What is so exciting about Mindfulness and the brain

·   We  can transfom  our brain with what we  thinks and what we do and we can extend the range of our mental and emotional capabilities including training our minds to be happy. 

·   We can heal through meditation and by using our brains in the right ways

·    We can voluntary enhance compassion and self-regulation through specific  mental techniques ….

 Interest in meditation and its beneficial effects on emotion regulation and well-being has quietly exploded over the recent 20 years, with psychological, medical and neuroscience research on the topic growing exponentially, as well as growing world-wide interest in contemplative clinical application and education.

Contemplative neuroscience - Research on the effects of meditation

Over the past several years, contemplative neuroscience has emerged as a promising ground for studying the effects of mental training in varying meditation methods on various facets of the human brain. Meditation is conceptualized as a family of complex attentional and emotional regulatory strategies developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Meditation techniques are best defined along two orthogonal dimensions, often combined in individual meditation training: a) focused attention (or 'concentration'), which involves voluntarily focusing sustained attention on a chosen object, and b) open monitoring (or 'mindfulness'), which entails non-reactively monitoring the content of experience from moment to moment.

The accumulated findings from affective neuroscience studies suggest training-induced neuroplasticity, including attentional, neurobiological, emotional and structural changes induced by meditation. These studies are being published in the top scientific journals and are entering the scientific mainstream:

·        Attentional changes include improved sustained attention, a more efficient attentional resource allocation, improved ability to orient attention, and decreased automatic reactivity.

·        Neurobiological changes include changes in brain waves (EEG) activity, changes in activation of brain areas associated with attention and emotion,   enhanced immune function, changes in autonomic nervous activity, and increased dopamine, melatonin and serotonin tone.

·        Emotional changes include reduced emotional interference on cognitive tasks, lower intensity of emotional arousal, trait reduction in anxiety and negative affect and increase in positive affect.

·         Structural changes include thicker cortices in regions that play important roles in integrating sensory information, emotional regulation and response control.

·         Clinical studies show evidence for the effectiveness of Meditation in disorders of affect (e.g. depression), anxiety, attention, eating disorders, chronic pain, chronic illness, cancer, Chronic Fatigue,  Diabetes, Fibromyalgia, Headache, Heart Disease, HIV/AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, Organ Transplant , Psoriasis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Sleep Disturbance, Smoking

Clinical uses of meditation

·        While stress-related illness presents an ever-increasing burden to worldwide society, Mindfulness meditation has gained eminence for its demonstrated efficacy in reducing stress and improving health outcomes, both in nonclinical and clinical populations, by reducing irrelevant thought processes through training of internalized attention.

·        Mindfulness has been incorporated into several interventions that are now widely available in medical and mental health settings. It includes dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and relapse prevention for substance abuse.

Why is neuroscience interested in meditation?

Expert mediators represent a unique state of mind and being that can help brain scientists examine fundamental mechanisms of mind-brain-body interaction

Issues asked by contemplative neuroscientists and Davidson at their head:

·    What is the developmental impact of meditation training in children and on the aging process?

·    What is the optimal dosing of particular types of meditation at different ages? More generally, how does meditation training fit in the framework of lifespan development?

·    Which meditation practices are best used for cultivating different types of cognitive and emotional skills? And how can we best match individuals’ unique cognitive and affective style to specific forms of meditation?

·     What are the peripheral biological consequences of different forms of meditation and how are these related to the unique patterns of brain function engaged by each?

Prof. Davidson

·    Prof. Davidson is the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

·    Davidson  is a pioneer in the relatively new field of affective neuroscience (study of the neural mechanisms of emotion)  showing in his work that there are areas related to positive and negative emotions and that the brain is malleable and that one can transfom  one's brain with what one thinks and what one do and we can extend the range of our mental and emotional capablities including trianing our minds to be happy. 

·    Prof. Davidson is internationally renowned for his research on the neural substrates of emotion and contemplative neuroscience, and Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people in May 2006 issue. In addition, he is conceivably the most renowned scientist in the field of contemplative neuroscience and has been a member of the Mind and Life Institute's (MLI) Board of Directors since 1991. He attends regularly the private meetings between renowned researchers and the Dalai Lama of Tibet and other contemplative scholars, is a moderator in the public conferences of MLI, and one of the founders of the Mind and Life Education Research Network, formed in 2006.

·    Contemplative neuroscience work at Prof. Davidson's lab focuses on emotion regulation, attentional changes and neural connectivity in both the unique population of Tibetan Buddhist monks with expertise in the range of thousands of accumulated hours of meditative practice and in lay persons. This unusual sample, unique to Prof. Davidson's lab, is recruited and directly encouraged by the personal help of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, a friend and collaborator with Prof. Davidson via the Mind and Life Institute.

The year 2050 according to Richie Davidson

·    Mental exercise will be accepted and practiced in the same way physical exercise is today

·    We will have a science of virtuous qualities

·    We will incorporate the mind back to medicine and better understand how the brain can modulate peripheral biology in ways the effect health. This will lead us to take more responsibility for our own health.

·    This will be incorporated in education, medicine etc

In order to get there Davidson established a new center called Center for Investigating Healthy Minds , with the slogan "Creating a world through research and outreach in which healthy qualities of mind flourish" see http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/

Retreat for Scientists and Mental health practitioners

This retreat will be of equal relevance to psychologists and neuroscientists and to mental health professionals, designed to introduce the ways in which mindfulness practice can inform their research and practice.

The Dalai Lama's Interest in Science The Dalai Lama has always shown a strong mechanical aptitude and a keen personal interest in the sciences. He has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to have been an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa he taught himself to fix broken machinery, from clocks to movie projectors to cars. A highlight of his first trip to the west in 1973 was a visit to the University Observatory at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge England.
Over the years he has enjoyed relationships with many scientists, including long friendships with the late renowned philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, and physicists Carl von Weizsäcker and the late David Bohm. He has participated in many conferences on science and spirituality. It was at one such conference, the Alpbach Symposia on Consciousness in 1983, that His Holiness met Dr. Francisco Varela who, in partnership with Adam Engle, later created the unique form of in-depth dialogue between Buddhism and science that has grown into the Mind and Life Institute. Since the first Mind and Life meeting in 1987, His Holiness has regularly dedicated a full week of his busy schedule to these biennial meetings. An Ongoing Dialogue with Western Science
Along with his vigorous interest in learning about the newest developments in science, His Holiness brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication. As well as engaging personally in dialogue with Western scientists and promoting scientific research into Buddhist meditative practices, he has led a campaign to introduce basic science education in Tibetan Buddhist monastic colleges and academic centers, and has encouraged Tibetan scholars to engage with science as a way of revitalizing the Tibetan philosophical tradition. His Holiness believes that science and Buddhism share a common objective: to serve humanity and create a better understanding of the world. He feels that science offers powerful tools for understanding the interconnectedness of all life, and that such understanding provides an essential rationale for ethical behavior and the protection of the environment.