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The neuroscience of meditation… this is where the meeting of science & spirituality gets really exciting… I can’t believe how far we’ve come.. and more and more of these scientists keep ‘coming out of the closet’ to step up and in to a much needed conversation about prescribing meditation over medication…

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Richard Davidson (internationally renowned for his research on the neural substrates of emotion and emotional disorders):

“… Our work indicates that there are signals in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which can be recorded, that reflect an individu- al’s overall level of happiness or well-be- ing. Individuals with greater left side pre- frontal activation, on average, tend to be individuals who report themselves to be happier, more energetic, and more opti- mistic. These are the kind of people who jump out of bed in the morning and are ready to embrace the world. They are approach oriented. It’s not a laid back type of happiness. It’s an active, involved happiness. And that’s what my index reflects…”

How cool is it that our brain’s are built for to be trained and re-trained… and we can ‘learn’ happiness, compassion, love, peace… and interesting that this activity is predominantly occurring in the left hemisphere…

And not only can meditation bring you happiness, and peace, but it also brings you a stronger immune system, more focus, greater vigilance… so what would happen if we started teaching our children and soldiers and physicians and politicians all to meditate? What would the world look like then? well.. at least our country…

And not only does it affect us, but it also affects the people around us… here’s the closing note of the interview:

“…To be succinct, we can influence other people’s health simply by the way we act.

EXPLORE: So we know that, if I medi- tate, I can affect my brain. Do we have any data that, if I meditate, I can affect the brains of the people that I am in- teracting with? If you are in the presence of an enlightened person, are you up- lifted?

DAVIDSON: Yes, I have no doubt in that. And, again, I don’t think it requires any nonstandard theoretical framework to un- derstand. It’s not as if there is a transmis- sion of some unknown energy, but, rather, simply by the demeanor of an individual, by what they say and how they say it, by
their gestures, they can affect, unquestion- ably, the mind and brain of those with whom they interact.
For instance, there is a lot of nonspe- cific healing that occurs in the ordinary course of a doctor-patient relationship. A doctor can make his or her patients feel more at ease, well cared for and attended to, and that can actually promote real bi- ological change that is beneficial.
When I am in the presence of the Dalai Lama, I am affected. There is no question about it, and it is very powerful. For in- stance, one interaction I had with the Dalai Lama occurred during a break in the meeting. He was sitting in a chair, and I was kneeling beside him, talking to him. We were close, and the whole time he had his hands on my ear lobe and was rubbing my ear. This went on for fifteen minutes. It was completely natural, and the impact of touch in that way can be very powerful. I had the experience of feeling very deeply secure and comforted by the Dalai Lama’s presence. But I don’t think it requires these crazy theories that there is some kind of energy that we really have not identified scientifically. It can be explained using the principles that we understand. I have yet to be confronted by new and compelling evidence that cannot be subsumed within the rubric of conventional scientific un- derstanding. But the fact that we can affect each other is very important, and having a scientific understanding of it doesn’t at all diminish its importance.

EXPLORE: So you would say that a per- son’s mind can affect other people?

DAVIDSON: Yes, and we should pay at- tention to this in our culture. That’s an- other issue that is addressed in the ethical framework of many of these traditions— the interdependence that all beings have on this planet. There is a level of interde- pendence that is very profound, and, when you actually begin to understand this scientifically, it makes perfect sense. The way we think, how we behave, the qualities that we exhibit, very directly af- fect those around us. We can affect their brains, and we can affect their bodies. To be succinct, we can influence other peo- ple’s health simply by the way we act.”

AHO! Well said Dr. Davidson! And thank you for stepping out of your spiritual closet and stepping up to lead a revolution in our way of thinking, feeling, and being!

If you would like to read this entire interview, here’s the reference:

EXPLORE, September 2005, Vol. 1, No. 5

I was just doing some research for the 22 Ways 2 Love You film project and came across this inspiring article published last year in Science News. The Helen Fisher group is the only one I know of getting public attention for the brain imaging studies conducted on romantic love. What a great journey & great training ground to explore and essentially study Love on every level from my own personal experiences to my coaching clients’ experience to what people share on the street in random interviews, to what scientists have to share from their findings.

Enjoy! And stay tuned for more postings…

Source: Science News/ Home / News / December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 / News item

Still crazy (in love) after all these years
A brain imaging study reveals that some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage
By Laura Sanders

December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 (p. 17)

WASHINGTON — New research on brain activity confirms that people can be madly in love with each other long after the honeymoon is over.

Researchers led by Bianca Acevedo at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York wanted to know if romantic love — or at least the brain activity it triggers — could last in a long-term relationship. To everyone’s relief, the answer is yes. The group presented its results November 16 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

The new data suggest that people who have been madly in love for an average of 21 years maintain activation in a brain region associated with early-stage love. “We now have physiological evidence that romantic love can last,” says coauthor Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Most couples who have been together for many years experience a change from a frenetic, obsessive love to something more subdued and comfortable, says study coauthor Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. But the researchers noticed a small group of outliers who had been with the same person many years and claimed to be as much in love as they were during the exciting early days of their relationship.

Since that earlier study in 2005 using functional MRI brain imaging, the researchers knew that a certain part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area was activated when people who had been in love for relatively short times — an average of seven months — saw pictures of their sweethearts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the ventral tegmental area is also activated by the rush of cocaine, and is the region that controls production of the natural stimulant dopamine. The researchers concluded that this area was associated with the intense, burning stages of early love. It was unclear whether this region would still be active after 20 years of being in a relationship.

