16

HAPPINESS IN THE LAB

There is no large and difficult task that can’t be divided into little, easy tasks.

BUDDHIST SAYING

Throughout these pages I have sought to explore the relationships between material conditions and the inner conditions that influence happiness. Without second-guessing the very nature of consciousness¹—a discussion that would lead us too far astray—it is clear that questions remain about the relationship between happiness and brain functions. We know that many serious mental problems arise from brain pathologies over which the patient seems to have little subjective control and that need to be treated with long-term care. We also know that by stimulating certain zones of the brain, we can instantly elicit depression or feelings of intense pleasure in a subject for the duration of the stimulus. But to what extent can mind training change the brain? How long does it take for those changes to take place and how extensive can they be? Recent discoveries about brain “plasticity” and new research bringing together some of the best cognitive scientists and expert meditators who have trained their minds for years are beginning to shed light on these fascinating questions.

BRAIN PLASTICITY

Twenty years ago almost all neuroscientists believed that the adult brain had very little margin for change and could not generate new neurons. There could only be some limited reinforcement or deactivation of synaptic connections, combined with a slow decline of the brain through aging. It was thought that major changes would wreak havoc in the unbelievably complex brain functions that had been gradually built up in early life. Today ideas have changed considerably and neuroscientists are talking more and more about neuroplasticity—the concept that the brain is continually evolving in response to our experience, through the establishment of new neuronal connections, the strengthening of existing ones, or the creation of new neurons.

In a seminal research project, Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in California studied the response of rats to an “enriched environment.” The rodents were transferred from a bland box to a large cage with toys, exercise wheels, tunnels to explore, and plenty of playmates. The results were striking: in just forty-five days, the number of neurons in the hippocampus—a brain structure associated with processing novel experiences and dispatching them for storage in other areas of the brain—grew by 15 percent, even in older rats.²

Does this apply to human beings? Peter Ericksson, in Sweden, was able to study the formation of new neurons in cancer patients who, in order to monitor the growth of their tumor, had already been receiving the same drug that had been used to track the making of new neurons in rats. When those elderly patients died, their brains were autopsied and it was found that, just as with the rodents, new neurons had been formed in the hippocampus.³ It has become clear that neurogenesis in the brain is possible throughout life. As Daniel Goleman writes in Destructive Emotions, “Musical training, where a musician practices an instrument every day for years, offers an apt model for neuroplasticity. MRI studies find that in a violinist, for example, the areas of the brain that control finger movements in the hand that does the fingering grow in size. Those who start their training earlier in life and practice longer show bigger changes in the brain.”⁴ Studies of chess players and Olympic athletes have also found profound changes in the cognitive capacities involved in their pursuit. The question we can now ask is, Can a voluntary inner enrichment, such as the long-term practice of meditation, even when carried out in the neutral environment of a hermitage, induce important and lasting changes in the workings of the brain?

That is precisely what Richard Davidson and his team set out to study in the W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

AN EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTER

It all began half a world away, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in India, in a small village where the Dalai Lama located his government-in-exile following the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

In the fall of 2000 a small group of some of the leading neuroscientists and psychologists of our time—Francisco Varela, Paul Ekman, Richard Davidson, and others—gathered for five days of dialogue around the Dalai Lama. This was the tenth session in a series of memorable encounters between the Dalai Lama and eminent scientists, organized since 1985 by the Mind and Life Institute at the initiative of the late Francisco Varela, a groundbreaking researcher in the cognitive sciences, and Amer-ican former businessman Adam Engle.

The topic was “destructive emotions,” and I had the daunting task of presenting the Buddhist view in the presence of the Dalai Lama, a test that reminded me of sitting for school exams. Following that remarkable meeting, which has been endearingly recounted by Daniel Goleman in Destructive Emotions, several research programs were launched to study individuals who had devoted themselves for twenty years or more to the systematic development of compassion, altruism, and inner peace.

Four years later, in November 2004, the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the first of an ongoing series of papers about what can arguably be described as the first serious study of the impact on the brain of long-term meditation.⁵ Meditation states have traditionally been described in terms of the first-person experience, but they now also began to be translated into a scientific language.

