January 2018 newsletter
I hope you all had a great New Year holiday. I’m in the
process of changing the newsletter email program, so this will be the last
until we get all our ducks in a row. Shouldn’t be too long, though.
For the meditation
buffs
I was sent this by Marc Rowe, M.D., one of my tai chi students. The first
paragraph is his. Even if you’re not into it, this is an interesting read
although longer than I usually send out.
This ongoing German research (see below) on the effects of
meditation is impressive There have been two previous carefully done
studies at Harvard and Wisconsin that demonstrated that meditation is an
effective method of mind training that develop unique skills- that
meditation induce both functional and structural changes in the brain in
spite of genetic and epigenetic factors and past learning
experiences- it is possible to change but it takes dedicated
and regular practice- changes are directly related to the amount of
training- meditation practice done. Singer's work confirmed and added to the
research done in the United States.
Singer is the director of the Department of Social Neuroscience
at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig,
Germany.
Marc
Singer is the principal investigator of the ReSource Project, an
impressive, large-scale longitudinal study on which she’s the principal
investigator. The goal of this research is to assess the effects of mental
training on subjective wellbeing,
health, brain plasticity, cognitive and affective functioning, the autonomic
nervous system, and behavior.
The study included more than 300 participants and a 9-month
mental training program with three distinct parts. Over the course of the
project, participants were repeatedly assessed using more than 90 measures
including behavioral experiments, blood tests for stress hormones, and MRI
brain scans.
The scale and rigor of the ReSource Project are impressive, but
more remarkable are its aims.
Singer’s integrative approach endeavors to address large,
societal questions using the tools of psychology and neuroscience. Can changes
in the brain contribute to a more peaceful and democratic world? Might
meditation practice combat economic and environmental crises? If individuals
can increase their capacities for altruism, might social systems and
institutions also be changed for the better?
To begin to answer these questions, the ReSource Project tested
three different modules of meditation-based training methods, each focused on
developing a distinctive mental or emotional capacity. Or, as Singer says in
conversation, “cultivating the mind and the heart.”
One module, called Presence, focused on introspective awareness
and attention. Meditation practitioners will be familiar with exercises such
as attending to one’s
breath and performing an attentional body scan.
Another module, Affect, focused on building compassion as well
as dealing with difficult emotions. Training included loving-kindness meditation from the Buddhist
tradition.
The third module, Perspective, focused on meta-cognitive
skills—or “thinking about
thinking”—and theory of mind, the capacity to understand that other people may
have different beliefs and perspectives than oneself.
Participants trained in all three modules (each lasted three months),
but in different sequence. This eloquent design allowed the researchers to
examine the effects of each training specifically, while also looking at
changes over time in the same people.
Singer and her team measured cortical thickening—places in the
brain where there was more grey matter than there had been before. One of the
most intriguing sets of findings came from the Affect module. After
three months of this meditation-based training in compassion, brain scans of
study participants revealed changes in a network associated with
socio-emotional processing. Thus, the pattern of cortical thickening suggested
a possible increase in social and emotional capacity.
To see how these brain changes played out in participants’
emotional experience, the researchers tested the same participants to see how
they reacted to watching emotionally distressing videos. This experiment
showed an increase in compassion from pre-training levels, suggesting
that not only did their brains change, but also their experience in response to
suffering. Tests also showed an increase in altruism, the expression of
compassion in real-life situations.
During the training, the participants had learned new skills,
and this change left physical evidence in the structure of the brain. In this case, it wasn’t a better memory or a quicker
response to physical stimuli that had been learned, but a bigger, more
vulnerable heart.
In addition, blood tests revealed that these participants had lower levels of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, in
response to a socially stressful experience. Singer postulated that learning to connect with and have
compassion for others might have provided a buffer to social stress for these
participants.
This work challenges
old ideas about whether or not people can change. “Classical economic theory
has for a long time supposed that human traits, called preferences, are fixed
and context-independent. The idea was that we were each born a certain way:
some are more altruistic, others more egoistic,” Singer explained. “The belief was that such preferences do
not change in an individual.”
Singer’s groundbreaking research suggests that not only can
traits change, both physically and behaviorally, but they can be purposefully
and specifically cultivated with meditation.
For example, Singer found that the three training modules
affected cortical thickness in different networks of the brain. Presence training led to increases in cortical thickness
in prefrontal regions, areas related to attention. Affect training led to
changes in the frontoinsular regions related to socio-emotional processing. And
Perspective training caused change in the inferior frontal and lateral temporal
cortices, brain structures related to theory of mind.
These findings align with other work suggesting that compassion
is associated with a brain network that doesn’t overlap with those for
meta-cognition and theory of mind. Similarly, in the ReSource Project, training
in attention didn’t change compassionate-related neural networks, or compassionate
behavior. The underlying brain structures for these capacities are different,
and can be cultivated separately.
One of the most effective and novel practices in the study for
training compassion and meta-cognition was meditation in dyads: two people
sitting across from each other or connected via a specially designed app. In
these meditations, one person shares specific aspects of an experience from
their day, and the other practices deep listening. “After that practice,
participants felt more connected not only to each other, but to other people in
the group,” said Singer. “Some people, after doing this dyadic practice for the
first time, actually felt very touched because they realized, ‘I’ve never
really listened to another person. I’ve just been waiting for my turn to
talk.’” Dyad practice seemed particularly related to improvements in stress
resilience, which could have implications in a wide variety of settings.
Fall Prevention
Many of us teach tai chi as a fall prevention method. Tai
Chi and other arts can help. There are a number of components incorporated in
martial arts training that have been shown to help.
1) It requires memory (forms training in particular)
2) It is exercise (however, see #3)
3) It is sophisticated (complex) movement
4) It is often done in groups
Increasing evidence
shows that cognitive therapies may help reduce falls in older adults, according
to a review published online Jan. 10 in the Journal of the American
Geriatrics Society.
Manuel Montero-Odasso, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of
Western Ontario in London, Canada, and colleagues conducted a literature review
of observational and interventional studies to assess the relationship between
gait and cognition in aging and neurodegeneration.
The researchers found that low performance in attention
and executive function is associated with gait slowing, instability, and future
falls. To improve mobility in sedentary older adults and in those
with cognitive impairment and dementia,
cognitive training, dual-task training, and virtual reality modalities are
promising.
"Disentangling the mechanism and contribution of cognitive
deficits in fall risk may open new treatment approaches. Mounting evidence
supports that cognitive therapies help reduce falls," the authors write.
Commentary from Marc Rowe, M.D.
(You may remember him from the last issue.)
“Interesting article. Point made is that attention -focus -concentration and
executive function is critical in falls. There is good evidence that insight
(focused) meditation and Tai Chi (which is a complex form of moving meditation)
changes the brain and improves attention and focus. Poor balance is in many
ways having poor FOCUS “not paying attention “and having poor body and
environmental AWARENESS. Falling is definitely not just a physical thing (“ I
have bad balance now that I am getting old”)it is truly a mind body thing and
mind exercises like meditation and mind body exercises like Tai chi work. By
training the mind to be aware and focused- mindful - it becomes possible to be
aware of what you are doing when you’re doing it.”
“January is always a
good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as
vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it
lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.” - Sendhil
Mullainathan
“I miss everything about Chicago, except January and February.” - Gary
Cole
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