You are what you meditate

http://www.dailycardinal.com/article/21706

You Are What You Meditate

By: Jigyasa Jyotika /The Daily Cardinal

UW scientists receive government grant to help study the surprising effects of meditation and compassion on the brain

With the holidays approaching, hopefully families everywhere will come together to celebrate their love for each other. They may not know the details of how love and compassion works in their brains, but at least there are some TV specials to help in feeling it.

In the meantime, a team of UW scientists has been systematically studying ethereal emotions like love, compassion and forgiveness at the neurological level. Concrete findings about emotions have so far been elusive, yet arguably central to human existence.

UW-Madison professor of psychiatry and psychology Richard Davidson not only thinks he may begin to find answers, but he received a $2.5 million grant from the Michigan-based Fetzer Institute earlier this year to study positive emotions like these.

“I think it would be fair to say that we are the most active research group in the world in the neuroscience of positive emotions,” said Davidson.

Davidson, who directs the UW Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, has been a world leader in the research on positive emotions in the human brain since its inception over a decade ago.

“With this grant, we plan to study the effects of other positive qualities on the brain — besides love, compassion and forgiveness — in the future and see how we can use the findings to find treatments for anxiety and depression,” said Davidson.

Using brain scans, his research has shown that people whose brains have nurtured higher capacities for love, compassion and forgiveness through mediation are significantly structurally different from those who don’t. (No word yet on those who watch lots of holiday TV specials.)

“We have studied Tibetan monks, amongst other practitioners of meditation, and their brains show significant signs of change after years of such meditation,” Davidson said.

“The brain is more plastic than we ever thought before and it will shape according to experience,” UW-Madison emeritus professor of molecular biology Deric Bownds said. “So you are what you are doing.” That means the brains of pianists expand to incorporate their learning and practice and keeping it that way, and the brains of couch potatoes adapt to that lifestyle too.

Professors around the UW campus are not surprised that Davidson’s group received the $2.5 million grant.

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been identified as the mecca of emotion research primarily due to Richard Davidson and his team, who had the foresight to lead this research,” UW professor of psychiatry Jack Nitschke said.

Davidson’s group studies brains by scanning them using functional magnetic resonance images (fMRIs), which reveal areas of the brain that light up under different stimuli. Although the fMRI technique, at best, can just establish correlations between brain areas and their likely functions, that may be enough information for the development of therapeutics for depression and other neurological conditions.

While negative emotions like anxiety and depression have received a lot of attention and are widely studied, Davidson is one of the few scientists in the world who studies positive emotions in humans. For his contribution to the field, in 2006 Time magazine named him among the top 100 most influential people.

In addition to meditating every day, Davidson agreed that he had a personal angle in studying positive emotions in the human brain, one worthy of any holiday special.

“I wanted to work on something that was of benefit to others and to alleviate suffering in the world,” he said.