[wordup] Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left

[Adam Shand]

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/health/psychology/04ESSA.html

February 4, 2003
Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left
By DANIEL GOLEMAN

All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, 
I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an 
antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, 
and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my 
results were inconclusive.

But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have 
looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the 
adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a 
definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the 
brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to 
soothe.

The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely 
research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and 
political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and 
neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with the 
Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss 
how people might better control their destructive emotions.

One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science 
and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory 
for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, 
in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, 
has identified an index for the brain's set point for moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally 
distressed -- anxious, angry, depressed -- the most active sites in the 
brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's 
emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region 
important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods -- upbeat, enthusiastic 
and energized -- those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in 
the left prefrontal cortex.

Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to 
index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of 
activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts 
daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the 
right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the 
more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.

By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has established a 
bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of 
good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the 
right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder 
over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the 
left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid.

This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically 
determined set point for our emotional range. One finding, for instance, 
shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and those 
unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so 
after the events their daily moods are about the same as before the 
momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes 
little, if at all.

By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio 
on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value 
to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.

Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the meeting between 
the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding, while 
intriguing, raised more questions than it answered.

Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become monks? Or 
was there something about the training of lamas -- the Tibetan Buddhist 
equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher -- that might nudge a set 
point into the range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama 
wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to be shared for 
the benefit of all?

A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. 
Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the 
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of 
Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases of all 
kinds, to help them better handle their symptoms. In an article accepted 
for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, 
Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training in 
mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its Buddhist origins and 
now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics throughout the 
United States and many other countries.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure biotech 
business for roughly three hours a week over two months. A comparison 
group of volunteers from the company received the training later, though 
they, like the participants, were tested before and after training by 
Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.

The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in the training 
time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness training, the workers 
were on average tipped toward the right in the ratio for the emotional 
set point. At the same time, they complained of feeling highly stressed. 
After the training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted 
leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their moods 
improved; they reported feeling engaged again in their work, more 
energized and less anxious.

In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, 
given the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their 
moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward distress. 
Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in 
the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from the amygdala 
that drive disturbing emotions.

Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that 
mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their immune systems, as 
gauged by the amount of flu antibodies in their blood after receiving a 
flu shot.

According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if people in two 
experimental groups are exposed to the flu virus, those who have learned 
the mindfulness technique will experience less severe symptoms. The 
greater the leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger the 
increase in the immune measure.

The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the continuing 
sensations and thoughts more closely, both in sitting meditation and in 
activities like yoga exercises.

Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly trained lamas 
have come to be studied. All of them have spent at least three years in 
solitary meditative retreat. That amount of practice puts them in a 
range found among masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and 
concert violinists.

What difference such intense mind training may make for human abilities 
has been suggested by preliminary findings from other laboratories. Some 
of the more tantalizing data come from the work of another scientist, 
Dr. Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the 
University of California at San Francisco, which studies the facial 
expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also participated in the five days of 
dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read 
another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial muscles.

As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by Times 
Books in April, these microexpressions -- ultrarapid facial actions, some 
lasting as little as one-twentieth of a second -- lay bare our most naked 
feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they cross our faces 
spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for those who can read 
them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.

Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments. 
Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people can learn to detect these 
expressions in just hours with proper training, his testing shows that 
most people -- including judges, the police and psychotherapists -- are 
ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than someone making 
random guesses.

Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan 
practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions 
tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American 
teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six, 
considered quite rare. Normally, a random guess will produce one correct 
answer in six.

Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr. 
Ekman to design a program called "Cultivating Emotional Balance," which 
combines methods extracted from Buddhism, like mindfulness, with 
synergistic training from modern psychology, like reading 
microexpressions, and seeks to help people better manage their emotions 
and relationships.

A pilot of the project began last month with elementary school teachers 
in the San Francisco Bay area, under the direction of Dr. Margaret 
Kemeny, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of 
California at San Francisco. She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's 
immune system findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other measures 
of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with 120 nurses and 
teachers.

Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays has intrigued 
other investigators. Under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute, 
which organizes the series of continuing meetings between the Dalai Lama 
and scientists, there will be a round at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama will meet with 
an expanded group of researchers to discuss further research possibilities.

Though open to the public, half the seats will be reserved for graduate 
students and academic researchers. (More information is at 
www.InvestigatingTheMind.org.)

As for me, I am taking all this to heart. An on-again, off-again 
meditator since my college days, I have become decidedly on again. Next 
month, my wife and I are heading to a warm spot for two or three weeks 
of meditation retreat. I may never catch up with that sublime lama, but 
I will enjoy trying.