Meditation And The Brain

Is it possible to teach yourself to be more compassionate? A study whose results came out in 2008 makes just that seem possible. The research was done at University of Wisconsin-Madison. This study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging. This imaging suggested that emotions like compassion could be learned.

The scans showed that the brain circuits that detect emotion were extensively increased in people that had meditated for many years. The director of the study, Richard Davidson, said that basically everyone could find meditation useful for depression, to stop being a bully or for other emotional reasons. Davidson is a professor of psychiatry and psychology.

The researchers have a continuing study going on of some Tibetan monks and lay adherents and this particular researcher is an arm of that work. The people studied have to have at least 10,000 hours of meditation practice under their belts. This particular study included 16 monks that have developed compassion meditation practices. It also involved 16 controls that learned compassion meditation for two weeks prior to the study.

They requested that the controls focus on feeling compassion for their loved ones. When they had gained a little practice they asked them to cultivate the feeling of compassion towards people in general. The scans showed an increase in the activity of the insula, which is part of the frontal brain that is important in detecting feelings. It helps to map the body's reaction to feelings like blood pressure and heart rate.

In 2006 researchers at Harvard, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered the initial evidence that meditation can change the brain's structure. They did brain scans that showed that the part of the brain that handles attention, focusing, and sensory input was larger than normal in meditators with a lot of experience.

One part of the gray matter that was thicker was in a section where it becomes thinner with aging, but it was thicker in the older meditators. Sara Lazar, the studies leader stated, "Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being." (Harvard Gazette, William J. Cromie)

It is interesting to not that she said "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice." (Harvard Gazette, William J. Cromie)

The comparison was made between 20 seasoned meditators and 15 people that didn't meditate. Some of the mediators had practiced for years and others only about a year.

It is amazing to find that the brain actually increases gray matter when people meditate, especially for decades. It is also fascinating to learn that brain activity increases when people are concentrating on compassion, but more so that compassion can be cultivated.

We are just starting to understand what meditation can do and how adaptable to the brain is and the wonders of the brain and meditation are yet to be fully discovered.