never heard of this. He had, the Dalai Lama replied, always assumed that people naturally loved themselves.
The opposite of self-compassion can be seen in the constant self-criticism common, for example, in depressed ways of thinking. Loving-kindness directed to yourself, on the other hand, would seem to offer a direct antidote.
Brain research tells us of three kinds of empathy.6 Cognitive empathy lets us understand how the other person thinks; we see their perspective. In emotional empathy we feel what the other is feeling. And the third, empathic concern or caring, lies at the heart of compassion.
Empathy meant that people felt the pain of those who were suffering. But when another group instead got instructions in compassion—feeling love for those suffering—their brains activated a completely different set of circuits, those for parental love of a child.8 Their brain signature was clearly different from those who received instructions in empathy.
Such positive regard for a victim of suffering means we can confront and deal with their difficulty.
the Davidson group had found that after eight or so hours of training in loving-kindness, volunteers showed strong echoes of those brain patterns found in more experienced meditators.
we can piece together a neural profile of reactions to suffering. Distress circuitry connecting to the insula, including the amygdala, responds with particular strength—a pattern typical of anyone’s empathy with other people’s pain. The insula monitors the signals in our body and also activates autonomic responses like heart rate and breathing—as
During compassion practice, the amygdala is turned up in volume, while in focused attention on something like the breath, the amygdala is turned down. Meditators are learning how to change their relationship to their emotions with different practices.
the insula uses its connections to the body’s visceral organs (like the heart) to ready the body for active engagement (increasing blood flow to the muscles, for example).
The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain’s circuitry for happiness energizes, along with compassion.
But compassion—feeling concern for the person suffering—seemed to involve a different set of brain circuits, those for feelings of warmth, love, and concern.
When he cultivated empathy, sharing the suffering of another, she saw the action in his neural networks for pain. But once he began to generate compassion—loving feelings for someone who was suffering—he activated brain circuitry for positive feelings, reward, and affiliation.
Compassion, she found, muted the empathic distress that can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout (as happens sometimes in the caring professions like nursing).
Tania has done definitive research on meditation as a way to cultivate wholesome mental qualities such as attention, mindfulness, perspective taking, empathy, and compassion.
In short, if you want to increase your feelings of kindness most effectively, practice exactly that—not something else.
First signs suggest that each variety of meditation has its own neural profile.
The main finding: the compassion group’s right amygdala tended to increase its activity in response to photos of suffering, and the more hours of practice, the larger the response. They were sharing the suffering person’s distress. But on a test of depressive thinking, the compassion group also reported being happier in general.
when you focus on someone else’s suffering, you forget your own troubles.
brain studies have long shown women are more attuned to other people’s emotions than are men.
A highly accomplished Tibetan meditation master studied in Richie’s lab once said that one hour spent practicing loving-kindness toward a difficult person is equivalent to one hundred hours of the same toward a friend or loved one.
The Dalai Lama sees one strategy: recognize the “oneness” of humankind, even groups we dislike, and so realize that “all of them, like ourselves, do not want suffering; they want happiness.”
As we’ve often heard the Dalai Lama say, “The first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it.”
The Dalai Lama noted that he had met people who had everything they wanted, yet were miserable. The ultimate source of peace, he said, is in the mind—which, far more than our circumstances, determines our happiness.
There are three forms of empathy—cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern. Often people empathize emotionally with someone’s suffering but then tune out to soothe their own uncomfortable feelings. But compassion meditation enhances empathic concern,
Compassion and loving-kindness increase amygdala activation to suffering while focused attention on something neutral like the breath lessens amygdala activity.
“The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character and will,” he declared in his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.
Whatever specific form it takes, most every kind of meditation entails retraining attention.
habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar. One downside of this brain dynamic: we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, the same dish night after night, even, perhaps, our loved ones. Habituation makes life manageable but a bit dull.
The brain habituates using circuitry we share even with reptiles: the brain stem’s reticular activating system (RAS),
In habituation, cortical circuits inhibit the RAS, keeping this region quiet when we see the s...
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By zooming in on details of sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations that we otherwise would habituate to, our mindfulness transformed the familiar and habitual into the fresh and intriguing.
prefrontal circuitry (behind the forehead) the brain’s executive center, which can learn, reflect, decide, and pursue long-term goals.
When anger or anxiety is triggered, the amygdala drives prefrontal circuitry; as such disturbing emotions reach their peak, an amygdala hijack paralyzes executive function. But when we take active control of our attention—as when we meditate—we deploy this prefrontal circuitry, and the amygdala quiets.
This area has today become the brain’s hot spot for meditation research; every aspect of attention involves the prefrontal cortex in some way. In humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of the brain’s top layer, the neocortex, than in any other species, and has been the site of the major evolutionary changes that make us human.
Conclusion: mindfulness (at least in this form) strengthens the brain’s ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions. The neural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained—contrary
A similar strengthening of selective attention was found in vipassana meditators at the Insight Meditation Society who were tested before and after a three-month retreat.
The lion’s share goes to what we choose to focus on in the moment. But as we keep our attention on that thing, our focus inevitably wanes, our mind wandering off to other thoughts and the like. Meditation defies this mental inertia.
That happy excitement over spotting Waldo marks a key moment in the workings of attention; the brain rewards us for any such victory with a dose of pleasing neurochemicals. For those few moments, research tells us, the nervous system takes our focus off-line and relaxes, in what amounts to a short neural celebration party.
The blink measure reflects “brain efficiency,” in the sense that not getting too caught up in one thing leaves our finite attentional resources available for the next. Speaking practically, the lack of blink reflects a greater ability to notice small changes—e.g.,
Vipassana meditation, on the face of it, might lessen the blink, since it cultivates a continuous nonreactive awareness of whatever arises in experience, an “open-monitoring” receptive to all that occurs in the mind.
nonreactive open awareness—simply noticing and allowing whatever comes into the mind “just to be” rather than following a chain of thoughts about it—becomes
“What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”
