Whoa! It's DEAN time! What's the latest and greatest in your neck of the woods?
It's kind of ironic that Circus is today's topic. I learned from ME*D-I-L today that the Circus will be coming to town here in July. When I commented excitedly that it's the same week that (her daughter) Eldest*Grand will be staying with us, however, she asked us to skip it because they're taking her to it in August. =Sigh=
I need great ideas for things to do with a 7 (almost 8) year old Grand who is super smart and gets taken to the ballet, etc., every year.
Alan, I read the article…a good one! Thanks for posting the link!
I very much liked this bit: "A challenge has been figuring out precisely what interviewees mean when they use concepts like God or spirituality. Everyone defines God differently, even when they belong to the same religion."
When I meet with seekers, one of the first things I need to help them articulate is their comprehension of the Holy or God. I concur that no two people express this the same way. My take on why is that each person has a unique relationship with the Holy or God. I think this is essentially why cults and other groups who push for uniformity are harmful.
Just to add that it all seems to underscore my view that Unitive experiences work as they do because they tap into that in the Universe that is at one with all. If that is manifested in the brain in a certain way, or certain area of the brain, that doesn't necessarily mean the brain is the cause; it could simply be how the brain responds to something beyond itself.
Here's a Washington Post article that I've been saving since 2005:
Part One:
Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds By Marc Kaufman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A05
Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
Scientists used to believe the opposite -- that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and "neuroplasticity."
Davidson says his newest results from the meditation study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, take the concept of neuroplasticity a step further by showing that mental training through meditation (and presumably other disciplines) can itself change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain.
The new findings are the result of a long, if unlikely, collaboration between Davidson and Tibet's Dalai Lama, the world's best-known practitioner of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama first invited Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks' meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson's lab.
The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners to Davidson's lab to have them hooked up for electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training.
The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical sensors and asked to meditate for short periods. Thinking and other mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses.
Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that focus because it does not require concentrating on particular objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed state of being.
Davidson said that the results unambiguously showed that meditation activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of the waves through the brain was far better organized and coordinated than in the students. The meditation novices showed only a slight increase in gamma wave activity while meditating, but some of the monks produced gamma wave activity more powerful than any previously reported in a healthy person, Davidson said.
The monks who had spent the most years meditating had the highest levels of gamma waves, he added. This "dose response" -- where higher levels of a drug or activity have greater effect than lower levels -- is what researchers look for to assess cause and effect.
In previous studies, mental activities such as focus, memory, learning and consciousness were associated with the kind of enhanced neural coordination found in the monks. The intense gamma waves found in the monks have also been associated with knitting together disparate brain circuits, and so are connected to higher mental activity and heightened awareness, as well.
Davidson's research is consistent with his earlier work that pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex as a brain region associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions. Using functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) on the meditating monks, Davidson found that their brain activity -- as measured by the EEG -- was especially high in this area.
Davidson concludes from the research that meditation not only changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite possibly produces permanent changes. That finding, he said, is based on the fact that the monks had considerably more gamma wave activity than the control group even before they started meditating. A researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Jon Kabat-Zinn, came to a similar conclusion several years ago.
Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities are now testing some of the same monks on different aspects of their meditation practice: their ability to visualize images and control their thinking. Davidson is also planning further research.
"What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one," he said. In time, "we'll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously."
Vague recollection: I read a story a few years back in Analog or Asimov's in which a detector had been devised that could identify terrorists actuated by fanatical religious belief. They tested the contraption very carefully, and found that Catholic priests and nuns did not set off the detector. The idea seemed to be (a sound one IMO) that there is a big difference between healthy faith and unhealthy, fanatical faith. The relevant point being that the detector did its thing on brain waves (brain activity anyway). So there must have been an underlying assumption that healthy and unhealthy religious experience/perception manifest differently in the brain.
That would be great if accurate. The fact that anyone can learn meditation and throw off the sensors, and that some fine people are just nervous types from childhood. probably means the sensors would not be foolproof.
listener--I have lately begun to consider that perhaps the "born-again" experience of evangelicalism (which is probably what attracted my ancestors to Methodism) may be the same basic experience that changed my life, although approached from and through a completely different frame of reference. Since it cannot be contained by words, we speak about it in code--which will be understandable to those who have approached it in the same way, and inscrutable to others.
And now to bed, far later that I should--but I got off work late.
Alan, I hear you regarding that interior "born-again" experience. It may be that the evangelical version is a sort of sacramental version: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. I know people who have held both together in all honesty and mercy. For me the inward and spiritual grace suffices. For some, mostly the outward and visible sign is experienced (and I think that sort is pretty dangerous). I love your expression of the understandable and the inscrutable. Amen!
Whoa! It's DEAN time! What's the latest and greatest in your neck of the woods?
