Meditation may help the brain 'turn down the volume' on distractions
April 21, 2011
Science Daily/Massachusetts General Hospital
The positive effects of mindfulness meditation on pain and working memory may result from an improved ability to regulate a crucial brain wave called the alpha rhythm. This rhythm is thought to "turn down the volume" on distracting information, which suggests that a key value of meditation may be helping the brain deal with an often-overstimulating world.
Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that modulation of the alpha rhythm in response to attention-directing cues was faster and significantly more enhanced among study participants who completed an eight-week mindfulness meditation program than in a control group. The report will appear in the journal Brain Research Bulletin and has been released online.
"Mindfulness meditation has been reported to enhance numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory recall," says Catherine Kerr, PhD, of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, co-lead author of the report. "Our discovery that mindfulness meditators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts."
Brain cells use particular frequencies or waves to regulate the flow of information in much the same way that radio stations broadcast at specific frequencies. One frequency, the alpha rhythm, is particularly active in the cells that process touch, sight and sound in the brain's outmost layer, called the cortex, where it helps to suppress irrelevant or distracting sensations and regulate the flow of sensory information between brain regions.
Previous studies have suggested that attention can be used to regulate the alpha rhythm and, in turn, sensory perception. When an individual anticipates a touch, sight or sound, the focusing of attention toward the expected stimulus induces a lower alpha wave height in cortical cells that would handle the expected sensation, which actually "turns up the volume" of those cells. At the same time the height of the alpha wave in cells that would handle irrelevant or distracting information increases, turning the volume in those regions down. Because mindfulness meditation -- in which practitioners direct nonjudgmental attention to their sensations, feelings and state of mind -- has been associated with improved performance on attention-based tasks, the research team decided to investigate whether individuals trained in the practice also exhibited enhanced regulation of the timing and intensity of alpha rhythms.
The study tested 12 healthy volunteers with no previous experience in meditation. Half completed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program developed at the University of Massachusetts. The other half were asked not to engage in any type of meditation during the study period. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that detects the location of brain activity with extreme precision, the researchers measured participants' alpha rhythms before, during and after the eight-week period. Specifically, they measured alpha rhythms in the brain area that processes signals from the left hand while participants were asked to direct their attention to either their left hand or left foot. Participants' abilities to adjust the alpha rhythm in cortical cells associated with the hand, depending on where their attention was directed, were recorded during the milliseconds immediately after they received an attention cue.
Although all participants had showed some attention-related alpha rhythm changes at the beginning of the study, at the end of the eight weeks, those who completed the mindfulness meditation training made faster and significantly more pronounced attention-based adjustments to the alpha rhythm than the non-meditators did. "This result may explain reports that mindfulness meditation decreases pain perception," says Kerr. "Enhanced ability to turn the alpha rhythm up or down could give practitioners' greater ability to regulate pain sensation."
The study also sheds light on how meditation may affect basic brain function, explains Stephanie Jones, PhD, of the Martinos Center, co-lead author of the paper. "Given what we know about how alpha waves arise from electrical currents in sensory cortical cells, these data suggest that mindfulness meditation practitioners can use the mind to enhance regulation of currents in targeted cortical cells. The implications extend far beyond meditation and give us clues about possible ways to help people better regulate a brain rhythm that is dysregulated in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and other conditions." Kerr is an instructor in Medicine and Jones an instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110421122337.htm
Demystifying Meditation: Brain Imaging Illustrates How Meditation Reduces Pain
Apr. 11, 2011 —
Science Daily/Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
"This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
"We found a big effect -- about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent."
For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.
Both before and after meditation training, study participants' brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging -- arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) -- that captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function. During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants' right legs. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120° Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.
The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.
At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is. The scans taken before meditation training showed activity in this area was very high. However, when participants were meditating during the scans, activity in this important pain-processing region could not be detected.
The research also showed that meditation increased brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex. "These areas all shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals that are coming in from the body," said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist.
"Consistent with this function, the more that these areas were activated by meditation the more that pain was reduced. One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing."
Zeidan and colleagues believe that meditation has great potential for clinical use because so little training was required to produce such dramatic pain-relieving effects. "This study shows that meditation produces real effects in the brain and can provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain without medications," Zeidan said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110405174835.htm
Meditation beats dance for harmonizing body and mind
March 2, 2011
Science Daily/University of California - Berkeley
The body is a dancer's instrument, but is it attuned to the mind? A new study suggests that professional ballet and modern dancers are not as emotionally in sync with their bodies as are people who regularly practice meditation.
UC Berkeley researchers tracked how closely the emotions of seasoned meditators and professional dancers followed bodily changes such as breathing and heart rates.
They found that dancers who devote enormous time and effort to developing awareness of and precise control over their muscles -- a theme coincidentally raised in the new ballet movie "Black Swan" -- do not have a stronger mind-body connection than do most other people.
