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In the following article (edited for
length; text bolded by the Highlights editor),
nondualism meditation is being used to shed light on the little
known default network, the one-third of the brain that is quiet
when external, goal-oriented tasks are dominant. The default
network is personal and subjective. Studies suggest that seasoned
nondual meditators are capable of harmonizing the
simultaneous activity of both the external and the default
networks. People with dementia, autism, and depression also
experience both networks at the same time, but they cannot
control the involvement of the default network. Studies are
underway to test the hypothesis that nondual contemplation does
correspond to differences in the default network.
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Contemplating
Oneness: The Neuroscience of Meditation
Neuroscientists
at
By Carina Storrs, posted
Average people are
conscious of either the external world or their personal world,
and they alternate their attention between the two. These worlds
push us into and pull us out of our awareness.
While neuroscientists
have made strides toward understanding the brain activity
associated with external tasks, the areas that control
self-related thoughts remain shrouded in mystery. Roughly
speaking, external or goal-oriented tasks activate regions around
the outer part of the brain known as the external network. The
default network, on the other hand, is about one-third of the
brain nestled inside the external network’s crown. It is an
area that is quiet when the external network is active, and
active when the external network sits idle. While
scientists first thought this area might just be active when the
brain had no task to focus on, a growing camp of brain
researchers, including Josipovic and Heeger, believe that it is
the seat of self-related thinking.
To learn about this
mysterious network, they are probing the brains of people who
practice a type of meditation called nondualism.
Unlike common meditation approaches, such as focusing on an
external or imaginary object for a prolonged stretch of time, nondualism
trains meditators to watch their own minds. All the while they
remain fully aware of their surroundings. “What I think is
important here is the use of trained meditators to get at a
subjective mental state,” Heeger explains. Because these
meditators can control whether they are reflecting on themselves
or on external issues, or on both, they can describe their
experiences to the researchers after their fMRI. If they achieved
a sense of “oneness,” the researchers can look to see
if the machine recorded any unique brain activity that could be
associated with this mental state.
Stumbling upon
the brain’s “resting” network
Dr. Marcus Raichle, a
neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in
Experiments in the
laboratory of Rafael Malach, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel, first raised the suspicion that
the default network did more than oppose the external network,
that it might control self-related thoughts. Malach’s team
made the surprising discovery that people’s brains responded
in identical ways to certain dramatic scenes in films such as
“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and movies by Alfred
Hitchcock. But, during other parts of the movies, each viewer had
his or her own pattern of brain activity. Malach believes that,
during less intense scenes, with less gunshots and bloodshed,
people began comparing the action to their own personal
experiences, letting their thoughts turn inward. Their brain
activity spiked upward in the areas known then as the default
network. Now, five years after this “neurocinematics”
study, which was published in Science in 2004, Malach says that, “We
are [still] very much in the dark about this system.”
FMRI-based experiments
usually monitor the brain activity of subjects as they respond to
stimuli, whereas the default network tends to activate in the
absence of external stimuli. This means that fMRI is an unlikely
tool for studying the default network. There are no tests to
study the wide range of internal thoughts that could come from
this network, such as reflections on the past (do I like the
shirt I just bought?), or the future (where will I wear that
shirt?) or anticipating other people’s opinions (will my
friend think that shirt looks good?). These thoughts
often pop into our heads seemingly out of nowhere.
Good luck
studying spontaneous thought, says Malach. Still, he
commends this approach for illuminating the network, saying that
the Western-style studies using fMRI scanning “fit like a
glove on Eastern meditation.”
Eastern practices meet Western studies
To learn about the
default network and its interplay with the external, Josipovic
and Heeger are beginning to piece together a slew of images
collected from scanning the brains of Buddhist monks as well as
secular meditators from around the Tri-State area. The pair is
planning to extend their study to Christian monks, nuns and
Jewish contemplatives.
One of the practitioners
of nondualism, or “oneness”
meditation, in the study is 31-year-old Karma Drodhul. He became
a Lama, or leader of Tibetan Buddhist, through spending about
seven years in meditation retreats. The brain scans do not
prevent Lama Drodhul from entering a state of oneness. “In
Buddhism, we are used to meditating through distractions,”
he says after a recent fMRI session. “It was fun.”
Josipovic already has
some early revelations about the networks. For normal
nonmeditators, Josipovic’s saw the same interplay as other
scientists: When the activity of the external network is
up, the default is down and vice versa. But the story is
different when it comes to experienced meditators. The activity
of the two networks for them is not as sharply opposed, perhaps
indicating that there is brain activity accompanying the
experience of harmony between internal and external perspectives
in nondualism meditation.
The default
network’s broader implications
Understanding the
default network may eventually elucidate information about the
mental diseases that seem to target it, including Alzheimer’s,
autism and depression. While the activity of the
external network is sometimes also affected in these diseases, it
is “not nearly as broken,” says Jessica Andrews-Hanna,
who recently completed her graduate studies in the laboratory of
Randy Buckner at Harvard University on the default networks of
aging people.
The diseases that involve
the default network are varied but, for all of them, the network
does not seem to turn off when it should. Perhaps because it
loses that “push-pull” relationship with the external
network in patients with severe Alzheimer’s and other
cognitive problems, it remains perpetually “on.” Within
the default network, activity is disorganized and connections are
deteriorated. Its activity also does not seem to wane in studies
of autistic people when they perform goal-related tasks, or of
depressed people during rest.
All these studies suggest
that there could be a striking similarity between the
brains of meditators and those of people with dementia or
depression. According to Andrews-Hanna, if it’s
true that meditators maintain their two networks operating at the
same time, their brain scans would be reminiscent of those of the
mentally ill. “Presumably, in the meditators’ case,
maybe it’s all cognitive; maybe they have the ability to
say, ‘Now I want to control these two [networks] together,’”
says Andrews-Hanna. “If you can turn the brain regions on
and off when you want, that’s great.”
For now, neuroscientists
are waiting to learn what Josipovic and Heeger find from their
studies of meditators, which they hope will offer unique insight
about the default network. The first step is to see if
nondual contemplation — combining the external and
subjective experiences — does correspond to differences in
the default network. If it does, these studies will open up a new
way to explore what was before a completely elusive network.
read the full article at http://scienceline.org/2009/08/13/storrs-neuroscience-meditation-fmri-brain/
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