Dear Msday -

My compliments. Another reason to love what is at least for now your wonderful city. Where it's my understanding that Richard Davidson carries the biggest stick in the world of Buddhist selfless neuroscience, I was somewhat disappointed by his prediction of 2050 as the year by which "brain exercise" would be taken as seriously as exercising the body: the somatic self, if you'll have it. He should know far better than me, but it's my strong sense/hope that the time of which he speaks will arrive much earlier.

That said, your post has inspired me to pull out the heavy artillery. To begin, please check out the following page from ScienceDaily.com:

Compassion Meditation Changes The Brain

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2008) — Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples' mental states, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

The research suggests that individuals -- from children who may engage in bullying to people prone to recurring depression -- and society in general could benefit from such meditative practices, says study director Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UW-Madison and an expert on imaging the effects of meditation. Davidson and UW-Madison associate scientist Antoine Lutz were co-principal investigators on the project.

The study was part of the researchers' ongoing investigations with a group of Tibetan monks and lay practitioners who have practiced meditation for a minimum of 10,000 hours. In this case, Lutz and Davidson worked with 16 monks who have cultivated compassion meditation practices. Sixteen age-matched controls with no previous training were taught the fundamentals of compassion meditation two weeks before the brain scanning took place. . . .

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0326204236.htm

The complete story is a must-read, and the webpage is pretty amazing in its own right for all of the links, etc. The underlying article, "Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise," Antoine Lutz, Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Tom Johnstone, Richard J. Davidson, PLoS ONE, 2008; 3 (3): e1897 can be opened in full text at http://www.plosone.org/article/fetch...esentation=PDF

A few months ago a friend sent me an article out of the Harvard Medical School, "Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness," Lazar SW et al, Neuroreport. 2005 Nov 28 Vol. 16 No. 17 pp. 1893-7 free full text at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...2&blobtype=pdf

The article is remarkable for, among other things, showing that dedicated practitioners - meditating at least 45 minutes a day and at least 5 days a week for ten years - showed a thickening of the cortical cells in the anterior insula (AI) (one of the primary signal receptors in the cortex from the thalamus, largely responsible from emotional regulation), where a comparable study done last year - at Vania Apkarian’s wonderful “Pain and Pleasure Lab” at Northwestern http://www.apkarianlab.northwestern.edu/ - of chronic CRPS patients showed, among other things, an atrophy of cortical cells in the AI. "The Brain in Chronic CRPS Pain: Abnormal Gray-White Matter Interactions in Emotional and Autonomic Regions," Geha PY, Baliki MN, Harden RN, Bauer WR, Parrish TB, Apkarian AV, Neuron 2008;60:570-581 full text at http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...aliki_etal.pdf

Now here’s where things get tricky. After four or five years of dropping into states of deep concentration on Shinzen’s retreats, I lost the ability to do so, around the time I had no other choice but to switch to Baclofen to control my spasms, having gone through everything else. Now, I don’t know that it’s causally related, but I have to tell you that sitting 10 hours a day for 12 days with nothing but monkey mind provides a wonderful opportunity to explore frustration: sometimes to the point that it alone may lead to moments of stream entering, but not often. So with this in mind I asked a friend of mine whose pretty deeply into this research whether time spent in meditation could have a beneficial effect on the AI, independent of one’s level of concentration. To which he replied that while this science was still in “its infancy” it was his sense that the level of concentration was probably an important factor.

Enter another article out of Professor Davidson’s group, “ Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners, Brefczynski-Lewis JA . . . Davidson R, J - Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2007 Jul 3 V. 104 No. 27 pp. 11483-8 full text at http://www.pnas.org/content/104/27/11483.full.pdf It’s something I highly recommend. And although finding hours of prior practice as the key variable, didn’t answer my precise question, if have to acknowledge that sitting year after year with monkey mind would be a remarkable achievement. That said, there are implications in the study that meditation may improve the focus of people with ADHD – which itself is quantifiable under fMRI – which I suppose was the case with me, until it didn’t. But having been recently diagnosed with “Chronic Small Vessel Ischemic White Matter Disease” - the term alone rings all sorts of RSD bells even the though the disease is understood to be atheroscleratic in origin* – I have to assume that’s playing a role here, where loss of executive functioning is the chief hallmark of the critter. Then there was a TIA 10 days ago that put me in the hospital on a 24 hour stroke watch . . . . But I digress, the “Practical Implications” paragraph at the end of the “Neural Correlates of Attention Expertise. . .” study is remarkable in and of itself:

Practical Implications. Regions in this study showing differences between groups and correlations with hours of practice overlapped with regions showing abnormal structural and functional variation in persons with attention deficit disorders. For example, compared with normal controls, individuals with attention deficit disorders have shown activation differences in the sustained attention network, regions involved in response inhibition, and reduction in size of prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. In addition, it is plausible from our results that meditation may strengthen the ability to inhibit cognitive and emotional mental processes such as rumination that can lead to or exacerbate stress, anxiety, or depression. Thus, our data encourage the examination of meditation as a potential form of attentional training in both disordered and normal populations and may provide an answer to William James’s question posed >100 years ago when he asked how we might educate attention because such education would be ‘‘the education par excellence’’ (original italics). [Footnote references omitted.]