To date, twelve experienced meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (eight Asian and four European, comprising both monks and lay practitioners) have been examined by Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, a student of Francisco Varela’s who joined the Madison laboratory. These accomplished practitioners, who have completed an estimated ten thousand to forty thousand hours of meditation over fifteen to forty years, were compared, as a control, with twelve age-matched volunteers, who were given meditation instructions and practiced for a week.

MEDITATORS IN THE LAB

I happened to be the first “guinea pig.” A protocol was developed whereby the meditator alternated between neutral states of mind and specific states of meditation. Among the various states that were initially tested, four were chosen as the objects of further research: the meditations on “altruistic love and compassion,” on “focused attention,” on “open presence,” and on the “visualization” of mental images.

There are methods in Buddhist practice devoted to cultivating loving-kindness and compassion. Here, the meditators try to generate an all-pervading sense of benevolence, a state in which love and compassion permeate the entire mind. They let pure love and compassion be the only object of their thoughts: intense, deep, and without any limit or exclusion. Although not immediately focusing on particular persons, altruistic love and compassion include a total readiness and unconditional availability to benefit others.

Focused attention, or concentration, requires focusing all one’s attention upon one chosen object and calling one’s mind back each time it wanders. Ideally this one-pointed concentration should be clear, calm, and stable. It should avoid sinking into dullness or being carried away by mental agitation.

Open presence is a clear, open, vast, and alert state of mind, free from mental constructs. It is not actively focused on anything, yet it is not distracted. The mind simply remains at ease, perfectly present in a state of pure awareness. When thoughts intrude, the meditator does not attempt to interfere with them, but allows the thoughts to vanish naturally.

Visualization consists of reconstituting in the mind’s eye a complex mental image, such as the representation of a Buddhist deity. The meditator begins by visualizing as clearly as possible every detail of the face, the clothes, the posture, and so on, inspecting them one by one. Lastly, he visualizes the entire deity and stabilizes that visualization.

These various meditations are among the many spiritual exercises that a practicing Buddhist cultivates over the course of many years, during which they become ever more stable and clear.

In the lab there are two main ways to test the meditators. Electroencephalograms (EEG) allow changes in the brain’s electrical activity to be recorded with a very accurate time resolution, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures blood flow in various areas of the brain and provides an extremely precise localization of cerebral activity.

The meditator alternates thirty-second neutral periods with ninety-second periods in which he generates one of the meditative states. The process is repeated many times for each mental state. In this instance, the instrument measuring the meditators was equipped with 256 sensors. The electrodes detected striking difference between novices and expert meditators. During meditation on compassion, most experienced meditators showed a dramatic increase in the high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves, “of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature,” says Richard Davidson.⁶ It was also found that movement of the waves through the brain was far better coordinated, or synchronized, than in the control group, who showed only a slight increase in gamma wave activity while meditating. This seems to demonstrate that “the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine” and that the meditators are able deliberately to regulate their cerebral activity.⁷ By comparison, most inexperienced subjects who are assigned a mental exercise—focusing on an object or an occurrence, visualizing an image, and so on—are generally incapable of limiting their mental activity to that one task.

One of the most interesting findings is that the monks who had spent the most years meditating generated the highest levels of gamma waves. This led Richard Davidson to speculate that “meditation not only changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite possibly produces permanent changes.”⁸

“We can’t rule out the possibility that there was a preexisting difference in brain function between monks and novices,” says Davidson, “but the fact that monks with the most hours of meditation showed the greatest brain changes gives us confidence that the changes are actually produced by mental training.”⁹ Further supporting this was the fact that the practitioners also had considerably higher gamma activity than the controls while resting in a neutral state, even before they started meditating. As science writer Sharon Begley comments: “That opens up the tantalizing possibility that the brain, like the rest of the body, can be altered intentionally. Just as aerobics sculpt the muscles, so mental training sculpts the gray matter in ways scientists are only beginning to fathom.”¹⁰