Long-term lovers who had been married for an average of 21 years viewed a picture of their partner while the scientists monitored the subjects’ brain activity using fMRI. People who claimed to be madly in love for 20 years and people who had been in love only for months showed similar activation in the ventral tegmental area of the brain.

At the same time, key differences between the early- and late-stage lovers emerged that suggest potential benefits to staying together for 20 years. People in long-term relationships who were madly in love showed higher levels of activity in a part of the brain associated with calmness and pain suppression, whereas people in love for shorter periods of time had higher activity in a region of the brain associated with obsession and anxiety. “The difference is that in long term love, the obsession the mania, the anxiety has been replaced with calm,” Fisher said in a news conference.

“There is an evolutionary advantage to being paired,” says researcher J. Thomas Curtis, who studies pair-bonding in prairie voles, small animals that are well-known for forming life-long monogamous pairs. Much of the research on voles, including Curtis’ work at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, Okla., supports these new findings on long-term pairing in humans, he says. In fact, when researchers get rid of the ventral tegmental area of a vole brain, the same region activated in human couples who are in love, the animal no longer forms pair bonds.

To understand the complicated subject of human love, the scientists plan to conduct more brain imaging studies. The next step will be to periodically monitor the brains of newlyweds as the couples slowly enter long-term relationships. The researchers hope to understand how brain activity may correlate with life events, like the birth of a child or relationship troubles, Acevedo says.

Learning: what does it have to do with Happiness?

Learning may be more fundamental to happiness than one might initially think.
What do you think of when you think of learning? Have we evolved as a species in the way that we learn? Or could we be experiencing a crisis in learning as we advance in the realm of science and technology?

At a conference on professional life coaching and personal growth, a major theme persisted, emphasizing that it’s not so much what we learn but more the process of learning that matters in the pursuit for happiness. It would make sense to first define happiness. For different people, happiness means different things. According to Merriam-Webster, happiness is a noun referring to a state of well-being and contentment (i.e. joy) or a pleasurable, satisfying experience.

Interestingly enough, scientists have demonstrated in the laboratory that the part of the brain long agreed upon as the ‘pleasure center’ is activated during associative learning in rats (Young et al., 1998). Specifically, rats are trained to associate two neutral stimuli, a flashing light and a tone. The tone was subsequently paired with a mild footshock using standard aversive conditioning procedures. The procedure can be likened to what Pavlov demonstrated with salivation becoming the conditioned effect of the bell ringing once the sound of the bell was associated with the presentation of the delicious piece of meat. Thus, conditioning is a very basic kind of learning. In fact, I would be so bold as to suggest that associative learning is the fundamental process underlying all learning.

What Young et al. (1998) showed in their study is that learning, by itself, is rewarding. Being that the neurochemical correlate to reward is the release of dopamine in the mesolimbic dopamine system and observing such release when learning had occurred suggests that not only is there pleasure in learning, but the pleasure is designed to motivate learning. Both rats and humans experience pleasure when learning occurs. Indeed, it doesn’t even matter what the subject is learning. It can be the association between two stimuli that are in and of itself neutral and quite boring such as a flashing light and a tone. Though it’s worthwhile to note that the scientists had to first associate the tone with a mild footshock, suggesting the potential importance of the emotional system to facilitate the learning process.

Going back to the definition of happiness being an experience of pleasure, one can begin to see exactly what learning has to do with happiness. There is pleasure in learning. It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t we be biologically set up to find pleasure in learning? We would be in a lot of trouble if learning were absolutely un-enjoyable. Can you imagine?

So what do our moods and emotions have to do with learning? The relationship between emotions and learning is clearly seen in many modern educational systems. Did you know that, according to a UNICEF study, 60% of a child’s ability to learn is impacted by emotion? According to this study, when a child has the experience of being loved and reports being happy, they are able to learn and remember 60% more material than a child who does not have the experience of love and happiness. How interesting is it, then, that so many schools claim there are not enough resources to maintain a proper educational system? Many schools insist that children’s education suffers because of the lack of funds for supplies and technology when what they really need is love and compassion. Sadly, our children often become emotionally malnourished in modern educational systems.

Philosophers, some as prominent as Freud and Jung, have suggested that a shift in the emotional domain makes learning take off exponentially. Witnessing the crisis in learning that is happening in modern day America, it’s not difficult to see how this might be true. Indeed, when the environments of our schools do not welcome the full expression of a child’s emotional experience, there is disconnect not only from the emotions but also from the teachers and the objectives they are there to learn. This sense of disconnection carries into adulthood. One must wonder if this sense of disconnection breeds a different kind of learning, the kind that relentlessly acquires more and more knowledge, pushing the envelope of technology, leaving behind the ability to be intimately and fully connected with the experience of life.

Bottom line: Love, compassion, and being connected to our emotions impact the learning process in a way that promotes happiness. There is wisdom in our emotions that goes beyond the rational mind. It’s time we honor that wisdom and dissolve the crisis of the western mind.

Young, A.M., R.G. Ahier, et al. (1998). “Increased extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens of the rat during associative learning of neutral stimuli.” Neuroscience 83(4): 1175-83.