January
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SCIENCE JOURNAL
By SHARON
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How Thinking Can Change the
Brain

Dalai
Lama Helps Scientists
Show the Power of the Mind
To Sculpt Our Gray
Matter
January 19,
2007; Page B1

Although science and religion are often in conflict, the
Dalai Lama takes a different approach. Every year or so the head of
Tibetan Buddhism invites a group of scientists to his home in Dharamsala,
in Northern India, to discuss their work and how Buddhism might contribute
to it.

In 2004 the subject was neuroplasticity, the ability of the
brain to change its structure and function in response to experience. The
following are vignettes adapted from "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,"
which describes this emerging area of science:

BOOK EXCERPT

Adapted
from "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain", by Sharon Begley. Ms.
Begley writes the weekly Science column for The Wall Street
Journal.

The Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a
visit to an American medical school over a decade earlier, asked the
surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?

Over the years, he said, neuroscientists had explained to
him that mental experiences reflect chemical and electrical changes in the
brain. When electrical impulses zip through our visual cortex, for
instance, we see; when neurochemicals course through the limbic system we
feel.

But something had always bothered him about this
explanation, the Dalai Lama said. Could it work the other way around? That
is, in addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs
and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, maybe the mind
also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very matter
that created it. If so, then pure thought would change the brain's
activity, its circuits or even its structure.

One brain surgeon hardly paused. Physical states give rise
to mental states, he asserted; "downward" causation from the mental to the
physical is not possible. The Dalai Lama let the matter drop. This wasn't
the first time a man of science had dismissed the possibility that the
mind can change the brain. But "I thought then and still think that there
is yet no scientific basis for such a categorical claim," he later
explained. "I am interested in the extent to which the mind itself, and
specific subtle thoughts, may have an influence upon the brain."

Sharon Begley with the Dalai Lama at the
neuroplasticity meeting in Dharamsala, India, in
2004

The Dalai Lama had put his finger on an emerging revolution
in brain research. In the last decade of the 20th century, neuroscientists
overthrew the dogma that the adult brain can't change. To the contrary,
its structure and activity can morph in response to experience, an ability
called neuroplasticity. The discovery has led to promising new treatments
for children with dyslexia and for stroke patients, among others.

But the brain changes that were discovered in the first
rounds of the neuroplasticity revolution reflected input from the outside
world. For instance, certain synthesized speech can alter the auditory
cortex of dyslexic kids in a way that lets their brains hear previously
garbled syllables; intensely practiced movements can alter the motor
cortex of stroke patients and allow them to move once paralyzed arms or
legs.

The kind of change the Dalai Lama asked about was
different. It would come from inside. Something as intangible and
insubstantial as a thought would rewire the brain. To the mandarins of
neuroscience, the very idea seemed as likely as the wings of a butterfly
leaving a dent on an armored tank.

* * *

Neuroscientist Helen Mayberg had not endeared herself to
the pharmaceutical industry by discovering, in 2002, that inert pills --
placebos -- work the same way on the brains of depressed people as
antidepressants do. Activity in the frontal cortex, the seat of higher
thought, increased; activity in limbic regions, which specialize in
emotions, fell. She figured that cognitive-behavioral therapy, in which
patients learn to think about their thoughts differently, would act by the
same mechanism.

At the University of Toronto, Dr. Mayberg, Zindel Segal and
their colleagues first used brain imaging to measure activity in the
brains of depressed adults. Some of these volunteers then received
paroxetine (the generic name of the antidepressant Paxil), while others
underwent 15 to 20 sessions of cognitive-behavior therapy, learning not to
catastrophize. That is, they were taught to break their habit of
interpreting every little setback as a calamity, as when they conclude
from a lousy date that no one will ever love them.

All the patients' depression lifted, regardless of whether
their brains were infused with a powerful drug or with a different way of
thinking. Yet the only "drugs" that the cognitive-therapy group received
were their own thoughts.

The scientists scanned their patients' brains again,
expecting that the changes would be the same no matter which treatment
they received, as Dr. Mayberg had found in her placebo study. But no. "We
were totally dead wrong," she says. Cognitive-behavior therapy muted
overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic, analysis
and higher thought. The antidepressant raised activity there.
Cognitive-behavior therapy raised activity in the limbic system, the
brain's emotion center. The drug lowered activity there.