A MAP OF JOY AND SADNESS

I mentioned earlier that, properly speaking, there is no center of emotions in the brain. Emotions are complex phenomena that are functions of the interaction of several regions of the brain. There is therefore no point in looking for a “center” of happiness or of unhappiness. Nonetheless, work carried out in the past twenty years, principally by Richard Davidson and his colleagues, has found that when people report feeling joy, altruism, interest, or enthusiasm, and when they manifest high energy and vivacity of spirit, they present significant cerebral activity in the left prefrontal cortex. On the other hand, those who predominantly experience such “negative” emotional states as depression, pessimism, or anxiety and have a tendency to become withdrawn manifest more activity in the right prefrontal cortex.

Moreover, when we compare the activity levels of the left and right prefrontal cortexes of subjects at rest—that is, in a neutral state of mind—we find that the relation between them varies considerably from one person to the next and quite faithfully reflects their temperament. People who are customarily more active on the left side than on the right mostly feel pleasant emotions. Conversely, those whose right prefrontal cortex is more active feel negative emotions more often. Subjects whose left prefrontal cortex is damaged (in an accident or by disease) are especially vulnerable to depression, most likely because the right side is no longer counterbalanced by the left.

These characteristics are relatively stable and manifest from early childhood. One study of nearly four hundred two-and-a-half-year-olds found that those who, upon entering a room with other children, toys, and adults, clung anxiously to their mothers and spoke only reluctantly to strangers presented activity predominantly on the right.¹¹ However, those who felt secure and went straight off to play and spoke freely and fearlessly had higher activity on the left. The brain clearly bears the signatures of extroversion and introversion, the imprint of a happy or unhappy disposition.

As Goleman comments:

The implications of these findings for our emotional balance are profound: we each have a characteristic ratio of right-to-left activation in the prefrontal areas that offers a barometer of the moods we are likely to feel day to day. That ratio represents what amounts to an emotional set point, the mean around which our daily moods swing. Each of us has the capacity to shift our moods, at least a bit, and to change this ratio. The further to the left the ratio tilts, the better our frame of mind tends to be, and experiences that lift our mood cause such a leftward tilt, at least temporarily. For instance, most people show small positive changes in this ratio when they are asked to recall pleasant memories of events from their past, or when they watch amusing or heartwarming film clips.¹²

What happens in the case of meditators who have cultivated positive states of mind such as empathy and compassion methodically over a long period of time? A few years earlier, Davidson had studied the asymmetry between the right and left prefrontal cortexes of an elderly Tibetan monk who had meditated on compassion several hours a day throughout his life. Davidson had noticed that the predominance of activity on the left was far higher in the monk than in the 175 “ordinary” people tested to that point. This time again, the figures registered by the meditators were outside the distribution curve representing the results of tests on several hundred subjects.

The most astonishing was the spike of so-called gamma activity in the left middle frontal gyrus. Davidson’s research had already shown that this part of the brain is a focal point of positive emotions and that fluctuations in its balance are generally modest. But the data drawn from the experiments with the meditators were striking. As they began meditating on compassion, an extraordinary increase of left prefrontal activity was registered. Compassion, the very act of feeling concern for other people’s well-being, appears to be one of the positive emotions, like joy and enthusiasm. This corroborates the research of psychologists showing that the most altruistic members of a population are also those who enjoy the highest sense of satisfaction in life.

Using fMRI, Lutz, Davidson, and their colleagues also found that the brain activity of the practitioners meditating on compassion was especially high in the left prefrontal cortex. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex swamped activity in the right prefrontal (site of negative emotions and anxiety), something never before seen from purely mental activity.¹³

Preliminary results obtained by Jonathan Cohen and Brent Field at Princeton University also suggest that trained meditators are able to sustain focused attention upon various tasks over a much longer period of time than untrained controls.