Time doesn’t permit me to go into all of the freely accessible article articles that I found, but here are the rest:

Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation - Antoine Lutz - Heleen A. Slagter - John D. Dunne and Richard J. Davidson - Trends Cogn. Sci. - 2008 April Vol. 12 No. 4 pp 163–169 full text at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...6&blobtype=pdf

Abstract
This article explores initial findings and the implications of neuroscientific research on meditation. Meditation is conceptualized here as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. The review focuses on the mental processes and the underlying neural circuitry that are critically involved in two styles of meditation. One style, Focused Attention (FA) meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, Open Monitoring (OM)meditation, involves non-reactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. We discuss the potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes and their putative long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

Attending to the present - mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference - Norman A. S. Farb et al - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience -2007 Vol. 2 No. 4 pp. 313-322 full text at http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/2/4/313.pdf

Abstract
It has long been theorised that there are two temporally distinct forms of self-reference: extended self-reference linking experiences across time, and momentary self-reference centred on the present. To characterise these two aspects of awareness,we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine monitoring of enduring traits (’narrative’ focus, NF) or momentary experience (’experiential’ focus, EF) in both novice participants and those having attended an 8 week course in mindfulness meditation, a program that trains individuals to develop focused attention on the present. In novices, EF yielded focal reductions in self-referential cortical midline regions (medial prefrontal cortex, mPFC) associated with NF. In trained participants, EF resulted in more marked and pervasive reductions in the mPFC, and increased engagement of a right lateralised network, comprising the lateral PFC and viscerosomatic areas such as the insula, secondary somatosensory cortex and inferior parietal lobule. Functional connectivity analyses further demonstrated a strong coupling between the right insula and the mPFC in novices that was uncoupled in the mindfulness group. These results suggest a fundamental neural dissociation between two distinct forms of self-awareness that are habitually integrated but can be dissociated through attentional training: the self across time and in the present moment.

Theta phase synchrony and conscious target perception - impact of intensive mental training - Slagter HA . . . Davidson RJ. J Cogn. Neurosci. 2009 Aug V. 21 No. 8 pp. 1536-49 full text at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...2&blobtype=pdf

Abstract
The information processing capacity of the human mind is limited, as is evidenced by the attentional blink—a deficit in identifying the second of two targets (T1 and T2) presented in close succession.This deficit is thought to result from an overinvestment of limited resources in T1 processing. We previously reported that intensive mental training in a style of meditation aimed at reducing elaborate object processing, reduced brain resource allocation to T1, and improved T2 accuracy [Slagter, H.A., Lutz, A., Greisschar, L. L., Frances, A. D., Nieuwenhuis, S., Davis, J., et al. Mental training affects distribution of limited brain resources. PloS Biology, 5, e138, 2007]. Here we report EEG spectral analyses to examine the possibility that this reduction in elaborate T1 processing rendered the system more available to process new target information, as indexed by T2-locked phase variability. Intensive mental training was associated with decreased cross-trial variability in the phase of oscillatory theta activity after successfully detected T2s, in particular, for those individuals who showed the greatest reduction in brain resource allocation to T1. These data implicate theta phase locking in conscious target perception, and suggest that after mental training the cognitive system is more rapidly available to process new target information. Mental training was not associated with changes in the amplitude of T2-induced responses or oscillatory activity before task onset. In combination, these findings illustrate the usefulness of systematic mental training in the study of the human mind by revealing the neural mechanisms that enable the brain to successfully represent target information.

Neuroimaging of meditation's effect on brain reactivity to pain - Orme-Johnson DW et al - Neuroreport 2006 Aug 21 Vol. 17 No. 12 pp. 1359-63 full text at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...5&blobtype=pdf

Abstract
Some meditation techniques reduce pain, but there have been no studies on how meditation affects the brain’s response to pain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the response to thermally induced pain applied outside the meditation period found that long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation technique showed 40–50% fewer voxels responding to pain in the thalamus and total brain than in healthy matched controls interested in learning the technique. After the controls learned the technique and practiced it for 5 months, their response decreased by 40–50% in the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, total brain, and marginally in the anterior cingulate cortex. The results suggest that the Transcendental Meditation technique longitudinally reduces the affective/motivational dimension of the brain’s response to pain.

Investigation of mindfulness meditation practitioners with voxel-based morphometry - Hölzel BK et al - Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2008 vol. 3 No. 1 pp. 55-61 full text at http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/3/1/55.pdf

Abstract
Mindfulness meditators practice the non-judgmental observation of the ongoing stream of internal experiences as they arise. Using voxel-based morphometry, this study investigated MRI brain images of 20 mindfulness (Vipassana) meditators (mean practice 8.6 years; 2 h daily) and compared the regional gray matter concentration to that of non-meditators matched for sex, age, education and handedness. Meditators were predicted to show greater gray matter concentration in regions that are typically activated during meditation. Results confirmed greater gray matter concentration for meditators in the right anterior insula, which is involved in interoceptive awareness. This group difference presumably reflects the training of bodily awareness during mindfulness meditation. Furthermore, meditators had greater gray matter concentration in the left inferior temporal gyrus and right hippocampus. Both regions have previously been found to be involved in meditation. The mean value of gray matter concentration in the left inferior temporal gyrus was predictable by the amount of meditation training, corroborating the assumption of a causal impact of meditation training on gray matter concentration in this region. Results suggest that meditation practice is associated with structural differences in regions that are typically activated during meditation and in regions that are relevant for the task of meditation.

That’s what I’ve got. My thanks to those who had the patience to stay with me.

Mike

*Turns out that there may be, in a very slim minority of cases, the chance of a "nonatheroscleratic vasculopathy," which could explain why my internist told me this afternoon that he's seen a marked decline in the speed of my expressive functions over the last five years, even though following the diagnosis of a coronary occlusion and issuance of a "drug elluding stent" in 2005, I've been on a steady diet of low dose statins, aspirin and Plavix: the precise therapies of choice for atheroscleratic neuro-ischemias (closing of blood vessels). As in, if they're not filling with fat, maybe they're being constricted after all. To be continued.