0.10 Biology and personality  (Page 16/22)

Discussion Question: The Buddha proposed a method for alleviating the suffering associated with our desires and distresses: the four mindfulness trainings. Have you ever tried meditating, particularly the form of mindfulness meditation taught in the Theravadan tradition? Has it been helpful, or if you haven’t tried it, do you think it might be helpful?

The Neurobiology of Mindfulness

We began this chapter by looking at genetics and biology. We then transitioned into Buddhist mindfulness techniques that are thousands of years old. Today, these two disciplines have come together in some fascinating research. Neurobiologists and psychologists are working together with advanced meditators and respected Buddhist monks (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to study the activity of the brain, in real time, during meditation. These studies may also help to advance our understanding of the nature of the mind, but that may still be somewhat beyond our technical abilities. The interest of the field of psychology, and academia in general, is clearly evidenced by articles that have been written about these studies in venues such as the prestigious journal Science (Barinaga, 2003), the popular The Chronicle of Higher Education (Monastersky, 2006), and the Monitor on Psychology published by the American Psychological Association (Winerman, 2006).

Cognitive neuroscience has taken advantage of many technical advances in brain imaging, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) , single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) , and positron emission tomography (PET) to study the activity of the brain during mental tasks. Initially, these studies focused on identifying brain regions involved in very specific tasks. More recently, however, some investigators have become interested in using these techniques to study broad questions, such as the nature of the mind. Since we don’t know what the nature of the mind is, we don’t exactly know what to look for in these brain imaging studies. So, the investigators pursuing this research must creatively examine the brain during meditation (as well as under other conditions). It has been shown that meditation activates neural structures involved in attention and arousal (Lazar et al., 2000, 2005a; Newberg, 2001), alterations in sensory processing and the sense of space (Lazar, 2005a; Newberg, 2001), and a dramatic increase in synchronization of neural activity (Lutz et al., 2004). In perhaps the most striking of these studies, Lazar and her colleagues have demonstrated that long-term meditation practice is associated with increased cortical thickness in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing (Lazar, 2005a). These effects were most pronounced in the older subjects, suggesting that meditation may have beneficial effects in terms of offsetting age-related declines in cortical thickness. Given these dramatic changes in brain function as a result of meditation, perhaps it should come as no surprise that meditation and mindfulness have proven to be useful adjuncts to therapy for a wide variety of psychological and medical disorders (for reviews see Lazar, 2005b and Newberg&Lee, 2005; see also Cozolino, 2002; Germer et al., 2005; Siegel, 2007).