Combine this building body of research with some of the insights shared by meditation experts for the last 3,000 years and you have a recipe for the best playground 'told you so' taunt in human history. In this blog, I'm going to just share a few examples and links of how science is proving what meditators have known for a long time.
For centuries, science regarded the brain as being fairly fixed and unregenerative, having a linear development, that thinks clearly and consistently, with the odd exception of some hormone-induced flows which might, through the necessity of some 'fight or flight' stimuli, provide useful emotional reactions to encourage certain behaviours, but that overall provided an accurate depiction to the world. In just one little decade, all that has proven to be false.
It's so cool.
Norman Doidge has written two fantastic books which enlighten some of these ideas, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain's Way of Healing. In a nutshell, the areas of the brain are not fixed, regenerate constantly and develop continually. His books detail how they figured this stuff out.
Back in the 50s, Dr. Edward Taub was working as a PhD student and, as part of his research, had to deaffernate, or cut the nerve cords to, the arms of monkeys (the 'why' is a long story that isn't germane here, but yes, sounds crap for the monkeys). In order to give his PhD a unique flavour, he restricted the good arm of the monkeys post operatively - to prove the deaffernation had rendered that appendage useless. The deaffernatiion was old science, but restricting the good arm afterward was a new twist. Nobody had done that. To his shock, the monkeys gradually started using the arm he'd deaffernated. Nobody understood how this was possible. He'd cut the nerve cords. But after a while, they began using that arm. Many questioned him, his techniques, and his science, it took decades to unfold and it makes a good read in Mr Doidge's book.
The upshot is that this one little experiment obliterated decades of scientific research and theory.
Fast forward, and we now know that because the good arm was restricted, the monkey's nervous system reorganised itself to have another part of the nervous system, a non-arm part, take over the deaffernated arm's nerve cells. Like an anatomical pirate, the monkey's system re-wired itself to surf other nerve endings. It was willing to do this because it couldn't use the good arm. It had been restricted in a sling. Since the monkey desperately needed an arm, the nervous system re-wired itself to solve the problem.
The ramifications of this experiment were massive. If the nervous system could rewire itself, could the brain? Taub decided to find out with stroke patients. We know a stroke injury is in the brain, not in the nervous system, and stroke patients want all the help they can get. What he found was yes, in many cases, the brain can be taught to completely re-wire itself to overcome some pretty massive difficulties.
How do we know this, for sure?
We'll use the example of someone who lost the use of their right arm due to a stroke. By restricting their left arm, so the person had no option but to use their immobile right arm, the brain would re-wire itself, it would comandeer a part of the brain officially designated for something else - the face, for instance. And they know this because we can see it on an fMRI. We can see the stroke-damaged brain. We can see zero blood flow where the right arm movement should be. We can see a patient, after several weeks of recovery and therapy, move their right arm. And we can see the blood flow through the 'face part' of the brain. It's amazing.
I love this for two reasons. First, this random chance experiment goes wrong, and it ends up positively changing the lives of stroke victims, among others, all over the world - treatment and recovery are vastly improved. And this random experiment opens up a whole new branch of science, Neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the study of the brain's ability to reorganise itself, to even fundamentally restructure itself. It turns our that our brains change all the time. Every millisecond of every day. We think we're a constant, we perceive it that way, but we just aren't. And science is deducing so much cool stuff about this.
Among other things, Neuroplasticity is suggesting that age-related decline parallels the slump many people experience in learning. Because the brain likes growing neural connections, because it wants to learn, if we get stuck in a rut for too long, when we stop learning, the brain starts to atrophy. There's good evidence that getting older is precisely the time for old dogs to learn new tricks. Our brains want us to learn an instrument or a language, we're dying for it.
Back to the connection with meditation. One of the next areas that PhDs in Neuroplasticity began researching were psychological functions. If the brain could be re-wired to heal motor function issues, could it be re-wired to deal with anxiety, depression and OCD?
Dr Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA decided to investigate, and guess what he used as his foundation? That's right - meditation. He taught some deeply disturbed patients to 'observe' their feelings, their compulsions, and try to avoid getting tied up in the story behind those feelings. Instead, he asked them to notice, 'what else?' was going on in their experience. Not to deny their anxiety, or to label it as bad, but just to notice, 'what else?' was happening right now, just as true as those thoughts. He asked them to focus on the sound of the rain, or the feeling of the wind on their skin, or any other part of the actual experience they were also having - many of the sensory ideas we shared in Part 2.
It worked. Or to be more precise, over time, even deeply disturbed patients began to feel significant relief from a combination of meditation and drugs that exceeded the effects that drugs alone had. The cool part for us science geeks is how.
