Mark's Mouth

Meditation Brain Studies

Washington Post describes a study released recently that included eight buddhist monks and collaboration with the Dalai Lama.

The study was also referenced a few other places:
* UWisc article
* WebMD article
* Wired Magazine

washingtonpost.com
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."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Brain Music Not Much To Dance To

The Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto (as covered by wired) was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG.

TORONTO -- A happy brain hums.

A stressed-out brain makes static sounds. A mildly concerned brain produces a noise that sounds like breakfast cereal melting in milk. An interested brain sounds like a jumpy cat emitting a steady, low-level purr interspersed with a few high-pitched squeals.

The Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG. Several hundred people crowded into the small gallery space where ominous-looking hooks, cables, suction cups and clamps dangled from the glass ceilings and white walls. Knowing the machinery was going to record your brain activity certainly added an interesting twist to the gallery visit. The concert began with a deep breathing meditation. (Evidently, the human brain makes better music when it's in a deeply relaxed alpha state.) Audience members were then connected to the concert system by way of electrodes clamped on each ear. Another electrode was attached to headbands and positioned over the backs of their skulls to grab signals from their occipital lobes, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. The final cut revealed a cute little tune with all the drawbacks of digitally produced music. In other words, it's brainy, but it's got no soul. The backbeat for the concert was provided from heart scans.

Hook a whole bunch of brains up to a computer, capture and play the sounds they make, and you get, well, not quite music, but certainly some interesting noise.

That's exactly what happened at the Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto over the weekend.

The concert was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG.

Deconcert, held at Toronto's Deconism Gallery, was based on James Fung's research on biofeedback techniques.

Several hundred people crowded into the small gallery space where ominous-looking hooks, cables, suction cups and clamps dangled from the glass ceilings and white walls. Knowing the machinery was going to record your brain activity certainly added an interesting twist to the gallery visit.

The concert began with a deep breathing meditation. (Evidently, the human brain makes better music when it's in a deeply relaxed alpha state.)

When the brain is busy it generates beta waves, which look like scratchy little marks on an EEG printout and are too shallow to make good music. Alpha waves are strong and steady.

Three sets of music played at the Deconcert. First, the technology was explained during a trial run, and some volunteers were hooked up to the scanning system. Audience members were then connected to the concert system by way of electrodes clamped on each ear. Another electrode was attached to headbands and positioned over the backs of their skulls to grab signals from their occipital lobes, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information.

FlexComp EEG concentrators captured the brainwaves. FlexComp can grab signals sent from human muscles and brain waves, as well as capture data on heartbeat, respiration and perspiration. That information is fed into a PC and can be presented using a spreadsheet, text file or other application.

Fung used his own software to combine the brain waves and transform them into sound. One of the concert's sponsors, Thought Technologies, a Montreal-based company that makes computerized biofeedback devices primarily for medical uses, made the EEG tools.

For the second set, people were divided into groups of eight. When each group's brain waves had been captured, the individual sounds were played to the audience, "sort of like an orchestra tuning up," Fung said.

During the final set, the sounds created from each group's brain waves were averaged out and then combined into a sort of mind-meld musical overture.

So what does brain-wave music sound like? The final cut revealed a cute little tune with all the drawbacks of digitally produced music. In other words, it's brainy, but it's got no soul.

The concert was part of a weekend-long series of events centered on the idea that the body in its present form has pretty much become obsolete. We've all become cyborgs, part human and part machine.

"Humans are now a combination of cyborg and zombie. The body has been augmented, changed, invaded, occupied -- and that's fine," said Australian performance artist Stelarc. "The body can now be used as a host for technology that allows us to share, interface, upload and access ideas."

The Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG. Several hundred people crowded into the small gallery space where ominous-looking hooks, cables, suction cups and clamps dangled from the glass ceilings and white walls. Knowing the machinery was going to record your brain activity certainly added an interesting twist to the gallery visit. The concert began with a deep breathing meditation. (Evidently, the human brain makes better music when it's in a deeply relaxed alpha state.) Audience members were then connected to the concert system by way of electrodes clamped on each ear. Another electrode was attached to headbands and positioned over the backs of their skulls to grab signals from their occipital lobes, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. The final cut revealed a cute little tune with all the drawbacks of digitally produced music. In other words, it's brainy, but it's got no soul. The backbeat for the concert was provided from heart scans.

But, you might argue, bodies can still do one thing better than computers. Stelarc begged to differ, happily describing the joys of virtual sex, performed while hooked up to machines that stimulate the appropriate body parts however and exactly as the brain desires.

"Sounds pretty great, and I'd love to try it, but over time I think I'd miss the element of surprise," said Ian McCormick, a student who attended the concert.

Celebrated Canadian cyborg Steve Mann, who co-founded the MIT Media Lab's Wearable Computing Project and now teaches engineering at the University of Toronto, was also in attendance but spent an awful lot of time seemingly talking to himself.

It turned out he was simultaneously delivering a speech at the Ad Astra Sci-Fi convention and attending the Deconcert. Ad Astra's event was going on about an hour's drive away.

Mann beamed his talk to the convention using his "eyetap," a mini-camera and tiny computer mounted on a pair of glasses that lets him record and broadcast live video feeds straight from his eyes to the Internet.

Mann, who has spent most of his life designing and constructing devices that allow him to stay connected 24 hours a day and broadcast his life to the world in real time, said without "humanistic intelligence" technology is neither fun nor useful.

He cautioned the Deconcert audience to think about what technology they allow into their lives and how they interface with it.

"Use it, don't let it use you," Mann said.

Chicago's Nature

What a great image.

taken from the web site for VersionFest.