January/February 2018 Newsletter

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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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