Neuroplasticity has two founding axioms - neurons that 'fire together wire together', and neurons that 'fire apart wire apart'. It's the Pavlovian response at the level of thought. The wire together thing is why people can get so phenomenal at chess or skateboarding or just anything, and the wire apart thing is why people, usually, think they can not do something that, if they tried hard enough, they probably could.
If we take these ideas into the universe of the mentally ill, Dr Schwartz explains that each time a patient stays with a thought, any thought, the thought wires together. The more we think that thing, the more deeply it gets wired. Mentally ill patients have wired a lot of neurons together in destructive paths. Unfortunately, well-meaning therapies such as psychotherapy and Cognitive Therapy have one thing in common - they ask an afflicted patient to continue to analyse their afflictions, to discuss them, to come up with strategies to overcome them, to be sure, but ultimately to wire together those neurons even deeper, to have them continue to fire together, each time they 'deal' with them. Dr Schwartz believes this strategy just isn't effective very often or very quickly.
When we meditate, something else is happening. We are wiring neurons to experience all our senses again, as we talked about in Part 1. Ever notice that experienced meditators often have the joyful look of children in their eyes? That's because experiencing all our senses is natural to us - we did it as children. But we forget. As we age we start to become reliant on the brain and ego. We become less sensitive to touch, to taste, to smell, to everything other than the importance and validity of our own thoughts.
We've stopped firing the neurons of these sensations. So they're less sensitive.
Part of what meditation is doing is firing them again, becoming more sensitive to our sense of touch, for instance, when we focus on the breath. But the brain/ego wants to take over, to keep us from ignoring it. Within moments, we find ourselves thinking about the breath instead of just feeling the breath itself, thinking about the activity, whether we should be doing it, what we had for lunch, what we need from the shops, and like that the brain is off solving the world again.
So we focus on the breath because it's here and now. The focus on the breath is the first step to keeping ourselves in this moment, experiencing right now. Remember - thoughts aren't bad. They're part of it, too, we're just learning to make them a part of our world, instead of running our world.
This focus on the our senses builds new neural networks, like in the monkey's arm. Literally. Via the axioms of neuroplasticity, we are building up the brain's awareness of touch to start, but over time, we learn to do this with all of our senses. These sensory networks becomes vastly more intertwined, as can be seen on fMRI scans of people meditating (we're getting to this part, below).
This is where the concerns about meditation are missing the point so badly.
We try to focus on the breath. Really, we do. But we think we're avoiding 'dealing' with our problems. We think meditation is meant to provide some nice peace and quiet to allow us to see our problems clearly, make some resolutions, and fix whatever our ails happen to be. We go along with the 'breathing thing' at the start, assuming this is the warm up, but what we really wonder is when the problem solving part starts.
That's missing the point. Meditation expands our awareness of reality so we see our troubles in a broader context. We still have troubles. We still have to do something about them, outside of meditation. But when it's time to work on our troubles, meditation has set us up to be more capable at handling them in a balanced, peaceful way. We can be more effective, because we see the situation more clearly.
Consider the science. Below is an image of two brains under an fMRI scan. The one on the left is just a normal, healthy person's brain. The one on the right is an experienced meditator and has increased activity, increased sensitivity, except in the areas of anxiety and panic, which is decreased. This is what greater awareness looks like.
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| Healthy Brain Meditator's Brain |
Now let's look at the scan of a normal person compared to a depressed person. During my bouts of depression, my thoughts felt big and heavy, like they were filling my head, and going round and round 1000 times a second, on this horrible theme park ride. It felt overwhelmingly busy.
It's an irony that the heavy feeling of depression is correlated to using less of our minds. We're less aware. We see this with all sort of mental illnesses.
These are different types of scans, but they show one thing. Using less of our mind is correlated with mental illness, and using more is correlated with meditation. And we can deduce that the opposite of mental illness can be mental health.
There's several other ways science has backed up the benefits of meditation, but this blog is already longer than expected. Enough for now. Still, science has made a good contribution today. Thanks, science!
The bad news is science doesn't help us one tiny bit. It's meaningless. We can only learn science at the level of thought, and we have to experience a deeper connection with our senses, if we're going to enjoy the benefits of meditation. It's not enough to know it, it's not enough to believe it, we have to experience it if its going to help us.
This is why I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat last Easter. It was pretty intense. We were allowed no phones, no technology, no books, no pen/paper, not even music. Nothing but meditation for 12 hours a day, for 10 days.
In the next blog, I'm going to share what I experienced.
