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Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation
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Short Description: Buddha’s Brain:. Neuroplasticity and Meditation. I. n a recent visit to the United States,. the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the ...
Content Inside: [in the SPOTLIGHT] Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation In a recent visit to the United States, niques designed to promote relaxation to Buddhist Vipassana and Mahamudra, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the exercises, performed with a more far- and are also implicated in many popular Society for Neuroscience's annual reaching goal such as a heightened sense secular interventions that draw on meeting in Washington, D.C. Over of well-being. It is thus essential to be spe- Buddhist practices. the past several years, he has helped cific about the type of meditation practice recruit Tibetan Buddhist monks for-- under investigation. In [3], meditation FINDINGS OF BRAIN and directly encouraged--research on was conceptualized as a family of complex CHANGES IN MEDITATION the brain and meditation in the Waisman emotional and attentional regulatory In what follows, we summarize the Laboratory for Brain Imaging and strategies developed for various ends, changes in the brain that occur during Behavior at the University of Wisconsin- including the cultivation of well-being each of these styles of meditation prac- Madison. The findings from stud- tice. Such changes include alter- ies in this unusual sample, as well ations in patterns of brain THE TERM NEUROPLASTICITY IS as related research efforts, suggest function assessed with functional that over the course of meditating USED TO DESCRIBE THE BRAIN magnetic resonance imaging for tens of thousands of hours, the CHANGES THAT OCCUR IN (fMRI), changes in the cortical long-term practitioners had actu- RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE. evoked response to visual stimuli ally altered the structure and func- that reflect the impact of medita- tion of their brains. tion on attention, and alterations In this article we discuss neuroplastic- and emotional balance. Here we focus on in amplitude and synchrony of high- ity, which encompasses such alterations, two common styles of meditation, i.e., frequency oscillations that probably and the findings from these studies. focused attention (FA) meditation and play an important role in connectivity Further, we comment on the associated open monitoring (OM) meditation. among widespread circuitry in the signal processing (SP) challenges, the FA meditation entails voluntarily brain. current status, and how SP can con- focusing attention on a chosen object in a tribute to advancing these studies. sustained fashion. OM meditation involves EXPERIMENTAL SETUP nonreactively monitoring the content of The experiments described below that WHAT IS NEUROPLASTICITY? experience from moment to moment, pri- measure hemodynamic changes with The term neuroplasticity is used to marily as a means to recognize the nature fMRI require a high-field-strength mag- describe the brain changes that occur in of emotional and cognitive patterns. netic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner response to experience. There are many OM meditation initially involves the equipped with the appropriate pulse different mechanisms of neuroplasticity, use of FA training to calm the mind and sequences to acquire data rapidly and ranging from the growth of new connec- reduce distractions, but as FA advances, with the necessary fiber optic stimulus tions to the creation of new neurons. the cultivation of the monitoring skill per delivery devices so that visual stimuli When the framework of neuroplasticity se becomes the main focus of practice. The can be presented to the subject while he is applied to meditation, we suggest that aim is to reach a state in which no explicit or she lays in the bore of the magnet. the mental training of meditation is fun- focus on a specific object is retained; For the studies that measure brain elec- damentally no different than other forms instead, one remains only in the monitor- trical activity, a high-density recording of skill acquisition that can induce plas- ing state, attentive moment by moment to system with between 64 and 256 elec- tic changes in the brain [1], [2]. anything that occurs in experience. trodes on the scalp surface is used. These two common styles of medita- WHAT IS MEDITATION? tion are often combined, whether in a FA MEDITATION The term meditation refers to a broad single session or over the course of a A recent study [4] used fMRI to inter- variety of practices, ranging from tech- practitioner's training. These styles are rogate the neural correlates of FA found with some variation in several Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2007.910429 meditation systems, including the (continued on page 172) 1053-5888/08/$25.002008IEEE IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [176] SEPTEMBER 2007
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