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Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the
Left
People Need Both Drugs and
Faith
to Get Rid of Pain Relief
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By DANIEL GOLEMAN
New York Times
February 4, 2003
Many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student,
I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as
an
antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were
weak,
and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly,
my
results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.
To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that
have
looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the
adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as
a
definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing
the
brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability
to
soothe.
The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely
research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and
political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and
neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with
the
Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to
discuss
how people might better control their destructive emotions.
One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science
and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory
for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson,
in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis,
has identified an index for the brain's set point for moods.
The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally
distressed anxious, angry, depressed the most active sites in
the
brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's
emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region
important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.
By contrast, when people are in positive moods upbeat, enthusiastic
and energized those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity
in
the left prefrontal cortex.
Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way
to
index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels
of
activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts
daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to
the
right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while
the
more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.
By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has established
a
bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having
a mix of
good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest
to the
right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder
over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to
the
left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid.
This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically
determined set point for our emotional range. One finding, for instance,
shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and those
unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a year
or so
after the events their daily moods are about the same as before
the
momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes
little, if at all.
By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right
ratio
on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme
value
to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.
Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the meeting
between
the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding, while
intriguing, raised more questions than it answered.
Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become monks?
Or
was there something about the training of lamas the Tibetan Buddhist
equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher that might nudge a
set
point into the range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai
Lama
wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to be shared
for
the benefit of all?
A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that
Dr.
Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of
the
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases
of all
kinds, to help them better handle their symptoms. In an article
accepted
for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine,
Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training in
mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its Buddhist origins
and
now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics throughout
the
United States and many other countries.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure biotech
business for roughly three hours a week over two months. A comparison
group of volunteers from the company received the training later,
though
they, like the participants, were tested before and after training
by
Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.
The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in the training
time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness training, the workers
were on average tipped toward the right in the ratio for the emotional
set point. At the same time, they complained of feeling highly stressed.
After the training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted
leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their moods
improved; they reported feeling engaged again in their work, more
energized and less anxious.
In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift,
given the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor
their
moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward distress.
Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons
in
the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from the amygdala
that drive disturbing emotions.
Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that
mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their immune systems,
as
gauged by the amount of flu antibodies in their blood after receiving
a
flu shot.
According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if people in
two
experimental groups are exposed to the flu virus, those who have
learned
the mindfulness technique will experience less severe symptoms.
The
greater the leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger
the
increase in the immune measure.
The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the continuing
sensations and thoughts more closely, both in sitting meditation
and in
activities like yoga exercises.
Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly trained
lamas
have come to be studied. All of them have spent at least three years
in
solitary meditative retreat. That amount of practice puts them in
a
range found among masters of other domains, like Olympic divers
and
concert violinists.
What difference such intense mind training may make for human abilities
has been suggested by preliminary findings from other laboratories.
Some
of the more tantalizing data come from the work of another scientist,
Dr. Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at
the
University of California at San Francisco, which studies the facial
expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also participated in the five
days of
dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read
another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial
muscles.
As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by
Times
Books in April, these microexpressions ultrarapid facial actions,
some
lasting as little as one-twentieth of a second lay bare our most
naked
feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they cross our faces
spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for those who can
read
them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.
Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments.
Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people can learn to detect
these
expressions in just hours with proper training, his testing shows
that
most people including judges, the police and psychotherapists
are
ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than someone making
random guesses.
Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan
practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions
tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American
teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six,
considered quite rare. Normally, a random guess will produce one
correct
answer in six.
Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr.
Ekman to design a program called "Cultivating Emotional Balance,"
which
combines methods extracted from Buddhism, like mindfulness, with
synergistic training from modern psychology, like reading
microexpressions, and seeks to help people better manage their emotions
and relationships.
A pilot of the project began last month with elementary school teachers
in the San Francisco Bay area, under the direction of Dr. Margaret
Kemeny, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of
California at San Francisco. She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's
immune system findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other measures
of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with 120 nurses
and
teachers.
Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays has intrigued
other investigators. Under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute,
which organizes the series of continuing meetings between the Dalai
Lama
and scientists, there will be a round at the Massachusetts Institute
of
Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama will meet
with
an expanded group of researchers to discuss further research possibilities.
Though open to the public, half the seats will be reserved for graduate
students and academic researchers. (More information is at
www.InvestigatingTheMind.org.)
As for me, I am taking all this to heart. An on-again, off-again
meditator since my college days, I have become decidedly on again.
Next
month, my wife and I are heading to a warm spot for two or three
weeks
of meditation retreat. I may never catch up with that sublime lama,
but
I will enjoy trying.
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