By contrast, veteran practitioners of Vipassana or mindfulness meditation -- a technique focused on observing breathing, heartbeat, thoughts and feelings without judgment -- showed the closest mind-body bond, according to the study recently published in the journal Emotion.
"We all talk about our emotions as if they are intimately connected to our bodies -- such as the 'heartache of sadness' and 'bursting a blood vessel' in anger," said Robert Levenson, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and senior author of the study. "We sought to precisely measure how close that connection was, and found it was stronger for meditators."
The results offer new clues in the mystery of the mind-body connection. Previous studies have linked the dissociation of mind and body to various medical and psychiatric diseases.
Although all participants reported similar emotional reactions to the film clips, meditators showed stronger correlations between the emotions they reported feeling and the speed of their heartbeats. Surprisingly, the differences between dancers and the control group were minimal.
Researchers theorize that dancers learn to shift focus between time, music, space, and muscles and achieve heightened awareness of their muscle tone, body alignment and posture.
"These are all very helpful for becoming a better dancer, but they do not tighten the links between mind and body in emotion," Levenson said.
By contrast, meditators practice attending to "visceral" body sensations, which makes them more attuned to internal organs such as the heart. "These types of visceral sensations are a primary focus of Vipassana meditation, which is typically done sitting still and paying attention to internal sensations," Sze said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110224091621.htm
Being 'mindful' can neutralize fears of death and dying
February 28, 2011
Science Daily/George Mason University
Death can be terrifying. Recognizing that death is inescapable and unpredictable makes us incredibly vulnerable, and can invoke feelings of anxiety, hatred and fear. But new research shows that being a mindful person not only makes you generally more tolerant and less defensive, but it can also actually neutralize fears of dying and death.
"Mindfulness is being open, receptive, and attentive to whatever is unfolding in the present moment," says Kashdan. In his latest research, Kashdan and his colleagues wanted to find out if mindful people had different attitudes about death and dying.
"Generally, when reminded of our mortality, we are extremely defensive. Like little kids who nearly suffocate under blanket protection to fend off the monster in the closet, the first thing we try to do is purge any death-related thoughts or feelings from our mind," says Kashdan.
"What we found was that when asked to deeply contemplate their death, mindful people spent more time writing (as opposed to avoiding) and used more death-related words when reflecting on the experience. This suggests that a greater openness to processing the threat of death allows compassion and fairness to reign. In this laboratory staged battle, mindfulness alters the power that death holds over us," Kashdan says.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110228151800.htm
Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in eight weeks
January 21, 2011
Science Daily/Massachusetts General Hospital
Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. A new study is the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's gray matter.
"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."
Previous studies from Lazar's group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.
"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life." says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. "Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change."
Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training's effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, "These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an 8-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amygdala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR's potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder." Jha was not one of the study investigators.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110121144007.htm
Pain: What Zen meditators don't think about won't hurt them
December 8, 2010
Science Daily/University of Montreal
Zen meditation has many health benefits, including a reduced sensitivity to pain. According to new research meditators do feel pain but they simply don't dwell on it as much. These findings may have implications for chronic pain sufferers, such as those with arthritis, back pain or cancer.
"Our previous research found that Zen meditators have lower pain sensitivity. The aim of the current study was to determine how they are achieving this," says senior author Pierre Rainville, researcher at the Université de Montréal and the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal. "Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated that although the meditators were aware of the pain, this sensation wasn't processed in the part of their brains responsible for appraisal, reasoning or memory formation. We think that they feel the sensations, but cut the process short, refraining from interpretation or labelling of the stimuli as painful."
"Our findings lead to new insights into mind/brain function," says first author, Joshua Grant, a doctoral student at the Université de Montréal. "These results challenge current concepts of mental control, which is thought to be achieved by increasing cognitive activity or effort. Instead, we suggest it is possible to self-regulate in a more passive manner, by 'turning off' certain areas of the brain, which in this case are normally involved in processing pain."
"The results suggest that Zen meditators may have a training-related ability to disengage some higher-order brain processes, while still experiencing the stimulus," says Rainville. "Such an ability could have widespread and profound implications for pain and emotion regulation and cognitive control. This behaviour is consistent with the mindset of Zen and with the notion of mindfulness."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208130054.htm
Mindfulness-based therapy helps prevent depression relapse
December 9, 2010
Science Daily/JAMA and Archives Journals
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy appears to be similar to maintenance antidepressant medication for preventing relapse or recurrence among patients successfully treated for depression, according to a new study.
"Relapse and recurrence after recovery from major depressive disorder are common and debilitating outcomes that carry enormous personal, familial and societal costs," the authors write as background information in the article. The current standard for preventing relapse is maintenance therapy with a single antidepressant. This regimen is generally effective if patients take their medications, but as many as 40 percent of them do not. "Alternatives to long-term antidepressant monotherapy, especially those that address mood outcomes in a broader context of well-being, may appeal to patients wary of continued intervention."
