New York TimesSeptember 14, 2003Is Buddhism Good for Your Health? By STEPHEN S. HALLIn the spring of 1992, out of the blue,
the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin
Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist,
was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion,
and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled
spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds
of his monks -- in particular, their meditative prowess -- for scientific
research. Most self-respecting
American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee, an invitation to
study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as
Davidson recently conceded, ''very flaky.'' But the Wisconsin professor, a
longtime meditator himself -- he took leave from graduate school to travel
through India and Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices -- leapt at
the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and embarked on an ambitious
data-gathering expedition to northern India, lugging portable electrical
generators, laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording
equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas. His goal was to measure a
remarkable, if seemingly evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of
the Buddhist mind at work. ''These are the Olympic athletes, the gold medalists,
of meditation,'' Davidson says. The work began fitfully --
the monks initially balked at being wired -- but research into meditation has
now attained a credibility unimaginable a decade ago. Over the past 10 years,
a number of Buddhist monks, led by Matthieu Ricard, a French-born monk with a
Ph.D. in molecular biology, have made a series of visits from northern India
and other South Asian countries to Davidson's lab in Madison. Ricard and his
peers have worn a Medusa-like tangle of 256-electrode EEG nets while sitting
on the floor of a little booth and responding to visual stimuli. They have
spent two to three hours at a time in a magnetic resonance imaging machine,
trying to meditate amid the clatter and thrum of the brain-imaging machinery.
No data from these
experiments have been published formally yet, but in ''Visions of
Compassion,'' a compilation of papers that came out last year, Davidson noted
in passing that in one visiting monk, activation in several regions of his
left prefrontal cortex -- an area of the brain just behind the forehead that
recent research has associated with positive emotion -- was the most intense
seen in about 175 experimental subjects. In the years since
Davidson's fax from the Dalai Lama, the neuroscientific study of Buddhist
practices has crossed a threshold of acceptability as a topic worthy of
scientific attention. Part of the reason for this lies in new, more powerful
brain-scanning technologies that not only can reveal a mind in the midst of
meditation but also can detect enduring changes in brain activity months
after a prolonged course of meditation. And it hasn't hurt that some
well-known mainstream neuroscientists are now intrigued by preliminary
reports of exceptional Buddhist mental skills. Paul Ekman of the University
of California at San Francisco and Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard have begun
their own studies of the mental capabilities of monks. In addition, a few
rigorous, controlled studies have suggested that Buddhist-style meditation in
Western patients may cause physiological changes in the brain and the immune
system. This growing, if sometimes
grudging, respect for the biology of meditation is achieving a milestone of
sorts this weekend, when some of the country's leading neuroscientists and
behavioral scientists are meeting with Tibetan Buddhists, including the Dalai
Lama himself, at a symposium held at M.I.T. ''You can think of the monks as
cases that show what the potential is here,'' Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, an emeritus
professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who
has pioneered work in the health benefits of meditation, says. ''But you
don't have to be weird or a Buddhist or sitting on top of a mountain in India
to derive benefits from this. This kind of study is in its infancy, but we're
on the verge of discovering hugely fascinating things.''
''In Buddhist tradition,''
Davidson explains, '''meditation' is a word that is equivalent to a word like
'sports' in the U.S. It's a family of activity, not a single thing.'' Each of
these meditative practices calls on different mental skills, according to
Buddhist practitioners. The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are focusing
on three common forms of Buddhist meditation. ''One is focused attention,
where they specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long
periods of time,'' Davidson says. ''The second area is where they voluntarily
cultivate compassion. It's something they do every day, and they have special
exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or
irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is
compassion. They say they are able to do it just like that,'' he says,
snapping his fingers. ''The third is called 'open presence.' It is a state of
being acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present,
without reacting to it. They describe it as pure awareness.'' The fact that the brain can
learn, adapt and molecularly resculpture itself on the basis of experience
and training suggests that meditation may leave a biological residue in the
brain -- a residue that, with the increasing sophistication of new technology,
might be captured and measured. ''This fits into the whole neuroscience
literature of expertise,'' says Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard neuroscientist,
''where taxi drivers are studied for their spatial memory and concert
musicians are studied for their sense of pitch. If you do something,
anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there's going
to be something in your brain that's different from someone who didn't do
that. It's just got to be.'' Jonathan D. Cohen, an
expert on attention and cognitive control at Princeton, has been intrigued by
reports that certain Buddhist adepts can maintain focus for extended periods.
