Can Meditation Alter Neural Circuitry?

Meditation has been defined as a practice than can help transform the mind. Typically this transformation is viewed as spiritual, but can meditation also bring about biological transformations?

Lisa Helfert 2016

Richard Davidson, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of many researchers who believe the answer to this question is yes. He addressed this topic last month at the 2016 Stephen E. Straus Distinguished Lecture in the Science of Complementary Therapies at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md.

While acknowledging that interpreting clinical studies and other scientific data related to meditative practices presents several methodological and conceptual challenges, Davidson described several findings that point to neural changes associated with various forms of meditation.

Decades ago, the primary focus of Davidson’s research was on how individuals respond to adversity. As he explained during the lecture, this focus expanded shortly after his own transformative experience upon meeting the Dalai Lama in 1992.

“I had given him a tour of our lab and he asked me, ‘Why don’t you use some of your research tools to study kindness and compassion instead of adversity and fear?’ ” Thus began his long career of research on Buddhist monks and other long-term practitioners of meditation to identify how the practice may affect neural circuitry.

His work has reinforced the idea that meditation is a skill that can elicit a range of brain changes. For example, when people are presented with emotional stimuli, the amygdala (a key region for processing emotions) shows heightened reactivity. Davidson’s group found that when people with a long history of meditation (several thousand hours or more) are presented with an emotional challenge (for example, seeing a hostile image), the amygdala more quickly returns to baseline levels compared with people who do not meditate.

Davidson said that he believes that the ability of those practicing meditation to recover from an emotionally charged state faster than those who do not regularly meditate may reflect the expert practitioners’ greater sense of self-acceptance that enables them to become more resilient to stress.

This resilience even goes beyond the brain, as some of Davidson’s latest research found that expert practitioners showed a lower inflammatory reaction when a topical capsaicin cream was applied to their skin.

Not everyone can devote thousands of hours to meditation, but Davidson also highlighted research from his team that showed even short-term practice can be beneficial. He discussed one study that found that just two weeks of compassion-based meditation (that is, training to feel more empathy for oneself and others) led to more altruistic behaviors among study participants who took part in a monetary redistribution game.

But while such observations are promising, Davidson noted the need to develop a viable placebo to use in mindfulness research.

“The power of positive thinking can skew research results, and I think this is especially strong in mindfulness studies,” he said. “We need a reliable, active comparator if we want to assign specificity to any of the changes we see in people who meditate.”

Davidson described a technique developed by his group that may one day offer a viable control for mindfulness studies. The program, called the Health Enhancement Program (HEP), mimics several aspects of mindfulness practice, including music therapy or yoga, but deemphasizes the importance of self-awareness during the practice.

The Stephen E. Straus Distinguished Lecture in the Science of Complementary Therapies is presented by the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and honors its founding director. ■