This is all the more remarkable given that the meditators found themselves in a highly unfamiliar environment. They were required to lie flat on their back for prolonged periods of time in the confined environment of the scanner, in which they were not permitted to move their head even a fraction of an inch, lest the data go to waste. This may not seem an ideal situation for meditating, yet Davidson was pleasantly surprised to see the meditators emerge relaxed after this grueling routine in the MRI.

READING FACES

Other remarkable results, described by Goleman in Destructive Emotions, were reported by Paul Ekman, one of the world’s most eminent emotion scientists, who was then leading the Human Interaction Laboratory on the San Francisco campus of the University of California. Ekman had been among the small group of scientists present at Dharamsala and had observed one of the first meditators to come to the labs, several months earlier. In cooperation with that monk, he had undertaken four studies, in each of which, as he said, “we found things we’ve never found before.” Some discoveries were so novel, Ekman commented, that he was not entirely sure of understanding them himself.

The first experiment drew on a system for measuring the facial expressions used to convey various emotions. The development of this system had been one of the greatest successes of Ekman’s career. A series of faces displaying various expressions is shown in very quick succession on a video. It begins with a neutral face, followed by the expression, which remains onscreen for a mere thirtieth of a second. The emotive expression is replaced immediately by the neutral expression, and so on. The test consists of identifying, during that thirtieth of a second, the facial signals one has just seen: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, or joy.

The ability to recognize such fleeting expressions has been associated with an unusual capacity for empathy and insight. The six microemotions put forward are universal, biologically determined, and expressed facially the same way worldwide.

As Goleman comments: “While there are sometimes large cultural differences in consciously managing the expression of emotions like disgust, these ultrarapid expressions come and go so quickly that they evade even cultural taboos. Microexpressions offer a window on the other person’s emotional reality.”¹⁴

Ekman’s studies of thousands of subjects had taught him that the most talented at recognizing microexpressions were also the most open to new experiences, the most curious about things in general, and the most reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explained.

It turned out that two experienced Western meditators whom Ekman had tested had achieved results that were far better than those of five thousand subjects previously tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had proven hitherto to be the most accurate, Ekman noted. He has since developed an interactive CD that teaches this skill to anyone in a few hours. But without this special training, it is only the meditators who display such ability.

THE STARTLE RESPONSE

The startle response, one of the most primitive reflexes in the human body’s repertoire of responses, involves a series of very rapid muscular spasms in reaction to a sudden noise or an unexpected and disturbing sight. In all people, the same five facial muscles contract instantaneously, notably around the eyes. The entire thing lasts a mere third of a second.

Like all reflexes, the startle reflex responds to activity in the brain stem, the most primitive part of that organ, and is usually not subject to voluntary control. As far as science is aware, no intentional act can alter the mechanism that controls it.

The intensity of the startle response is known to reflect the predominance of the negative emotions to which someone is subject—fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. The stronger a person’s flinch, the more he is inclined to experience negative emotions.

To test the first meditator’s startle reflex, Ekman brought him to the Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory run by his longtime colleague Robert Levenson. The meditator’s body movements, pulse, perspiration, and skin temperature were measured. His facial expressions were filmed to capture his physiological reactions to a sudden noise. The experimenters opted for the maximal threshold of human tolerance—a very powerful detonation, equivalent to a gunshot going off beside the ear.

The subject was told that within a five-minute period he would hear a loud explosion. He was asked to try to neutralize the inevitable strong reaction, to the extent of making it imperceptible if possible. Some people are better than others at this exercise, but no one is able to suppress it entirely—far from it—even with the most intense effort to restrain the muscular spasms. Among the hundreds of subjects whom Ekman and Levenson had tested, none had ever managed it. Prior research had found that even elite police sharpshooters, who fire guns every day, cannot stop themselves from flinching. But the meditator was able to.

As Ekman explained: “When he tries to repress the startle, it almost disappears. We’ve never found anyone who can do that. Nor have any other researchers. This is a spectacular accomplishment. We don’t have any idea of the anatomy that would allow him to suppress the startle reflex.”

