Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

Melinda Wenner

Special to LiveScience

LiveScience.com
Sat Jun 30, 1:35 PM ET
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.
UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.
They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearful”—or two possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.
When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they saw.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.
By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes—indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.
In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.


“These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health,” said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.

Video: Here's to Your Brain Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind Using the Mind to Cure the Body

Original Story: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

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Using the Mind to Cure the Body
By Karen Pallarito, HealthDay Reporter

posted: 27 November 2006 11:09 am ET

Email(HealthDay News) --

The medical community traditionally has relied on potent drugs to relieve severe pain. But in a number of academic settings across the country, health-care practitioners are adding another therapeutic weapon to the mix -- they're helping patients harness the healing power of their own imaginations.

The use of guided imagery, or mental images, to evoke physical benefits is perhaps the oldest form of therapy known to man, explained David E. Bresler, a founder of the Academy for Guided Imagery in Malibu, Calif. In fact, imagery is woven into the fabric of many ancient cultures' healing rituals, he said.

Today, academic researchers are studying guided imagery's use as an adjunct to more traditional medical treatments.

"I think it's just the beginning, really, even though it's been around a long time," said Bresler, whose academy instructs clinicians, including pediatricians, in the use of imagery to evoke physiologic changes that promote healing. A traditionally trained Ph.D. neuroscientist, he first became intrigued with alternative methods of pain relief in the early 1970s as founder and director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Pain Control Unit.

While much of the ongoing research is preliminary, practitioners of guided imagery are encouraged by initial results among children and adults.

Nola Schmidt, associate professor of nursing at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., recently completed a pilot study at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago examining guided imagery's effect among children with pain due to sickle cell disease or stem cell transplants. Of the 17 participants, eight were randomly assigned to listen to guided-imagery tapes created especially for each child.

Most tapes were vague, allowing the children to insert different scenes each time they listened to a recording. "For example," Schmidt said, "a tape may start out: 'OK, we want you to relax and close your eyes, take a deep breath, feel the air go in, feel the air go out.' " The child is invited to imagine being in "one of your favorite places" and to describe the sights, sounds and smells he or she encounters.

Children in the experimental and control groups also kept pain diaries. Their entries recorded when and where they felt pain, what they did to feel better and how much they hurt before and after those interventions.

On a 0-to-10 scale, children in the guided-imagery group had an average post-pain intervention score of 4.3, a point lower than children in the control group. While the difference was not statistically significant, Schmidt believes it is "clinically" significant.

"If it works for you, and it reduced your pain by one point or two points, isn't it worth it?" she asked.

Bresler noted that his academy trains a lot of pediatricians to use guided-imagery techniques. But kids aren't the only patients benefiting from this mind-body therapy. Sports psychologists use it to enhance athletes' physical performance. And cancer centers often use it to relieve patients' pain and nausea.

Carol L. Baird, an associate professor of nursing at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., recently tested guided imagery with a relaxation component among older women suffering from osteoarthritis.

Half of the 28 volunteers in the pilot study listened to recordings that described a pleasant scene and guided listeners to engage all of their senses. After 12 weeks, the experimental group experienced a significant reduction in pain compared with women in the control group. The guided-imagery group also had increased mobility, the study showed.

What's more, a separate study involving the same volunteers found that guided imagery with relaxation seemed to improve their quality of life, she said.

Baird thinks the guided-imagery approach has exciting potential. "For one thing, it's so easy to use," she noted. It's also inexpensive and easy to teach, making it suitable for patients to use in their own self-care, she added.

Of course, it may not be for everyone, especially people who have difficulty visualizing images in their heads, Baird acknowledged. In the future, she plans to do studies that measure people's "imaging ability."

On the other hand, guided-imagery experts say the technique has minimal side effects, if any. So why not try it?

Schmidt suspects science someday will reveal a concrete biological reason why guided imagery works. In fact, animal studies suggest that images in the brain can stimulate neurotransmitters that, in turn, block pain receptors, she said. But for patients garnering relief today, a neurochemical explanation may not be necessary.

"I mean, who cares why it works, if it works," she said.

More information:

To learn more about guided imagery, visit the University of California, San Diego.

http://www.imageryforkids.com/presentations.asp

Long time meditators have an increase in grey matter, too. That study was released last year. I wonder if that's mentioned in this research article.

Meditation Associated With Increased Grey Matter In The Brain

Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.


The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, the researchers report in the November issue of NeuroReport.

Although the study included only 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, the results are significant, said Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's grey matter," Gray said. "The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk."

Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.

"Most of the regions identified in this study were found in the right hemisphere," the researchers said. "The right hemisphere is essential for sustaining attention, which is a central practice of Insight meditation."

They said other forms of yoga and meditation likely have a similar impact on cortical structure, although each tradition would be expected to have a slightly different pattern of cortical thickening based on the specific mental exercises involved.
###

Co-authors include Catherine Kerr, Rachel Wasserman Jeffery Dusek, Herbert Benson and Metta McGarvey, Harvard; Douglas Greve, Brian Quinn, Bruce Fischl, Michael Treadway and Scott Rauch, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Christopher Moore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NeuroReport 16: 1893-1897 (November 28, 2005)