The same mirroring was occurring in our Power of Eight circles. In a workshop of mine in Maarssen, Netherlands, Bet had sprained her ankle and her arm after a fall and was chosen by her group of eleven to be the recipient of the healing. Once she joined the circle, she realized that she was acting as both sender and receiver at the same moment. “When I felt people putting their hands on me I thought, maybe I’ll join them because after all it is me. I felt the energy coming in and I decided to be the eleventh person to join in the ten others, and then I felt my energy being part of a whole energy.”
Bet was no longer a single entity. She was both the sender and the receiver at the same time.
It was now clear to me that the particular rebound effect experienced by our participants had to do with the object of focus, and that this was causing the mirrored healing. In my book The Bond, I write about the discovery by Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolati that when we observe an action or an emotion in someone else, in order to understand it, the very same neurons fire in us as though we were performing the action or having the emotion. He’d called these copycat brain waves “mirror neurons,” but what seemed to be occurring among my participants was something beyond simple mirroring. They weren’t just reflecting back. They were identifying so strongly with the object of their intention that they seemed to be merging with it, as though it were happening to them:
“I . . . tasted blood and smelled blood as though I were in Afghanistan and had lost family this way.”
“Todd Voss, I hear the name constantly in my mind. It’s as if he has become part of me.”
What does mirroring to this extent do to your brain, I wondered. Does it cause something to change permanently? Richard J. Davidson, a psychologist at of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleague Antoine Lutz, a research scientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, are fascinated by the workings of extreme brains—those that have had an unusual, lifelong workout, particularly from long bouts of meditation—and how their neural connections and structure continue to revise through life, depending upon the focus of thought.
“A brain region that controls the movement of a violinist’s fingers becomes progressively larger with mastery of the instrument. A similar process appears to happen when we meditate,” Davidson and Lutz wrote in Scientific American.
Working with monks and Buddhists connected with the Dalai Lama, Lutz and Davidson have studied which parts of the brain change, whether it’s focused attention, where the meditator concentrates on the in and out breaths; mindfulness, where participants maintain moment-to-moment awareness of all their sensations, including thoughts, to develop a less reactive response to them; or loving-kindness meditation, where the meditator focuses on a feeling of compassionate love toward all other people.
Each type of meditation offers a workout for a different portion of the brain and at different frequencies: focused attention and loving-kindness meditation appear to activate very fast frequencies in the brain (beta 2 at 20–30 Hz and gamma waves at 30–50 Hz), which tend to create a brain more accustomed to intense focus, whereas mindfulness makes use of very slow brain waves (theta brain waves of 5–8 Hz) so that the brain relaxes and becomes less concerned about reacting to what’s going on in its environment.
The object of focus tends to improve the brain in remarkable ways. Focused attention and mindfulness create meditators with heightened perceptual awareness: focused meditators to the outer life and mindfulness to the inner life. As I discovered when I wrote about this in The Intention Experiment, when the object is compassionate meditation and a desire to send love to all things, these types of thoughts send the brain soaring into a supercharged state of heightened perception. The brain begins working at fever pitch; Davidson’s studies of monks showed their brains produced sustained bursts of high-frequency gamma waves, or rapid cycles of 25–70 cycles per second. This is the kind of brain speed experienced only when the brain is at rapt attention, when trying to dig through working memory for something, during great flashes of insight. At this speed, the brain waves also begin synchronizing throughout the brain, a state necessary to achieve heightened awareness, and the two sides of the brain also begin operating more synergistically.
As Davidson’s research with monks demonstrated, achieving a high gamma state activates the left anterior portion of the brain, the portion associated with joy, and exercising this “happy” part of the brain seems to produce permanent emotional improvement. Brain states achieved in these circumstances can create such positive effects on people’s emotions that they stay that way permanently.
Our Intention Experiments and Power of Eight circles appeared to make use of a combination of focused attention and loving-kindness, as we had both an altruistic goal—to heal something—and a specific focus—either a specific person or a situation, such as a war-torn region of the world. It may have been possible that my participants had undergone some sort of a “happy brain” effect as a result of their compassionate intention, which is usually only experienced by monks who have spent years at compassionate meditation.