During these tests, the meditator had practiced two types of meditation: single-pointed concentration and open presence, both of which had been studied by fMRI in Madison. He found that the best effect was obtained with the open presence meditation. “In that state,” he said, “I was not actively trying to control the startle, but the detonation seemed weaker, as if I were hearing it from a distance.” Ekman described how, while some changes had been effected in the meditator’s physiology, not one muscle in his face had moved. As the subject explained: “In the distracted state, the explosion suddenly brings you back to the present moment and causes you to jump out of suprise. But while in open presence you are resting in the present moment and the bang simply occurs and causes only a little disturbance, like a bird crossing the sky.”

Although none of the meditator’s facial muscles had quivered when he was in the open presence, his physiological parameters (pulse, perspiration, blood pressure) had risen in the way usually associated with the startle reflex. This tells us that the body reacted, registering all the effects of the detonation, but that the bang had no emotional impact on the mind. The meditator’s performance suggests remarkable emotional equanimity—precisely the same kind of equanimity that the ancient texts describe as one of the fruits of meditative practice.

WHAT TO MAKE OF IT ALL?

The research, writes Goleman,

seeks to map . . . the extent to which the brain can be trained to dwell in a constructive range: contentment instead of craving, calm rather than agitation, compassion in place of hatred. Medicines are the leading modality in the West for addressing disturbing emotions, and for better or for worse, there is no doubt that mood-altering pills have brought solace to millions. But one compelling question the research [with meditators] raises is whether a person, through his or her own efforts, can bring about lasting positive changes in brain function that are even more far-reaching than medication in their impact on emotions.¹⁵

As far as the cognitive scientists are concerned, the point of this research is not simply to demonstrate the remarkable abilities of a few isolated meditators, but to make us rethink our assumptions about the potential impact of mental training on the development of constructive emotions. “What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one. In time, we will be able to understand the potential importance of mind training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously,” says Richard Davidson.¹⁶ The important thing is to find out whether that process of mental training is available to anyone with enough determination.

We may wonder how much practice is necessary for the brain to effectuate such changes, especially in an exercise as subtle as meditation. For example, by the time they have reached the competition for admission to national music conservatories, violinists have logged an average of ten thousand hours of practice. Most of the meditators now being studied by Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson have gone way beyond the equivalent ten thousand hours of meditation. The major portion of their training has been undertaken during intensive retreats, in addition to their years of daily practice.

Ten thousand hours may seem indeed daunting, if not entirely out of reach, to the vast majority of us. Yet there is some comforting news. A study that Richard Davidson published with Jon Kabat-Zinn and others has shown that three months of meditation training with highly active employees of a biotech company in Madison had significantly shifted toward the left the baseline reflecting the differential activities of their right and left prefrontal cortices. The immune system of these apprentice meditators was also boosted and the flu vaccine that they received in the fall, at the end of the training, was 20 percent more effective than in the control group.¹⁷

What is clearly needed next are more extensive longitudinal studies on the effect of meditation in general and more particularly on the cultivation of loving-kindness and compassion. A few such studies are planned. At the newly created Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, B. Alan Wallace will soon lead an eight-month retreat of novice meditators who will meditate eight hours a day and be monitored by scientists from the University of California-Davis. Another research program, “Cultivating Emotional Balance,” undertaken at the request of the Dalai Lama and spearheaded by the Mind and Life Institute, was initiated by Paul Ekman and is presently led by Margaret Kemeny at UC-San Francisco. This program is studying the effect of a three-month meditation course on 150 women teachers and has yielded remarkable preliminary results.

If it is possible for meditators to train their minds to make their destructive emotions vanish, certain practical elements of that meditative training could be valuably incorporated into the education of children and help adults to achieve better quality of life. If such meditation techniques are valid and address the deepest mechanisms of the human mind, their value is universal and they don’t have to be labeled Buddhist even though they are the fruit of more than twenty centuries of Buddhist contemplatives’ investigation of the mind. In essence, the current collaboration between scientists and contemplatives could awaken people’s interest to the immense value of mind training. If happiness and emotional balance are skills, we cannot underestimate the power of the transformation of the mind and must give due importance to the profound methods that allow us to become better human beings.