Zindel V. Segal, Ph.D., of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues studied 160 patients age 18 to 65 who met criteria for major depressive disorder and had experienced at least two episodes of depression. After eight months of treatment, 84 (52.5 percent) achieved remission. Patients in remission were then randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: 28 continued taking their medication; 30 had their medication slowly replaced by placebo; and 26 tapered their medication and then received mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy.
In this therapy, patients learn to monitor and observe their thinking patterns when they feel sad, changing automatic reactions associated with depression (such as rumination and avoidance) into opportunities for useful reflection. "This is accomplished through daily homework exercises featuring (1) guided (taped) awareness exercises directed at increasing moment-by-moment nonjudgmental awareness of bodily sensations, thoughts, and feelings; (2) accepting difficulties with a stance of self-compassion; and (3) developing an 'action plan' composed of strategies for responding to early warning signs of relapse/recurrence," the authors write.
During the 18-month follow-up period, relapse occurred among 38 percent of those in the cognitive behavioral therapy group, 46 percent of those in the maintenance medication group and 60 percent of those in the placebo group, making both medication and behavioral therapy effective at preventing relapse.
About half (51 percent) of patients were classified as unstable remitters, defined as individuals who had symptom "flurries" or intermittently higher scores on depression rating scales despite having a low enough average score to qualify for remission. The other half (49 percent) were stable remitters with consistently low scores. Among unstable remitters, those taking maintenance medication or undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy were about 73 percent less likely to relapse than those taking placebo. Among stable remitters, there were no differences between the three groups.
"Our data highlight the importance of maintaining at least one active long-term treatment in recurrently depressed patients whose remission is unstable," the authors write. "For those unwilling or unable to tolerate maintenance antidepressant treatment, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy offers equal protection from relapse during an 18-month period." It is unclear exactly how mindfulness-based therapy works, but it may change neural pathways to support patterns that lead to recovery instead of to deeper depression, they note.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101206161734.htm
Positive well-being to higher telomerase: Psychological changes from meditation training linked to cellular health
November 4, 2010
Science Daily/University of California - Davis
Positive psychological changes that occur during meditation training are associated with greater telomerase activity, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. The study is the first to link positive well-being to higher telomerase, an enzyme important for the long-term health of cells in the body.
The effect appears to be attributable to psychological changes that increase a person's ability to cope with stress and maintain feelings of well-being.
"We have found that meditation promotes positive psychological changes, and that meditators showing the greatest improvement on various psychological measures had the highest levels of telomerase," said Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.
"The take-home message from this work is not that meditation directly increases telomerase activity and therefore a person's health and longevity," Saron said. "Rather, meditation may improve a person's psychological well-being and in turn these changes are related to telomerase activity in immune cells, which has the potential to promote longevity in those cells. Activities that increase a person's sense of well-being may have a profound effect on the most fundamental aspects of their physiology."
The study, with UC Davis postdoctoral scholar Tonya Jacobs as lead author, was published online Oct. 29 in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology and will soon appear in print. It is a product of the UC Davis-based Shamatha Project, led by Saron, one of the first long-term, detailed, matched control-group studies of the effects of intensive meditation training on mind and body.
"This work is among the first to show a relation between positive psychological change and telomerase activity. Because the finding is new, it should serve to inspire future studies to replicate and extend what we found," Jacobs said.
Elizabeth Blackburn, professor of biology and physiology at UCSF, is a co-author of the paper. Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for discovering telomeres and telomerase. Other co-authors include UCSF colleagues Elissa Epel, associate professor of psychiatry; assistant research biochemist Jue Lin; and Owen Wolkowitz, professor of psychiatry.
Telomeres are sequences of DNA at the end of chromosomes that tend to get shorter every time a cell divides. When telomeres drop below a critical length, the cell can no longer divide properly and eventually dies.
Telomerase is an enzyme that can rebuild and lengthen telomeres. Other studies suggest that telomerase activity may be a link between psychological stress and physical health.
The research team measured telomerase activity in participants in the Shamatha Project at the end of a three-month intensive meditation retreat.
Telomerase activity was about one-third higher in the white blood cells of participants who had completed the retreat than in a matched group of controls.
The retreat participants also showed increases in such beneficial psychological qualities as perceived control (over one's life and surroundings), mindfulness (being able to observe one's experience in a nonreactive manner) and purpose in life (viewing one's life as meaningful, worthwhile and aligned with long-term goals and values). In addition, they experienced decreased neuroticism, or negative emotionality.
Using statistical modeling techniques, the researchers concluded that high telomerase activity was due to the beneficial effects of meditation on perceived control and neuroticism, which in turn were due to changes in mindfulness and sense of purpose.
The Shamatha Project is the most comprehensive longitudinal study of intensive meditation yet undertaken.
