Neuroscience Has a Lot To Learn from Buddhism

Neuroscience Has a Lot To Learn from Buddhism

• Matthieu Ricard
  
• Wolf Singer
  

Ricard: A study of people who have practiced meditation for a long time demonstrates that structural connectivity among the different areas of the brain is higher in meditators than in a control group. Hence, there must be another kind of change allowed by the brain.

Singer: I have no difficulty in accepting that a learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from reeducation programs, where practice leads to small but incremental behavior modifications. There is also evidence for quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and coping strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning—distributed changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections—lead to drastic alterations of global brain states.

Ricard: You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly.

Singer: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas.

Ricard: So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

Along the same lines, a while ago I noted this book as sounding quite interesting (though describing a book as "your roadmap to a more mindful, compassionate, fulfilling life" has anything but the intended effect on me!):
Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" (2017)
https://www.richardjdavidson.com/altered-traits

Unlike the consensus above, they do apparently claim anatomical changes as a result of meditation.

To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!

This is something which I think could affect our choice of the work we do. In some types of work, it is possible to free the mind and enter meditation while continuing to work. Other types of work not only pull us away from that possibility, but may leave after-effects which continue to play through the mind even during so-called rest or leisure times.

As someone who has spent a lot of time both in work and not in work, I value the time not working as precious, though Western society is constructed to demean and devalue this status.

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - there's a recently published study reporting that scans of the brain of a Tibetan Buddhist monk showed slower ageing than those of a control group.

Here's a commentary on LiveScience:
https://www.livescience.com/buddhist-mon...brain.html

And here's the abstract of the paper (the full text is pay-per-view):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...20.1731553

It strikes me as interesting, but not really evidential. I don't see anything about statistical significance, and as the LiveScience article points out, the control group was from Madison, Wisconsin, not Tibet, so there may be other factors than meditation which could explain the observations.