In the first scientific article to come from its pioneering studies of
long-term Buddhist meditation practitioners, a UW-Madison team has found
that long-term meditators (or "adepts") show markedly different patterns
of brain electrical oscillations compared to a group with no previous
meditative experience, when both of them generated a standard meditative
practice.
The researchers, led by psychology and psychiatry professor
Richard Davidson
and Waisman Center
scientist Antoine
Lutz, say the findings suggest that mental training of the sort
involved in meditation relies on mechanisms in the brain — called neural
synchrony — involved in the global coordination of brain activity and
could induce both short-term and long-term change in the brain.
The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
The study focused on a comparison of brain-oscillation patterns,
reflecting neural synchrony, between a group of eight long-term Buddhist
practitioners of traditional Tibetan meditation and a group of 10 healthy
student volunteers who had no experience in meditation but who were taught
meditation before the experiment.
Neural synchrony is a mechanism by which groups of neurons, oscillating
at different frequencies, fire in phase. The transient coordination of
these neural circuits across the brain is comparable to the coordination
of jazz musicians who are playing and improvising together.
The UW team focused on the "gamma-band" rhythms, a range of
fast-frequency oscillations that is associated with higher mental activity
such as attention, learning and conscious perception.
The subjects in the study were asked to generate a standard meditation
state several times, alternating with a resting state. The type of
meditation each group pursued involves the voluntary generation of
compassion and loving kindness. It does not involve concentration on
particular objects, memories or images, but instead, encourages the
practitioner to generate loving kindness and compassion toward all feeling
beings without thinking about anyone in particular. This "nonreferential"
meditative state is designed to permeate the mind without focusing on any
one person or being.
Three findings emerged from the study. First, the research team found
that the two groups had significantly different baseline brain-wave
patterns in the resting state before the meditation began. Compared to the
control group, the Buddhist monks had a higher ratio of "gamma-band"
rhythms to slower oscillatory rhythms. This suggests that long-term
meditation practice changes the baseline state of the brain.
Second, the difference between the two groups increased sharply during
meditation and remained higher than the baseline after meditation. Third,
following each period of meditation in the post-meditation baseline state,
the practitioners continued to display high-amplitude gamma synchrony
compared with the controls.
These findings indicate that mental training to increase compassion and
loving kindness has profound effects on brain function. The results
further suggest that these qualities are not fixed characteristics of
people, but rather can be improved through practice and training.