The intensive meditation retreat took place at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colo. The study included 30 participants each in the retreat and control groups. Participants received ongoing instruction in meditation techniques from Buddhist scholar, author and teacher B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. They attended group meditation sessions twice a day and engaged in individual practice for about six hours a day.
A control group of 30 people matched for age, sex, education, ethnicity and meditation experience was assessed at the same time and in the same place, but did not otherwise attend meditation training at that time.
The Shamatha Project has drawn the attention of scientists and Buddhist scholars alike, including the Dalai Lama, who has endorsed the project.
Saron and his colleagues are now analyzing and publishing other findings from the project. In a paper published this summer in Psychological Science, Katherine MacLean, a recent UC Davis Ph.D. graduate now at Johns Hopkins University, reported that meditators were better at making fine visual distinctions and sustaining attention over a long period.
The group's next research article, currently in press in the journal Emotion, will describe a meditation-related reduction in impulsive reactions, which was linked in turn to enhancement in positive psychological functioning. UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Baljinder Sahdra is the lead author on that paper.
Additional co-authors on the current paper are: UC Davis graduate students Stephen Aichele, Anthony Zanesco and Brandon King; Sahdra, Associate Professor Emilio Ferrer and Distinguished Professor Phillip Shaver from the UC Davis Department of Psychology; consulting scientist Erika Rosenberg from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain; and from UC Irvine, graduate student David Bridwell of the Department of Cognitive Science.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101103171642.htm
Mindfulness meditation may ease fatigue, depression in multiple sclerosis
September 28, 2010
Science Daily/American Academy of Neurology
Learning mindfulness meditation may help people who have multiple sclerosis with the fatigue, depression and other life challenges that commonly accompany the disease, according to a new study.
n the study, people who took an eight-week class in mindfulness meditation training reduced their fatigue and depression and improved overall quality of life compared to people with MS who received only usual medical care. The positive effects continued for at least six months.
"People with MS must often confront special challenges of life related to profession, financial security, recreational and social activities, and personal relationships, not to mention the direct fears associated with current or future physical symptoms and disability. Fatigue, depression and anxiety are also common consequences of having MS." said study author Paul Grossman, PhD, of the University of Basel Hospital in Switzerland. "Unfortunately, the treatments that help slow the disease process may have little direct effect on people's overall quality of life, fatigue or depression. So any complementary treatments that can quickly and directly improve quality of life are very welcome."
Improvements among mindfulness participants were particularly large for those who showed significant levels of depression or fatigue at the beginning of the study. About 65 percent of participants showed evidence of serious levels of depression, anxiety or fatigue at the start of the study, and this risk group was reduced by a third at the end of training and six months later.
The other benefits of the training were also still apparent six months after the training ended, although they were sometimes reduced compared to right after finishing the training. Reductions in fatigue, however, were stable from the end of treatment to six months later.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100927162243.htm
Mindfulness meditation increases well-being in adolescent boys
September 1, 2010
Science Daily/University of Cambridge
"Mindfulness," the process of learning to become more aware of our ongoing experiences, increases well-being in adolescent boys, a new study reports.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed 155 boys from two independent UK schools, Tonbridge and Hampton, before and after a four-week crash course in mindfulness. After the trial period, the 14 and 15 year-old boys were found to have increased well-being, defined as the combination of feeling good (including positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, interest and affection) and functioning well.
Professor Felicia Huppert of the Well-being Institute at the University of Cambridge said: "More and more we are realising the importance of supporting the overall mental health of children. Our study demonstrates that this type of training improves well-being in adolescents and that the more they practice, the greater the benefits. Importantly, many of the students genuinely enjoyed the exercises and said they intended to continue them -- a good sign that many children would be receptive to this type of intervention.
"Another significant aspect of this study is that adolescents who suffered from higher levels of anxiety were the ones who benefitted most from the training."
For the experiment, students in six classes were trained in mindful awareness -- mindfulness. Mindfulness is a 'way of paying attention. It means consciously bringing awareness to our experience, in the present moment, without making judgements about it'. Students in the five control classes attended their normal religious studies lessons.
The training consisted of four 40 minute classes, one per week, which presented the principles and practice of mindfulness. The classes covered the concepts of awareness and acceptance, and taught the schoolboys such things as how to practice bodily awareness by noticing where they were in contact with their chairs or the floor, paying attention to their breathing, and noticing all the sensations involved in walking.
The students were also asked to practice outside the classroom and were encouraged to listen to a CD or mp3 file for eight minutes a day. These exercises are intended to improve concentration and reduce stress.
All participants completed a short series of online questionnaires before and after the mindfulness project. The questionnaires measured the effect of the training on changes in mindful awareness, resilience (the ability to modify responses to changing situations) and psychological well-being.
The researchers found that although it was a short programme, the students who participated in the mindfulness training had increased levels of well-being which were proportional to the amount of time the students spent practicing their new skills.