But could this have been the X factor causing the major changes in people’s lives?
Tania Singer, director of the Social Neuroscience Department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, runs the ReSource Project, a large-scale study in which participants are taught a protocol of Eastern and Western mental training devised by Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk and cellular biologist and a close colleague of the Dalai Lama’s. After eleven months, the group is then studied to see whether this training changes anything in their lives and relationships.
After just a single week of carrying out compassionate meditation, Singer’s participants become more cooperative and more willing to help others in need, as demonstrated by having them play a virtual “prosocial” game designed to test and measure their desire and capacity to help others. Singer’s meditators became more desirous of helping, even if there were no prospect of their good deed being returned, and more sensitized to distress signals from people—all marks of an enhanced sense of wanting to connect with others.
This certainly accorded with the experiences of my participants in the Peace Intention Experiments, a majority of whom felt a greater readiness to get along with others, including strangers, but they hadn’t required nearly a year’s worth of training—just a single ten-minute session of sending intention.
Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard refers to gamma brain states as “oceanic,” enabling you to move out of your small self to something larger, and recent experiments of his suggest that these gamma frequencies are infectious. He embeds hidden gamma frequencies into music, which he plays to some volunteers during a meditation, then measures their brain frequencies. Repeatedly the brains of his listeners begin to evidence a “resonance response,” a greater percentage of these same high frequencies. Just listening to these hidden frequencies, even if you don’t know you’re doing so, trains your brain to imitate them.
“If you change the brain waves,” he told me, “you change a person’s sense of identity. The sense of self shifts and the self becomes larger.”
When experiencing this oceanic state, they move from the small self, which is solely interested in their own reactions to the exterior world, to a larger self. “In that expanded state, they can more easily let go of chronic emotional patterns and limiting beliefs,” he says. “And it is easier for them to feel universal love.”
One of his participants was a mother, age sixty-five, whose son had killed himself when he was seventeen. The event had occurred twenty-five years before, but she was still suffering from guilt and trauma over the manner of her son’s death. After experiencing the gamma brain wave state, says Mario, she felt finally free of her grief and ready to move on with her life.
So in our circles, if the individuals’ brains had flashes of a happy-brain synchrony, this may have helped to increase a natural sense of joy. But the healing effects my participants were experiencing in their lives and relationships seemed to go beyond an oceanic feeling of universal love. What was it about the circles that had this effect? Robert Cialdini, a psychologist formerly at the University of Arizona and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, maintains that a sense of connectedness increases altruism: people have a natural desire to help when they lose their individuality and step temporarily into a state of oneness.
Lutz and Davidson discovered that practicing compassionate meditation produces more activity in certain parts of the brain called the temporoparietal junction, the medial prefontal cortex, and the superior temporal sulcus, all of which are usually activated when we are altruistically inspired to help someone else. Altruistic thoughts of healing also appear to change a number of networks in the brain—the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventral striatum, and the anterior cingulate cortex—all associated with compassion, positive emotions, even maternal love.
I could see why people could heal their relationships and feel more contented with their lives through this experience, but what was it about the experience that enabled them to heal their own physical conditions?
We know from extensive research that meditation has direct effects on the body, helping to diminish inflammation and alter the functioning of important enzymes, including an enzyme called telomerase, which affects the longevity of a cell. In Singer’s own work at the ReSource Project, her meditators enjoyed improved immune system and nervous system responses and a lowering of stress hormones.
But there was something more. In my experiments and groups, these healing effects were instantaneous and recorded largely in people not practiced in meditative techniques. Love must get bigger through our Power of Eight and Intention Experiment circles, and this creates a virtuous circle of healing. It may well have been that within the confines of intention groups, it finally becomes safe to give, and giving might ultimately be the entire point of the exercise, the aspect of the intention that proves to be the greatest healer.
It was time to turn the experiment on its head. Instead of studying the outcome—the getting—I needed to study the process: the act of giving.