Meditation – Law Street

Can Meditation Change Your Brain?

Ashley Bell — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 20:20:09 +0000

Image courtesy of [Moyan Brenn via Flickr]

If you had the chance to change your brain, would you? If you said yes, meditation might be the answer. Meditation involves sustained thinking aimed to relax or achieve religious or spiritual purposes. It’s a simple and ancient practice; paintings found in the Indus Valley from 5,000-3,500 BCE depict people reposing in meditative postures. Throughout its long history, meditation has been lauded for virtues like improved moods and decreased anxiety. But how does meditation produce these benefits aside from just making people more relaxed?

How can you change your brain?

It turns out that meditation actually changes your brain. This might sound a little strange at first, but many things you do can change your brain thanks to a concept called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change through experiences or repeated practice. When exposed to a stimuli, the brain can actually create new neurons and form new neural connections that change its structure. When you learn to play new instruments or memorize complicated dance moves, you’re restructuring your brain’s neural pathways.

Think of it this way: when you lift weights repeatedly, your muscles probably get bigger or more toned. They change. Meditation exercises the brain, and like lifting weights, it can produce desired changes.

Funding for research on alternative medicine and meditation surged in the past several years. With healthier budgets and burgeoning new technologies, researchers discovered new scientific connections between meditation and changes in the brain. Below are some summaries of their findings.

Meditation Changes Gray Matter

Massachusetts General Hospital documented that meditation causes changes in the brain’s gray matter. Researchers there measured differences in gray matter concentration in subjects’ brains before and after an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program using magnetic resonance (MR) images. After meditation, subjects displayed more concentration in the gray matter of different brain regions, including the left hippocampus. They also took before and after images of a control group that practiced no meditation and saw zero notable changes.

Time out. I have gray stuff in my brain?

Yup. Gray matter tissue surrounds the cerebrum. It’s also called the cerebral cortex, but was dubbed gray matter because of its dull tone. This is the part of your brain that wrinkles. The cerebral cortex is responsible for many functions including motor movements, sensory processing, language, and cognitive skills.

After meditation, gray matter in the subjects’ brains became more concentrated in these regions:

The left hippocampus: The hippocampus is a vital component of the brain’s limbic system, the portion of the brain that handles emotions and memories. It also connects emotions and memories so you can form associations and experience a wave of happiness when recalling your favorite childhood memories. Meditation induced changes in only the left side of the hippocampus. Unfortunately, the function of the different sides eludes explanation. One study found that synapses in the left and right regions are asymmetrical with distinct structural differences, suggesting that they have separate but interrelated functions.
The posterior cingulate cortex: Many agree that the posterior cingulate cortex plays a role in cognition, specifically attention direction and rewards systems. Brains at rest, brains planning for the future, and brains reflecting on the past show increased activity in this region. A Duke University study suggests this region might be what keeps you motivated when learning something challenging. Posterior cingulate cortex activity in monkeys increased when they made errors in a test and needed to learn something new to improve their performance.
The temporo-parietal junction: The temporo-parietal junction is often associated with empathy. Studies have found activity in this region increases when subjects read stories about people who were accidentally or intentionally harmed.
The cerebellum: A large brain region called the cerebellum helps you make coordinated movements and communicates with several other structures in the brain. It’s how you can run, walk, eat, and throw a football without thinking of all of the tiny movements you need to perform to accomplish these seemingly simple tasks.
The amygdala: The researchers also found decreased gray matter density in the amygdala, a region associated with anxiety and stress.

Meditation Reduces Anxiety

The Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center found that meditation reduces subjects’ anxiety ratings by as much as 39 percent. They studied 15 volunteers with normal stress levels, no diagnosed issues, and no meditation experience. The volunteers learned the proper way to practice mindful meditation and took just four 20-minute classes. Scientists noted changes in the brain areas associated with worrying and emotions during and after the meditation.

Scientists noticed increased activity in the areas noted below. While each perform many complex functions, their associations with emotions, guilt, and conflict control contributed to the subjects’ decreased anxiety ratings.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex: The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been connected with decisionmaking and cognitive control as well as complex social interactions like emotional processing and guilt. Most people would be incensed after witnessing a poisoning attempt. Studies have shown that people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortexes don’t find a moral problem as long as the potential poisoner failed to kill the victim. They view the transaction only as deep as the outcome.
The anterior cingulate: The anterior cingulate activates during conflict. Recent research has found that it’s also active when we find something humorous. Researchers believe this points to its role in coping with situations. Your brain might not see the difference between trying to understand the punchline of a joke and trying to detect why your spouse could be mad at you.