Professor Huppert continued: "We believe that the effects of mindfulness training can enhance well-being in a number of ways. If you practice being in the present, you can increase positive feelings by savouring pleasurable on-going experiences. Additionally, calming the mind and observing experiences with curiosity and acceptance not only reduces stress but helps with attention control and emotion regulation -- skills which are valuable both inside and outside the classroom."
The success of this initial study has recently led to the creation of an exciting 8 week mindfulness curriculum for schools in both the state and private sectors. This new curriculum, which includes games and video clips, should have even greater benefits.
For further information, see http://mindfulnessinschools.org.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100901111720.htm
Meditation helps increase attention span
July 16, 2010
Science Daily/Association for Psychological Science
It's nearly impossible to pay attention to one thing for a long time. A new study looks at whether Buddhist meditation can improve a person's ability to be attentive and finds that meditation training helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see.
The research was inspired by work on Buddhist monks, who spend years training in meditation. "You wonder if the mental skills, the calmness, the peace that they express, if those things are a result of their very intensive training or if they were just very special people to begin with," says Katherine MacLean, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Her co-advisor, Clifford Saron, did some research with monks decades ago and wanted to study meditation by putting volunteers through intensive training and seeing how it changes their mental abilities.
About 140 people applied to participate; they heard about it via word of mouth and advertisements in Buddhist-themed magazines. Sixty were selected for the study. A group of thirty people went on a meditation retreat while the second group waited their turn; that meant the second group served as a control for the first group. All of the participants had been on at least three five-to-ten day meditation retreats before, so they weren't new to the practice. They studied meditation for three months at a retreat in Colorado with B. Alan Wallace, one of the study's co-authors and a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar.
The people took part in several experiments; results from one are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. At three points during the retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.
Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day.
The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding. "Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it's kind of a perfect index of meditation training," says MacLean. "People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."
This experiment is one of many that were done by Saron, MacLean and a team of nearly 30 researchers with the same group of participants. It's the most comprehensive study of intensive meditation to date, using methods drawn from fields as diverse as molecular biology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Future analyses of these same volunteers will look at other mental abilities, such as how well people can regulate their emotions and their general well-being.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100714121737.htm
Meditation reduces the emotional impact of pain
June 2, 2010
Science Daily/University of Manchester
People who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant because their brains anticipate the pain less, a new study has found.
Scientists from The University of Manchester recruited individuals into the study who had a diverse range of experience with meditation, spanning anything from months to decades. It was only the more advanced meditators whose anticipation and experience of pain differed from non-meditators.
The type of meditation practised also varied across individuals, but all included 'mindfulness meditation' practices, such as those that form the basis of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), recommended for recurrent depression by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 2004.
"Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis," said Dr Christopher Brown, who conducted the research. "Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50% of people with chronic pain. However, scientists have only just started to look into how meditation might reduce the emotional impact of pain."
The study, to be published in the journal Pain, found that particular areas of the brain were less active as meditators anticipated pain, as induced by a laser device. Those with longer meditation experience (up to 35 years) showed the least anticipation of the laser pain.
He said: "The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse."
Dr Brown said the findings should encourage further research into how the brain is changed by meditation practice. He said: "Although we found that meditators anticipate pain less and find pain less unpleasant, it's not clear precisely how meditation changes brain function over time to produce these effects.
"However, the importance of developing new treatments for chronic pain is clear: 40% of people who suffer from chronic pain report inadequate management of their pain problem."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602091315.htm
Mindfulness meditation effective in marriage and family therapy curriculum
April 7, 2010
Science Daily/Virginia Tech
Mindfulness meditation helps students improve their ability to be emotionally present in therapy sessions with clients. It helps beginners, who can sometimes feel overwhelmed, stop focusing on themselves and think more about others.
Although most extensively described in the Buddhist tradition, McCollum teaches mindfulness as a secular practice, compatible with all religious beliefs. Mindfulness meditation involves deliberately focusing one's attention on present experience -- thoughts, physical sensations, emotions -- and doing one's best to stay present with those experiences without judging them or avoiding the difficult aspects.
Extensive research on mindfulness in health care points to benefits to be gained from the practice. For novice therapists, another advantage is that mindfulness meditation helps them to switch out of problem solving into being more present, more empathetic, and more compassionate, all important aspects of the therapeutic process, said McCollum. He has practiced mindfulness for over 20 years and began to introduce the practice into the Virginia Tech MFT curriculum about five years ago after seeing students struggle to be emotionally available to clients.
Among the study's findings:
Mindfulness helped students be present in their sessions. They were able to attend to their inner experience during what was happening with the clients in front of them, and further bring these two domains together in the therapist-client interaction. However, the students also made clear that this was not a process of becoming absorbed. They described instances where they were able to remain present with intense or difficult material in sessions without becoming "infected" with it; that is, in contact but not overwhelmed, a theme referred to as "centered."