''Our experience -- and the laboratory evidence is abundant -- is that humans
have a limited capacity for attention,'' he says. ''When we try to sustain
attention for longer periods of time, like air-traffic controllers have to
do, we consider it incredibly effortful and stressful. Buddhism is all about
the ability to direct attention flexibly, and they talk about this state of
sustained and focused attention that is pleasant, no longer stressful.'' If nothing else, the
meeting at M.I.T. this weekend shows that Davidson, one of its principal
organizers, has managed to persuade a lot of marquee names to join him in making
the case that it has become scientifically respectable to investigate these
practices. Participants include mainstream scientists like Eric Lander, a
leader of the human genome project; Cohen, a prominent researcher into the
neural mechanisms of moral and economic decision-making; and Daniel Kahneman,
the Nobel-Prize-winning Princeton economist who has pioneered research into
the psychology of financial decision-making. ''Neuroscientists want to
preserve both the substance and the image of rigor in their approach, so one
doesn't want to be seen as whisking out into the la-la land of studying
consciousness,'' concedes Cohen, who is chairman of a session at the M.I.T.
meeting. ''On the other hand, my personal belief is that the history of
science has humbled us about the hubris of thinking we know everything.''
The power of the mind to
influence bodily function has long been of interest to scientists, especially
connections between the nervous, immune and endocrine systems. Janice
Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser, researchers at Ohio State University, for
example, have done a series of studies showing that stress typically impairs
immune function, though the exact woof and weave of these connections remains
unclear. Interestingly enough, the
Buddhist subjects themselves are largely open to scientific explanation of
their practices. ''Buddhism is, like science, based on experience and
investigation, not on dogma,'' Matthieu Ricard explained in an e-mail message
to me last month. The religion can be thought of as ''a contemplative
science,'' he wrote, adding, ''the Buddha always said that one should not
accept his teachings simply out of respect for him, but rediscover their
truth through our own experience, as when checking the quality of a piece of
gold by rubbing it on a piece on stone, melting it and so on.'' In July, I joined Davidson
and several colleagues as they stood in a control room and watched an
experiment in progress. On a television monitor in the control room, a young
woman sat in a chair in a nearby room, alone with her thoughts. Those
thoughts -- and, more specifically, the way she tried to control them when
provoked -- were the point of the experiment. Davidson hypothesizes that
a component of a person's emotional makeup reflects the relative strength, or
asymmetry, of activity between two sides of the prefrontal cortex -- the left
side, which Davidson's work argues is associated with positive emotion, and
the right side, where heightened activity has been associated with anxiety,
depression and other mood disorders. His research group has
conducted experiments on infants and the elderly, amateur meditators and
Eastern adepts, in an attempt to define a complex neural circuit that
connects the prefrontal cortex to other brain structures like the amygdala,
which is the seat of fear, and the anterior cingulate, which is associated
with ''conflict-monitoring.'' Some experiments have also shown that greater
left-sided prefrontal activation is associated with enhanced immunological
activity by natural killer cells and other immune markers. When one scientist in the
control room said, ''All right, here comes the first picture,'' the young
woman visibly tensed, gripping her elbows. Electrodes snaked out of her scalp
and from two spots just below her right eye. And then, staring into a
monitor, the young woman watched as a succession of mostly disturbing images
flashed on a screen in front of her -- a horribly mutilated body, a severed
hand, a venomous snake poised to strike. Through earphones, the woman was
prompted to modulate her emotional response as each image appeared, either to
enhance it or suppress it, while the electrodes below her eye surreptitiously
tapped into a neural circuit that would indicate if she had successfully
modified either a positive or negative emotional response to the images. ''What's being measured,''
Davidson explained, ''is a person's capacity to voluntarily regulate their
emotional reactions.'' Daren Jackson, the lead
researcher on the study, added, ''Meditation may facilitate more rapid,
spontaneous recovery from negative reactions.'' The visiting monks, as well
as a group of meditating office workers at a nearby biotech company, have
viewed these same gruesome images for the same purpose: to determine what
Davidson calls each individual's ''affective style'' (if they are prone, for
example, to hang onto negative emotional reactions) and if that style can be
modulated by mental effort, of the sort that meditation seeks to cultivate.