Meditators Have Different Brains

Other studies from Massachusetts General Hospital reported that meditators’ brains differ structurally from non-meditators’ brains. Meditators have thicker regions for sensory processing and attention than non-meditators. Older people showed even more pronounced differences, suggesting that meditation might be able to reduce thinning of certain structures as the brain ages.

The study showed that you can change the structure of your brain, making certain areas thicker and stronger with constant practice. Why is that so special? Well, Albert Einstein might have owed some of his genius to thicker connective structures in his brain.

These regions indicated below were thicker in the meditators studied:

The prefrontal cortex: The prefrontal cortex engages when you’re involved in complex and abstract thought, emotions, planning, and introspection. It’s basically your decision center, taking information provided by your senses and deciding what to do with it. It might also play a role in creativity. Scientists studied brain images of jazz artists to see what the brain does during the spontaneous performance of music. During improvisation, the scans revealed a flurry of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. To make things more interesting, they noticed activity in the dorsol lateral prefrontal cortex decreased; this area of the brain manages inhibitions and detailed planning.
The insula: The insula is a mysterious prune-sized brain tissue thought to be important in integrating thoughts, senses, and emotions. For example, when you smell something you find repulsive, it’s probably the insula that relays the distaste to your brain in reaction to the odor. It also lights up during arousal–when people feel pain, crave drugs, listen to jokes, and even make financial decisions.

What else can meditation do?

Other studies have suggested fascinating effects of meditation without pinning down the actual brain structures responsible. According to these compelling findings, meditation might…

Allow You to Expand Limited Brain Resources

Our brains have limited capacity for processing synchronous stimuli. For example, when presented with two visual targets in close proximity, you can’t detect the second. This is called attentional blink. See for yourself:

But some studies suggest meditation reduces attentional blink. Attentional blink happens because the two targets compete for your limited brain resources. Meditators allocate their resources across the targets more effectively and therefore can detect both.

Make Us Masters of Pain

Meditation might influence reaction to pain. Researchers pitted 12 thirty-year meditation veterans against 12 normal, yet meditation-less control subjects. The meditation veterans showed a 40-50 percent lower response in their brains when exposed to pain than those in the control group. After the 12 members of the control group practiced meditation for five months, their brains’ responses to pain decreased by 40-50 percent, as well.

Mind Over Matter

Mind over matter. Believe and achieve. Mantras like this stare us down from classroom posters and self help tomes. While the statements are inspiring, few people take them literally. But evidence that you can change your brain through meditation gives these words new life. From changing your gray matter concentration to thickening certain regions of your brain, the emerging studies on meditation are compelling–even for the most skeptical of potential practitioners.

You have the power to change your brain. How’s that for an empowering meditation mantra?

Resources

Primary

Mind, Mood & Memory: Meditation–the Relaxation Remedy: Research Suggests Meditation Can Help Ease Stress, Improve Health and Well-Being, and Even Boost Brain Activity

Townsend Letter: Transcendental Meditation Reduces the Brain’s Reaction to Pain

New Scientist: How Life Shapes the Brainscape: From Meditation to Diet, Life Experiences Profoundly Change the Structure and Connectivity of the Brain

Mind, Mood & Memory: The Neuroscience of Meditation: Spending Time Consciously Directing Awareness to Present-Moment Experience Can Change the Brain’s Activities and Structure

Mind, Mood & Memory: Eight Ways to Improve Your Focus–and Your Memory; These Suggestions For Boosting Concentration Can Help You Strengthen Your Ability to Absorb Information

NIH: Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation

PLos Biology: Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources

NIH: Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density

Journal of Neuroscience: The Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Abstract State-Based Inference During Decision Making in Humans

Additional

Psych Central: Meditation That Eases Anxiety? Brain Scans Show Us How

Harvard: Eight Weeks to a Better Brain

Reference and User Services Quarterly: Meditation and Health: an Annotated Bibliography

Brain Facts: Mapping the Brain

Brain Facts: The Cerebellum

Education Portal: Hippocampus: Definition, Function & Location

Science Daily: How is Our Left Brain Different From Our Right?