The students credited several "effects" of their mindfulness practice with their ability to be present as therapists. They felt they were calmer in general and specifically in their therapy sessions; were more aware of their inner chatter and could either decrease or disconnect from it, and were able to slow down their perceived inner pace or sense of hurry. Finally, some of them used brief periods of formal practice to allow themselves to set aside thoughts and feelings associated with the previous session or with their lives outside of the clinic and focus their attention on what was happening in the current client session.
The students' experience of presence seems to have formed a foundation for them to shift their mode of being in the session. Being did not become their sole mode in therapy sessions but they appeared to reach more balance between the two modes. What helped them make this shift was seeing the positive effects on the clients of their changed presence. For most students, this came through interaction with clients in the session; some actually meditated with their clients and were encouraged when clients found this a useful experience.
The students reported explicitly experiencing a sense of compassion and acceptance. As they came to accept themselves in the therapist role, they were better able to accept their clients. Some students came to a stance of compassion that was consistent with the traditional meditation literature -- seeing commonality between their own struggles and their clients' struggles and recognizing their shared humanity.
"Our findings suggest that mindfulness meditation may be a useful addition to clinical training," said McCollum.
"When I first thought back about the mindfulness experience, I wasn't sure how much it still applied. I thought, 'I don't practice daily, and I don't use it as often as I should.' Then I realized that I was wrong. I do practice daily and I do use the experience often. However, it's no longer a conscience practice. It's something I've incorporated into who I am and how I deal with the struggles and frustrations I face every day. When I look back and who I was before the mindfulness experience, I realize how I 'became' the stress I experience. I would think about how stress had affected me in the past and how it would affect my future. I would get more frustrated and more irritated… Now, while I experience as much stress as I did before, I am more aware of my present experience and the stress seems outside of who I am. I worry less about how I have experienced it in the past and how it will impact my future. I am also not negative about the experience. I'm aware of it, I notice it, and for the most part, I'm able to let it go."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100407144705.htm
Building fit minds under stress
February 17, 2010
Science Daily/University of Pennsylvania
A new study in which training was provided to a high-stress U.S. military group preparing for deployment to Iraq has demonstrated a positive link between mindfulness training, or MT, and improvements in mood and working memory.
The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions. The study also suggests that sufficient MT practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress challenges that require a tremendous amount of cognitive control, self-awareness, situational awareness and emotional regulation.
To study the protective effects of mindfulness training on psychological health in individuals about to experience extreme stress, cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha of the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn and Elizabeth A. Stanley of Georgetown University provided mindfulness training for the first time to U.S. Marines before deployment. Jha and her research team investigated working memory capacity and affective experience in individuals participating in a training program developed and delivered by Stanley, a former U.S. Army officer and security-studies professor with extensive experience in mindfulness techniques.
The program, called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT™), aims to cultivate greater psychological resilience or "mental armor" by bolstering mindfulness.
The program emphasized integrating mindfulness exercises, like focused attention on the breath and mindful movement, into pre-deployment training. These mindfulness skills were to regulate symptoms in the body and mind following an experience of extreme stress. The importance of regularly engaging in mindfulness exercises was also emphasized.
"Our findings suggest that, just as daily physical exercise leads to physical fitness, engaging in mindfulness exercises on a regular basis may improve mind-fitness," Jha said. "Working memory is an important feature of mind-fitness. Not only does it safeguard against distraction and emotional reactivity, but it also provides a mental workspace to ensure quick-and-considered decisions and action plans. Building mind-fitness with mindfulness training may help anyone who must maintain peak performance in the face of extremely stressful circumstances, from first responders, relief workers and trauma surgeons, to professional and Olympic athletes."
The study findings are in line with prior research on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, programs and suggest that MMFT may provide "psychological prophylaxis," or protection from cognitive and emotional disturbances, even among high-stress cohorts such as members of the military preparing for deployment. Given the high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental-health disturbances suffered by those returning from war, providing such training prior to deployment may buffer against potential lifelong psychological illness by bolstering working memory capacity.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216101153.htm
New mental treatment improves anxiety and depression in secondary education teachers
December 7, 2009
Science Daily/University of Granada
Research in Spain supports the effectiveness of mindfulness, an emotional self-regulating tool that consists in focusing on what we are doing, thinking about or feeling at every moment. This psychological technique, more and more popular in the U.S., contributed to fight against psychological diseases such as anxiety, depression, concern or complaints about health, and improves emotional regulation.
Besides, as a consequence of the mental training, both the girls with chronic concern and the teachers improved their subjective rates of anxiety, depression, concern, complaints about health and emotional regulation, together with certain con psycho-physiological such as, for example, cardiac, muscular and respiratory variables. Delgado Pastor says that, in the light of the results obtained, they have proved the "effectiveness of training mindfulness abilities and human values in the teaching sector as an emotional self-regulating tool, stress prevention for teachers and students, as well as to facilitate the teaching-learning process."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091203091906.htm
Brief Training in Meditation May Help Manage Pain
November 10, 2009
Science Daily/University of North Carolina at Charlotte
An experimental study examining the perception of pain and the effects of various mental training techniques has found that a relatively short and simple meditation method can have a significant positive effect on pain management.
