If You Don’t Use It – You’ll Lose It!
Buddhist Monks Give Insights Into Happiness Set Point and Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour

Harvard neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone got volunteers to learn and practice a simple five-finger piano exercise, keeping to 60 beats per minute, for 2 hours daily for 5 days.  Then they took a test: the transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS), which allows the function of the neurons to be inferred. The TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex in the brain – which is responsible for movement – controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements started taking over surrounding areas. This means that the greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to allocate more brain space to it.

Pascual-Leone decided to take his experiments a step further. He got another group of volunteers to just THINK about practicing the piano. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still, while imagining how they would move their fingers. When the TMS test was carried out on these volunteers it was found that the motor cortex here had also expanded, just as with those who had actually physically played the piano.  What this shows is that mental training - thinking about something viscerally - has the power to change the physical structure of the brain, and that the brain can change as a result of the thoughts we think.

Another neuroscientist, Richard Davidson, had become fascinated by Buddhist monks and the fact that they were the ‘Olympic athletes of mental training’. Some monks have spent as much as 10 000 hours of their lives in meditation. Earlier in his career, Davidson had found that there was a correlation between higher activity in an area of the brain called the left prefrontal cortex and degrees of contentment. The relative activity of the left/right prefrontal cortex has become viewed as a marker for the happiness set point. The right prefrontal cortex is associated with negative moods. There is  ‘baseline’ level (like a default setting) that people tend to return to whether they have won the lottery or their partner has died.  Davidson wondered if it was possible to produce changes that underlie enduring happiness and other positive emotions. Can emotions, moods and states such as compassion, be viewed as trainable mental skills?

Encouraged in his endeavours by the Dalai Lama, Davidson recruited Buddhist monks to meditate inside his brain-scanning machine (fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging). As a comparison, he used undergraduate students who had had no experience with meditation, but received a crash course in basic techniques before the experiments were carried out. 

The Buddhist monks were seen to have a significantly grater activation in the brain network linked to empathy and maternal love. During the Buddhist compassion meditation the connections from the frontal brain regions to the brain’s emotional areas were stronger with more years of meditation practice. It seems that the brain ‘learns’ to forge more robust connections between thinking and feeling during the course of the years.

The most striking difference was in the area of the happiness set point – the left prefrontal cortex. While the monks were doing their compassion meditation, activity in the left prefrontal cortex swamped the right prefrontal cortex, to a degree that had never been seen before from just mental activity. The undergraduate volunteer ‘meditators’ showed no differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests that the positive, compassionate and happy state is a skill that can be trained, and that the conscious act of thinking thoughts in a particular way – as in meditation - rearranges the structure of the brain.

Well, that’s all well and good, you might say, but how can it be used to help heal disease?

Recent experiments carried out from the University of California by Jeffrey Schwartz have found that the brain circuit that underlies obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) - the orbital frontal cortex - can be quietened by ‘cognitive behaviour therapy’. Schwartz had been inspired by another Buddhist practice – that of the mindfulness mediation – to observe your inner experiences as though they were happening to someone else.  When OCD patients had an obsessive though, Schwartz instructed them to think that is was ‘just another obsessive thought thrown up by their brain as a result of some faulty circuit’. After 10 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy, 12 of the 18 patients had significantly improved. Brain scans showed that the activity of the orbital frontal cortex, which plays such an important part in OCD, had fallen dramatically. Even more noteworthy is that it had worked in the same way as the medicines that are effective against OCD. Schwartz concluded that ‘the mind can change the brain.’

We have seen that our thoughts can not only influence our moods, but that they can change the physical structure of our brains. And what’s more….it seems that there is truth in the old saying of  ‘if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it’ !! So here’s to using our wonderful brains and to more health, happiness and well-being.

References:
J. Talan. “Masters of Emotion.” Scientific American Mind, 2007, volume 1, pages 40-41.

S. Begley. “How the Brain Rewires Itself.”  Time Magazine, 2007, Feb.12, pages 48-52.

D. Goleman. “Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogie with the Dalai Lama.” Bantam, 2003.

B.A. Wallace. “Genuine Happiness: Meditation as the Path to Fulfilment.” John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

A. Pascual-Leone et al. “Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills.” Journal of  Neurophysiology, 1995, volume 74, pages 1037-1045.

A. Lutz, L.L. Greischar, Rawlings NB, Ricard M, Davidson RJ. “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2004, volume 101, pages 6369-73.

J.M. Schwartz. “Brain Lock.” Regan Books, 1997.

J.M. Schwartz. “The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.” Regan Books, 2003.