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of ironic that Circus is today's topic. I learned from ME*D-I-L today that the Circus will be coming to town here in July. When I commented excitedly that it's the same week that (her daughter) Eldest*Grand will be staying with us, however, she asked us to skip it because they're taking her to it in August. =Sigh=
I need great ideas for things to do with a 7 (almost 8) year old Grand who is super smart and gets taken to the ballet, etc., every year.
Time to introduce her to science fiction?
DeleteAlan, I read the article…a good one! Thanks for posting the link!
ReplyDeleteI very much liked this bit:
"A challenge has been figuring out precisely what interviewees mean when they use concepts like God or spirituality. Everyone defines God differently, even when they belong to the same religion."
When I meet with seekers, one of the first things I need to help them articulate is their comprehension of the Holy or God. I concur that no two people express this the same way. My take on why is that each person has a unique relationship with the Holy or God. I think this is essentially why cults and other groups who push for uniformity are harmful.
Just to add that it all seems to underscore my view that Unitive experiences work as they do because they tap into that in the Universe that is at one with all. If that is manifested in the brain in a certain way, or certain area of the brain, that doesn't necessarily mean the brain is the cause; it could simply be how the brain responds to something beyond itself.
DeleteHere's a Washington Post article that I've been saving since 2005:
DeletePart One:
Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A05
Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
Scientists used to believe the opposite -- that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and "neuroplasticity."
Part Two:
ReplyDeleteDavidson says his newest results from the meditation study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, take the concept of neuroplasticity a step further by showing that mental training through meditation (and presumably other disciplines) can itself change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain.
The new findings are the result of a long, if unlikely, collaboration between Davidson and Tibet's Dalai Lama, the world's best-known practitioner of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama first invited Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks' meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson's lab.
The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners to Davidson's lab to have them hooked up for electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training.
The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical sensors and asked to meditate for short periods. Thinking and other mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses.
Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that focus because it does not require concentrating on particular objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed state of being.
Davidson said that the results unambiguously showed that meditation activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of the waves through the brain was far better organized and coordinated than in the students. The meditation novices showed only a slight increase in gamma wave activity while meditating, but some of the monks produced gamma wave activity more powerful than any previously reported in a healthy person, Davidson said.
The monks who had spent the most years meditating had the highest levels of gamma waves, he added.
This "dose response" -- where higher levels of a drug or activity have greater effect than lower levels -- is what researchers look for to assess cause and effect.
Part Three:
ReplyDeleteIn previous studies, mental activities such as focus, memory, learning and consciousness were associated with the kind of enhanced neural coordination found in the monks. The intense gamma waves found in the monks have also been associated with knitting together disparate brain circuits, and so are connected to higher mental activity and heightened awareness, as well.
Davidson's research is consistent with his earlier work that pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex as a brain region associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions. Using functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) on the meditating monks, Davidson found that their brain activity -- as measured by the EEG -- was especially high in this area.
Davidson concludes from the research that meditation not only changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite possibly produces permanent changes. That finding, he said, is based on the fact that the monks had considerably more gamma wave activity than the control group even before they started meditating. A researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Jon Kabat-Zinn, came to a similar conclusion several years ago.
Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities are now testing some of the same monks on different aspects of their meditation practice: their ability to visualize images and control their thinking. Davidson is also planning further research.
"What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one," he said. In time, "we'll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Howard is Top Banana!
ReplyDeleteI've been trying to post that all day!
Vague recollection: I read a story a few years back in Analog or Asimov's in which a detector had been devised that could identify terrorists actuated by fanatical religious belief. They tested the contraption very carefully, and found that Catholic priests and nuns did not set off the detector. The idea seemed to be (a sound one IMO) that there is a big difference between healthy faith and unhealthy, fanatical faith. The relevant point being that the detector did its thing on brain waves (brain activity anyway). So there must have been an underlying assumption that healthy and unhealthy religious experience/perception manifest differently in the brain.
ReplyDeleteThat would be great if accurate. The fact that anyone can learn meditation and throw off the sensors, and that some fine people are just nervous types from childhood. probably means the sensors would not be foolproof.
Deletelistener--I have lately begun to consider that perhaps the "born-again" experience of evangelicalism (which is probably what attracted my ancestors to Methodism) may be the same basic experience that changed my life, although approached from and through a completely different frame of reference. Since it cannot be contained by words, we speak about it in code--which will be understandable to those who have approached it in the same way, and inscrutable to others.
ReplyDeleteAnd now to bed, far later that I should--but I got off work late.
--Alan
Alan, I hear you regarding that interior "born-again" experience. It may be that the evangelical version is a sort of sacramental version: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. I know people who have held both together in all honesty and mercy. For me the inward and spiritual grace suffices. For some, mostly the outward and visible sign is experienced (and I think that sort is pretty dangerous). I love your expression of the understandable and the inscrutable. Amen!
Delete