It is the hope of Davidson and his sometime collaborator Jon Kabat-Zinn that
the power of meditation can be harnessed to promote not only emotional
well-being but also physical health. Since founding the Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979,
Kabat-Zinn and colleagues have treated 16,000 patients and taught more than
2,000 health professionals the techniques of ''mindfulness meditation,''
which instructs a Buddhist-inspired ''nonjudgmental,'' total awareness of the
present moment as a way of reducing stress. Along the way, Kabat-Zinn has
published small but intriguing studies showing that people undergoing
treatment for psoriasis heal four times as fast if they meditate; that cancer
patients practicing meditation had significantly better emotional outlooks
than a control group; and not only that meditation relieved symptoms in
patients with anxiety and chronic pain but also that the benefits persisted
up to four years after training. Kabat-Zinn is conducting a study for
In July 1997, Davidson
recruited human subjects at a small biotech company outside Madison called
Promega to study the effects of Buddhist-style meditation on the neural and
immunological activity of ordinary American office workers. The employees'
brains were wired and measured before they began a course in meditation
training taught by Kabat-Zinn. It was a controlled, randomized study, and
after eight weeks, the researchers would test brain and immune markers to
assess the effects of meditation. There was reluctance among
some employees to volunteer, but eventually, about four dozen employees
participated in the study. Once a week for eight weeks, Kabat-Zinn would show
up at Promega with his boom box, his red and purple meditation tape cassettes
and his Tibetan chimes, and the assembled Promega employees -- scientists,
marketing people, lab techs and even some managers -- would sit on the floor
of a conference room and practice mindfulness for three hours. In July, the results of the
experiment at Promega were published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine,
and they suggest that meditation may indeed leave a discernible and lasting
imprint on the minds and bodies of its practitioners. Among the Promega
employees who practiced meditation for two months, the Wisconsin researchers
detected significant increases in activity in several areas of the left
prefrontal cortex -- heightened activity that persisted for at least four
months after the experiment, when the subjects were tested again. Moreover,
the meditators who showed the greatest increase in prefrontal activity after
training showed a correspondingly more robust ability to churn out antibodies
in response to receiving a flu vaccine. The findings, Kabat-Zinn suggested,
demonstrated qualitative shifts in brain activity after only two months of
meditation that mirror preliminary results seen in expert meditators like
monks. These results are still
embraced cautiously, at best. Indeed, the Wisconsin study took five years to
publish in part because several higher-profile journals to which it was
submitted refused even to send it out for peer review, according to Davidson.
And yet, by the time the study was over, the subjective experience of
participants complemented the objective data: meditation ultimately left
people feeling healthier, more positive and less stressed. ''I really am an
empiricist in every aspect of my life,'' said Michael Slater, a molecular
biologist at Promega. ''I doubt dogma, and I test it. I do it at the
laboratory bench, but also in my personal life. So this appealed to me,
because I could feel the reduction in stress. I could tell I was less
irritable. I had more capacity to take on more stressors. My wife felt I was
easier to be around. So there were tangible impacts. For an empiricist, that
was enough.'' Granted, that's not enough
for many other people, especially the scientific skeptics. But Slater made an
offhand comment that struck me as a highly convincing, though thoroughly
unofficial, form of peer review. ''My wife,'' Slater said quietly, ''is dying
for me to start meditating again.'' Stephen S. Hall is the
author, most recently, of ''Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of
Human Life Extension.'' Pure Land Buddhists
of KU Amitabha Buddhist Association meet every Friday evening (7:30-10:00pm)
for two consecutive 1-hour meditation sessions in Olympian Room at Burge
Union. For more information, please visit http://www.ku.edu/~amtb. |