Though pain research during the past decade has shown that extensive meditation training can have a positive effect in reducing a person's awareness and sensitivity to pain, the effort, time commitment, and financial obligations required has made the treatment not practical for many patients. Now, a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte shows that a single hour of training spread out over a three day period can produce the same kind of analgesic effect.
"This study is the first study to demonstrate the efficacy of such a brief intervention on the perception of pain," noted Fadel Zeidan, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UNC Charlotte and the paper's lead author. "Not only did the meditation subjects feel less pain than the control group while meditating but they also experienced less pain sensitivity while not meditating."
Over the course of three experiments employing harmless electrical shocks administered in gradual increments, the researchers measured the effect of brief sessions of mindfulness meditation training on pain awareness measuring responses that were carefully calibrated to insure reporting accuracy. Subjects who received the meditation training were compared to controls and to groups using relaxation and distraction techniques. The researchers measured changes in the subjects' rating of pain at "low" and "high" levels during the different activities, and also changes in their general sensitivity to pain through the process of calibrating responses before the activities.
Zeidan stresses that the effect the researchers measured in the meditation subjects was a lessening of pain but not a lessening of sensation. The calibration results showed little change in the meditation subjects' sensitivity to the sensation of electricity, but a significant change in what level of shock was perceived to be painful.
"The short course of meditation was very effective on pain perception," Zeidan said. "We got a very high effect size for the periods when they were meditating.
"In fact, it was kind of freaky for me. I was ramping at 400-500 milliamps and their arms would be jolting back and forth because the current was stimulating a motor nerve. Yet they would still be asking, 'A 2?' ('2' being the level of electrical shock that designates low pain) It was really surprising," he said.
Zeidan suspects that the mindfulness training lessens the awareness of and sensitivity to pain because it trains subjects' brains to pay attention to sensations at the present moment rather than anticipating future pain or dwelling on the emotions caused by pain, and thus reduces anxiety.
"The mindfulness training taught them that distractions, feelings, emotions are momentary, don't require a label or judgment because the moment is already over," Zeidan noted. "With the meditation training they would acknowledge the pain, they realize what it is, but just let it go. They learn to bring their attention back to the present."
Though the results are in line with past findings regarding mindfulness practitioners, Zeidan says that the findings are important because they show that meditation is much easier to use for pain management than it was previously believed to be because a very short, simple course of training is all that is required in order to achieve a significant effect. Even self-administered training might be effective, according to Zeidan.
"What's neat here is that this is the briefest known way to promote a meditation state and yet it has an effect in pain management. People who want to make use of the technique might not need a meditation facilitator -- they might be able to get the necessary training off the internet, " Zeidan said. "All you have to do is use your mind, change the way you look at the perception of pain and that, ultimately, might help alleviate the feeling of that pain."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110065909.htm
Regular Yoga Practice Is Associated with Mindful Eating
August 16, 2009
Science Daily/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating, and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese, according to a new study
The study was prompted by initial findings reported four years ago by Alan Kristal, Dr.P.H., and colleagues, who found that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-age spread in normal-weight people and may promote weight loss in those who are overweight. At the time, the researchers suspected that the weight-loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger and satiety than the physical activity of yoga practice itself.
"In our earlier study, we found that middle-age people who practice yoga gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. We hypothesized that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behavior," said Kristal, associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center.
The researchers found that people who ate mindfully – those were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression. The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating.
"These findings fit with our hypothesis that yoga increases mindfulness in eating and leads to less weight gain over time, independent of the physical activity aspect of yoga practice," said Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
"Beyond calories and diets, mindful eating takes a more holistic approach that can empower individuals to build positive relationships with food and eating, said first author Celia Framson, M.P.H., R.D., C.D., a former graduate student of Kristal's – and former yoga teacher – who now works with adolescents with eating disorders at Seattle Children's Hospital. "The Mindful Eating Questionnaire offers a new and relevant dimension for masuring the effectiveness of dietary behavior interventions. It also encourages nutrition and medical practitioners to consider the broad scope of behavior involved in healthy eating," she said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090803185712.htm
Mindful Meditation, Shared Dialogues Reduce Physician Burnout
September 23, 2009
Science Daily/University of Rochester Medical Center
Training in mindfulness meditation and communication can alleviate the psychological distress and burnout experienced by many physicians and can improve their well-being, researchers report.
The training also can expand a physician's capacity to relate to patients and enhance patient-centered care, according to the researchers, who were led by Michael S. Krasner, M.D., associate professor of Clinical Medicine.