With cognitive therapy, says Dr. Mayberg, the brain is
rewired "to adopt different thinking circuits."

* * *

Such discoveries of how the mind can change the brain have
a spooky quality that makes you want to cue the "Twilight Zone" theme, but
they rest on a solid foundation of animal studies. Attention, for
instance, seems like one of those ephemeral things that comes and goes in
the mind but has no real physical presence. Yet attention can alter the
layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab
of stone.

That was shown dramatically in an experiment with monkeys
in 1993. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged
up a device that tapped monkeys' fingers 100 minutes a day every day. As
this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds
through headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught: Ignore the sounds and
pay attention to what you feel on your fingers, because when you tell us
it changes we'll reward you with a sip of juice. Other monkeys were
taught: Pay attention to the sound, and if you indicate when it changes
you'll get juice.

Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, undergoing
an EEG during a study of compassion meditation

After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys'
brains. Usually, when a spot on the skin receives unusual amounts of
stimulation, the amount of cortex that processes touch expands. That was
what the scientists found in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps:
The somatosensory region that processes information from the fingers
doubled or tripled. But when the monkeys paid attention to the sounds,
there was no such expansion. Instead, the region of their auditory cortex
that processes the frequency they heard increased.

Through attention, UCSF's Michael Merzenich and a colleague
wrote, "We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we
choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these
choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves."

The discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without
attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you
can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And
if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be
as effective if you become able to do them without paying much
attention.

* * *

Since the 1990s, the Dalai Lama had been lending monks and
lamas to neuroscientists for studies of how meditation alters activity in
the brain. The idea was not to document brain changes during meditation
but to see whether such mental training produces enduring changes in the
brain.

All the Buddhist "adepts" -- experienced meditators -- who
lent their brains to science had practiced meditation for at least 10,000
hours. One by one, they made their way to the basement lab of Richard
Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He and his colleagues
wired them up like latter-day Medusas, a tangle of wires snaking from
their scalps to the electroencephalograph that would record their brain
waves.

Eight Buddhist adepts and 10 volunteers who had had a crash
course in meditation engaged in the form of meditation called
nonreferential compassion. In this state, the meditator focuses on
unlimited compassion and loving kindness toward all living beings.

As the volunteers began meditating, one kind of brain wave
grew exceptionally strong: gamma waves. These, scientists believe, are a
signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung circuits --
consciousness, in a sense. Gamma waves appear when the brain brings
together different features of an object, such as look, feel, sound and
other attributes that lead the brain to its aha moment of, yup, that's an
armadillo.

Some of the novices "showed a slight but significant
increase in the gamma signal," Prof. Davidson explained to the Dalai Lama.
But at the moment the monks switched on compassion meditation, the gamma
signal began rising and kept rising. On its own, that is hardly
astounding: Everything the mind does has a physical correlate, so the
gamma waves (much more intense than in the novice meditators) might just
have been the mark of compassion meditation.

Except for one thing. In between meditations, the gamma
signal in the monks never died down. Even when they were not meditating,
their brains were different from the novices' brains, marked by waves
associated with perception, problem solving and consciousness. Moreover,
the more hours of meditation training a monk had had, the stronger and
more enduring the gamma signal.

It was something Prof. Davidson had been seeking since he
trekked into the hills above Dharamsala to study lamas and monks: evidence
that mental training can create an enduring brain trait.

Prof. Davidson then used fMRI imaging to detect which
regions of the monks' and novices' brains became active during compassion
meditation. The brains of all the subjects showed activity in regions that
monitor one's emotions, plan movements, and generate positive feelings
such as happiness. Regions that keep track of what is self and what is
other became quieter, as if during compassion meditation the subjects
opened their minds and hearts to others.

More interesting were the differences between the monks and
the novices. The monks had much greater activation in brain regions called
the right insula and caudate, a network that underlies empathy and
maternal love. They also had stronger connections from the frontal regions
to the emotion regions, which is the pathway by which higher thought can
control emotions.

In each case, monks with the most hours of meditation
showed the most dramatic brain changes. That was a strong hint that mental
training makes it easier for the brain to turn on circuits that underlie
compassion and empathy.

"This positive state is a skill that can be trained," Prof.
Davidson says. "Our findings clearly indicate that meditation can change
the function of the brain in an enduring way."

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