Medical Daily: Motivation Stems From Single Brain Region: The Posterior Cingulate Cortex Keeps You Going When Learning is Tough

Brain Facts: The Moral Brain

Brain Facts: Neuroeconomics: Money and the Brain

Brain Facts: No Laughing (Gray) Matter: Laughter, the Brain, and Evolution

Brain Facts: Unlocking Creativity in the Brain

Psychology Today: An Overview of Meditation: Its Origins and Traditions

Ashley Bell

Ashley Bell communicates about health and wellness every day as a non-profit Program Manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from the College of William and Mary, and loves to investigate what changes in healthy policy and research might mean for the future. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Is Too Much Focus Making You Less Creative?

Ashley Bell — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 19:47:01 +0000

Image courtesy of [Peter Alfred Hess via Flickr]

Some problems have tormentingly evasive solutions. You think if you spend just five more minutes on it, everything will become clear. Five minutes turns into an hour. An hour after that, you’re brewing a fresh pot of coffee in a frenzy. You’re just drowsy. Once you’ve pumped yourself full of caffeine, you’ll wipe this sucker out in an hour tops.

The next morning you wake up feeling numb. You stayed up five hours past your bedtime and made little progress. What went wrong? We’re trained to think that if we keep our nose to the grind, stick with it, and push through our hard work will bloom into satisfying insight. But the truth is, focusing too hard for too long may be chasing away the insight you need to solve that niggling little problem.

What if I said you might be better off taking a warm shower instead of sucking down more caffeine? Or that too much focus might be making you less creative?

ADHD and the Creative Connection

If you don’t believe that NOT focusing might actually be a good thing, what studies have shown about creativity and people with ADHD might surprise you.

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, affects how the brain receives and processes information and how a person behaves as a result. The underlying causes haven’t been confirmed, but differences in the brain’s left prefrontal cortex and motor cortex have been proposed as possibilities. Symptoms of ADHD vary from person to person but many of the most typical qualities are inattentiveness, fidgeting, and impulsiveness.

While it is considered a disorder, studies have pointed to certain benefits that are associated with ADHD, one of which is creative thinking.

White and Shah found that people with ADHD are good at coming up with more divergent and creative solutions to problems than people without ADHD. People with ADHD out-performed their “normal” counterparts in certain tests, especially the Alternative Uses Task. In this task, subjects are asked to brainstorm alternative uses for mundane household items like paperclips. People with ADHD were able to come up with more (and more original) uses for the items.The researchers concluded that unrestrained brain function was a key driver of creative thought in those with ADHD. Why not use a brick as a “toilet submarine”? In other words, people with ADHD practiced more relaxed thinking, and came up with unique ideas.

Intrigued by their findings, the same researchers revisited the subject a few years later. In addition to administering controlled tests, they investigated the real-world creativity of their subjects by measuring creative achievements. People with ADHD had achieved more and earned more creative awards than those without it. They also found people with ADHD gravitated toward creating novel solutions to problems rather than working toward developing extant ideas.

Other researchers have tackled this subject to come up with more compelling links between ADHD and creativity:

Bonnie Cramond compared behavioral indicators of ADHD to behaviors indicative of creativity and found several links.

Darya Zabelina found that creativity is associated with relaxed attention–one of the trademark symptoms of ADHD.

Why is there a connection between relaxed focus and creative thought? It’s about letting go. “Over-focusers” get bogged down in minutiae and end up fixating on the wrong things. Relaxed people are able to make the broad, big-picture connections that too many extraneous details tend to hamper.

What “Aha” Moments Tell Us

Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist at Goldsmith’s in London, sought to answer why interrupting focus might actually be a good thing. He used an EEG (electroencephalogram) test to detect electrical activity in the brain as it solved verbal puzzles. In an EEG, metal disks called electrodes are attached to your scalp to detect the electrical impulses flashing through your brain. (You’ve probably seen this in at least one science fiction movie.) The EEG records the impulses in a series of lines that doctors and scientists are miraculously able to decode.

The test revealed that our brains know a lot more than we’re consciously aware of. A flurry of activity in the right frontal cortex indicated precognition of a solution eight seconds before subjects indicated they had solved the problem. This only happened when the subjects were about to solve the problem through insight. The other subjects were given hints and proceeded to solve the problems analytically. An eight-second lag in awareness of insight? Maybe that’s where that “tip of the tongue” feeling comes from.