"From the patient's perspective, we hear all too often of dissatisfaction in the quality of presence from their physician. From the practitioner's perspective, the opportunity for deeper connection is all too often missed in the stressful, complex, and chaotic reality of medical practice," Krasner said. "Enhancing the already inherent capacity of the physician to experience fully the clinical encounter—not only its pleasant but also its most unpleasant aspects—without judgment but with a sense of curiosity and adventure seems to have had a profound effect on the experience of stress and burnout. It also seems to enhance the physician's ability to connect with the patient as a unique human being and to center care around that uniqueness.
"Cultivating these qualities of mindful communication with colleagues, anectodotally, had an unexpected benefit of combating the practitioners' sense of isolation and brought forth the very experiences that are such a rich source of meaning in the life of the clinician," he said.
"The most salient element was the collegial effect of weathered physicians reflecting on mutual experience using a theme-based approach in a safe environment," Chamberlain said. "It is a unique opportunity to return to our roots as physicians, exploring in a workshop format abstract yet key emotionally charged or difficult issues that many of us had not visited so academically since medical school. Perception of the impact and approach to those issues is quite different once tempered by experience, particularly in a program that emphasizes awareness of the moment. It is a singular opportunity to do-over some of our medical school experience, and get much more out of it than the first time, as one reflects on how others in the group have grappled with and addressed the complex experiences of being a physician whose life touches and is touched by others constantly. The program is all about the experience of being a physician. Not what to do, or how to do it, but what it feels like. That is unique, and quite refreshing."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090922162259.htm
Workplace Yoga and Meditation Can Lower Feelings of Stress
August 5, 2009
Science Daily/Ohio State University
Twenty minutes per day of guided workplace meditation and yoga combined with six weekly group sessions can lower feelings of stress by more than 10 percent and improve sleep quality in sedentary office employees, a pilot study suggests.
The study offered participants a modified version of what is known as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a program established in 1979 to help hospital patients in Massachusetts assist in their own healing that is now in wide use around the world.
In this context, mindfulness refers in part to one’s heightened awareness of an external stressor as the first step toward relaxing in a way that can minimize the effects of that stress on the body.
While the traditional MBSR program practice takes up an hour per day for eight weeks supplemented by lengthy weekly sessions and a full-day retreat, the modified version developed at Ohio State University for this study was designed for office-based workers wearing professional attire.
Mindful attention awareness increased significantly and perceived stress decreased significantly among the intervention group when compared to the control group’s responses. Overall sleep quality increased in both groups, but three of seven components of sleep were more affected in the intervention group.
On average, mindfulness increased by about 9.7 percent and perceived stress decreased by about 11 percent among the group that experienced the intervention. These participants also reported that it took them less time to fall asleep, they had fewer sleep disturbances and they experienced less daytime dysfunction than did members of the non-intervention group.
The researchers also took saliva samples to test for the presence of cortisol, a stress hormone, but found no significant changes in average daily levels of the hormone over time for participants in both groups. Klatt said the design of this part of the pilot study could have affected the result, and the sample collection technique will be changed in subsequent studies.
Klatt said mindfulness-based stress reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, has been studied widely and determined to be useful in lowering symptoms ranging from depression and anxiety to chronic pain. But the time commitment required in the program makes it impractical for busy working professionals, and adding a stress-reduction class outside of work could add stress to these people, she said.
So Klatt set out to develop what she calls a “low dose” of the program that is suitable for the workplace and still offers stress-reduction benefits. She specifically scheduled weekly sessions during lunch to avoid interfering with work time or home time, and combined movement with verbal prompts and music that are cues for participants to relax.
“As I’ve been working on the program, I heard so many of the participants say they wish they had learned this earlier,” Klatt said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090804114102.htm
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an Effective Treatment for Chronic Insomnia
June 16, 2009
Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine
A majority of people experiencing chronic insomnia can experience a normalization of sleep parameters through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, according to new research.
Results indicate that 50 percent to 60 percent of participants with chronic sleep onset insomnia, sleep maintenance insomnia or both experienced remission of their primary sleep difficulty. Among the 64 participants who completed five or more treatment sessions, there were significant improvements on presenting complaints, as well as all other measures, including sleep efficiency, average nightly awakenings, total sleep time and average nights of sleep medication use per week.
The multi-component, CBT-I program included comprehensive evaluations of patients' habits, attitudes and knowledge concerning sleep. The program was designed to involve six to seven treatment sessions. Specific strategies included education on sleep regulating systems, sleep scheduling recommendations, sleep hygiene education, sleep consolidation therapy, stimulus control therapy, relaxation training, cognitive therapy and mindfulness training.
According to Wetzler, a related study found that of participants who completed at least four treatment sessions of CBT-I, 78 percent of those using sleep medication for three or more nights per week were able to completely discontinue use of sleep medications. Findings from this study indicate that those who discontinued use of sleep medications not only stopped using drugs to sleep but also slept better than when they were taking sleep medications.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090609072709.htm