The Best Kept Brain Secret

Want to rewire your brain in only twenty minutes a day, reaping untold benefits in your daily life? And it’s free, free, free! “Really,” you query, as you snap to the conclusion that this sounds like a late-night TV pitch, or maybe an email that squeaked by your not-so-trusty spam filter. Hard science evidence accumulates, pointing to the best-kept secret to alter aspects of your brain function including coping with pain: meditation.

Meditation is a ritual of maintaining mental focus on a specific sensation, thought, or movement (as in yoga or Tai Chi.) There are more than 7000 forms of meditation, most originating as spiritual practice within Eastern religions. The practice of meditation has become increasingly popular in Western cultures for facilitating physical relaxation, emotional calm, and healing in both physical and emotional realms. During meditation, attention is centered on words or phrases such as prayers or mantras, sounds such as chants or chimes, one’s breath, visualized or actual images of nature or religious icons, or consciousness. Mindfulness meditation is one popular form of meditation in which the focus is purposefully on thoughts and sensations in the present moment, without judgment; training the brain to be in the present moment. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ that arises in mindfulness meditation; the value is in observation of any sensation or thought with total acceptance.

In 2005, psychologists Sara Lazar and Jeremy Gray employed magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) to examine brain changes in ordinary people who meditated regularly. The MRI results showed that the cortical regions of the brain, i.e. the parts of the brain involved in sensory, emotional, and cognitive processing, actually increased in thickness from the practice of meditation. Meditation also seemed to forestall the thinning of the frontal cortex (a section of the brain that integrates information from other areas), that comes with age. This was one of the earliest studies to show proof that meditation actually changes brain tissue in a positive way, and that it’s not just Zen monks who reap the benefits.

What is the significance of thicker gray matter? A recent study by Joshua Grant, Pierre Rainville, and their team at the University of Montreal compared two groups of participants: those who meditated regularly (averaging 40 minutes a day) and those who had never meditated or practiced yoga. The researchers looked at both gray matter thickness and sensitivity to pain. Again, MRI showed that the meditators had not only thicker gray matter, but thicker central brain regions, an area called the anterior cingulate, that influences perceptions of pain. Pain was inflicted on participants with a computer controlled heated plate, pressed against the calf muscles. These researchers were expanding upon their own work from 2009 that had shown that meditators could stand greater levels of pain than non-meditators, both during meditation and afterwards. Grant and Rainville conducted the 2010 study, adding the collection of MRI data, to tease out how the meditation was beneficial. The data showed that brain changes were really the key to being able to tolerate more pain, rather than the slower breathing in stressful situations that was observed in the people who practiced meditation.

Researchers at University of North Carolina at Charlotte led by Fadel Zeidan studied this issue of meditation and pain in a slightly different way, by examining underlying beneficial mechanisms and testing how much meditation is needed to see results. Critics had challenged that few in our current hectic, driven society will engage in 40 minutes of meditation a day. It’s simply not realistic to expect compliance for many patients, especially over the weeks of training that might be required for the benefits to occur. Zeidan and colleagues had participants complete just 20 minutes of meditation a day, over the course of three days, before testing began. Participants who learned meditation were compared to participants in two control groups: one group learned simple relaxation techniques and another practiced a distraction technique, computing math problems to remove their focus from the pain. In this study, pain was inflicted by harmless electrical shocks that were gradually increased in intensity. Participants rated the pain on a numbered scale, “1” being low. Meditators perceived less pain than nonmeditators—at the same shock levels. For instance, at a shock of 400-500 milliamps, the researcher could directly observe the nerve in a participant’s arm reacting to the current. A meditator might label that pain a “two” while a nonmeditator would assign a much higher rating. This was a lasting effect, continuing even when participants were not meditating. The effect was attributed to experiencing sensation in the moment and letting go of the fear, anticipation, and labeling of the perception of pain as “pain”, rather than dwelling on the pain. These results are also significant because benefits were shown to be available after a very brief meditation training.

Christopher Brown and Anthony Jones, researchers at the University of Manchester, England, further explored the relationship of meditation, the experience of pain, and anticipation of pain. Mindfulness meditation was practiced by the British participants in this study. Experienced meditators spent less time thinking about the coming pain, inflicted by a laser device, than those without meditation skills. As a result, they also perceived less pain. To understand the way in which anticipation—or lack thereof—can affect pain perception, think back to the childhood experience of injections in the doctor’s office. If you focused on that scary needle and worried about the “stick,” your pain was likely greater than if the nurse snuck up behind you and stuck the hypodermic in your arm before you knew what hit you. Almost as an aside, Brown and Jones reported that when anticipating pain, meditators had higher than average activity in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that regulates attention under threat conditions. Their brains seemed to be working overtime to tune out the threat.

Data like this about the mind-body benefits of meditation practice just keep piling up. And you only need to carve out twenty minutes a day. Here’s the free part I promised: The Chopra Center has just relaunched a “21 day meditation challenge. ” This is an opportunity to receive daily email links to an excellent series of downloadable podcasts which teach meditation skills from the ground up, in approximately 20 minutes a day. Mindfulness meditation is one aspect of the Chopra Challenge, with expansion into other aspects. Start with day one, and build each day. The Chopra Center also offers podcasts and a regular newsletter with tips to expand your meditation practice. Remember that meditation is a skill, and for many of us stuck in cultural fast forward, repeated practice is necessary before you feel calmer and less stressed. Expect to develop a valuable skill, and you will.

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Create your own reality and the life of your dreams. Who wouldn’t want to achieve the ideal life simply by thinking the “right thoughts?” But what are the facts? This column explores the scientific research on the mind-body connection and the power of thought to shape our lives.

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