Other studies aimed to dissect exactly how these subconscious insights occur. Dr. Kounios and Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University also turned to the EEG and fMRI to eavesdrop on brain activity.

The wired-in subjects toiled away at word puzzles as their brain waves were measured. They found widely distinct brain patterns associated with problems solved analytically versus those solved by insight. Insight solutions were associated with activity in the temporal lobes of both hemispheres and the mid-frontal cortex. Analytic solutions were associated with more activity over the posterior (visual) cortex.

Increased neural activity in the posterior cortex of those who solved problems analytically lead the researchers to believe that these subjects prepared for problem solving by directing attention outward–toward the next problem. On the other hand, the brain activity of those who solved the problems through insight did so through internal retrieval of solutions. In problems solved by insight, outward sensory awareness was dulled. It appeared as though the brain was barricading itself from distractions that might disrupt the treasured insight.

In the video below, Dr. John Kounios refers to this concept as “insight” vs “outsight.”

How does creativity work?

To figure out WHY certain people might naturally solve problems by insight vs analytical methods, Kounios turned back to the trusty old EEG to study people’s brain waves as they sat comfortably without knowledge of an upcoming test. After recording their resting-state brain activity, the subjects were given a problem.

The researchers predicted that people who solved more problems by insight would display:

Greater activity in the right hemisphere of the brain.
Greater diffuse activation of the visual system.

They were correct and not altogether surprised. A body of research pointed them to these predictions in the first place. In 1962, Mednick proposed that creativity stemmed from remote associations between ideas. In 2003, Ansburg & Hill found that the most creative people deploy their focus in a diffuse way. In 2005, Jung-Beeman connected loose association processing to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere was found to process tight association.

Loose association and diffuse thinking are time and time again linked with creativity.

A relaxed brain is a creative brain…but why?

In the studies above, insights often came along with a stirring of alpha waves in the right hemisphere of the brain. Alpha waves are just a type of brainwave. At the root of all our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is the communication between neurons in our brains. Brainwaves are produced when neurons communicate through synchronized electrical pulses. Alpha waves are often associated with relaxing activities like warm showers. They are also key to making insights. Research has shown that if there is a lack of alpha wave activities, subjects won’t get any closer to solving a given problem–even when they are provided with ample hints.

Alpha waves represent non-arousal. They’re slower and higher in amplitude than beta waves. Completing a test, meditation, and walks are often associated with increased alpha wave activity. A relaxed mind contains alpha waves directing thought inward toward loose associations associated with the right hemisphere.

In contrast, an actively focused brain is directed outward toward extraneous details of the problem at hand. This is great for tedious problems that require an analytical touch, but it spoils the possibility for connections that lead to creativity and insight.

What is all this talk of the right hemisphere?

It’s a myth that people exhibit dominance on one side of their brains or the other. While different hemispheres are associated with different types of thought processing, it’s not true that creative people only use their right brains. Everyone uses both.

This video explains it…plus a few bonus brain myths.

The myth stems back to Roger W. Sperry who split the brain by cutting the corpus callosum in an effort to study the effects of epilepsy. In doing this, seizures were reduced, but other curious consequences arose that caused Sperry to think about the functions of the different brain hemispheres.

His “split brain experiments” revealed that the different brain hemispheres carried out different functions. Without the ability for the hemispheres to communicate with each other, he could tell what function each of them served in isolation. For example, the left brain specializes in detecting sounds that form words and understanding syntax, but it doesn’t control the whole language process. The right hemisphere is needed to determine the emotional undertones of the language and produce rhythms that promote melody and emphasis.

The hemispheres don’t operate independently. Recent research shows the best performance occurs when the two sides work together via uninhibited communication through the corpus callosum. That means everyone–from painters to accountants–has to use their whole brain.

Manipulating Focus

Drugs that increase focus could also decrease insight and the likelihood of epiphanies. Adderall and Ritalin are stimulants that shift attention away from right hemisphere are steer people away from broad insights and toward minute details.

Can you mentally control your focus levels? Beeman and Kounios did tests on a Zen Buddhist that suggest you can. At first the Buddhist was failing the tests miserably, diligently focusing on the possible solutions. When he realized that focus was against him, he was able to control his mind so acutely from his meditation training that he could deliberately not focus. He began solving problems with ease, his meditation creating just the alpha waves he needed for insight.