Contemplative Science

This is from 2003 All in the Mind hosted by Natasha Mitchell. An excerpt from transcript:

Natasha Mitchell: Richard Davidson, let's come to some of the work that you've been doing which really is an extension of your many years of work looking at our expression of emotions and the role that emotions have in our well being and in our essential nature as humans. You have actually been putting monks and meditators under brain scans.

Richard Davidson: Yes, we've been doing two kinds of research on meditation, one is work with individuals who in fact are naïve to meditation, where we train them with a short term program of meditation based on certain Buddhist meditation practices and then look at changes that occur over a relatively short period of time, just over the course of several months. What's actually remarkable is that we find any changes over such a short period of time, but in fact, we've recently published an article showing significant changes in certain measures of both brain and immune function that were produced by this very short-term course of mindfulness meditation.

The second kind of work we've done is work with experts, people who have spent many years in contemplative practice who have really very finely honed their skills in these practices, and that work is still very much ongoing. And it really represents I think a radical experiment in cross cultural and trans-disciplinary science because here the Buddhist practitioner becomes not a subject but a collaborator, given their expertise in contemplative science in helping us to understand the nature of the data that we're collecting, helping us to design appropriate experiments to capture some of the specific qualities of mind that maybe produced. One particular domain of work that has I think been extremely influential is work on plasticity of the brain, which indicates that the brain really is the organ that is built to change in response to experience. That gives a solid foundation for asking how meditation might change the brain in ways that maybe helpful.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's come to some of your results with people that you trained up over a period of time in mindfulness meditation and part of that process will also be tapping into some of the incredible observations you've been making over the years about how emotions reside in the brain, and how there's a variation in how emotions work in the brain across the two hemispheres of the brain.

Richard Davidson: That's right, and so one of the questions that we were interested in examining at the outset was whether meditation might change a specific pattern of activation in the pre-frontal cortex which we have previously associated with different emotional dispositions.

We have evidence to suggest that individuals who exhibit at base line - just in their resting state so to speak - greater activation in certain regions of the left pre-frontal cortex, those individuals have a more positive dispositional mood, that is they are happier people and there's a whole constellation of characteristics that we've discovered which is associated with that pattern.

And what we wanted to see is whether a short intervention of meditation, in this case it was two month course, whether individuals would show a change over that period of time in this direction compared to a control group of people that were not engaged in this meditation.

Natasha Mitchell: And what did you find?

Richard Davidson: And what we found is that individuals who participated showed a significant increase in activation in left pre-frontal regions of their brain. That was associated with a reduction in the amount of anxiety that they reported. And we also found remarkably that there was a change in the immune system in these individuals, compared to individuals who were in our control group. We found that to be particularly remarkable.

Natasha Mitchell: It's extraordinary.

Richard Davidson: Given the brevity of the training, it suggests that meditation was producing systematic changes in both the brain and the body in directions that were positive.

Thanks to WH for heads up. Read the whole transcript.