Tag: Brain

With emotions that cause stress, we have a choice

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I read an interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,  neuroanatomist and spokeswoman for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. She had a stroke that damaged her left hemisphere and for a while she could not walk, talk, read, write, or remember many of the incidents of her life. She underwent major surgery to remove a clot in her brain. She describes her experiences in the book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

In the book she draws attention to brain patterns – or “circuity” –  and states that we actually have much greater choice in the circuits we run than we think we have. For example,  when we get sad, angry or afraid she says we have a choice – to run with that circuity or to not identify with it, to step back and observe it. There is not doubt that it can be easier to engage the circuitry. When this happens we identify with the emotion – I am my anger, I am my sadness, I am my fear.

However, there is another approach which is coincidentally developed in mindfulness practice. In it we work at being aware of what is going on in our mind at any moment. We learn to say – I am in this moment running this circuitry; is this the circuitry I really want to run? And how long am I going to run it? Dr Taylor  states that we can have a real choice on which way we want to go. For example, when something happens which provokes us,  we can be aware of the process of anger and see it as the brain working in a certain way. She puts it this way – “I’m running my anger circuitry, I can feel what this is like in my body”. Then we can develop the gap between ourselves and the strong emotion and decide if we want to stay with it or not.

She goes on todescribe some very practical, everyday ways in which we can develop our  capacity to observe our brain circuity. We just need to pay greater attention to what we are doing in this present moment:

I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.

Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.

For more about Dr Taylor you can visit her website:  www.drjilltaylor.com

Quotations taken from interview “Balancing the Brain towards Joy” :

www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/archives/balancing-brain-toward-joy

Richard Davidson’s new project

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We have already written about the work of Richard Davidson and his work at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience in the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was featured in an interesting article last week in the New York Times where the Dalai Lama contributed 50,000 dollars to his recently established Centre for Investigating Healthy Minds. The short article is worth reading and charts the increasing scientific interest into the effects of meditation on the brain.

The center  is now working on an exciting new project, teaching meditation skills to school children in Madison. Based on earlier research,  they wish to see what the effects of teaching compassion and loving-kindness meditation has on the children. The children are led in meditation  focusing on kindness thoughts toward loved ones, strangers, even enemies. Previous research by Barbara Friedrickson would indicate that this will boost positive emotions and a general sense of well-being in life. The research which Davidson has commenced is longitudinal,  and so the children will be followed into middle school to see how their behaviour compares with a control group of non-meditators.

For the fully article check out www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27happy.html?_r=3&th&emc=th

Photo taken from the New York Times

Nothing new here: Stress is bad for you….

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A new study confirms what most of us already know. High stress is bad for us and is linked to cardiovascular death even if we do not have a  pre-existing cardiovascular problem. The study, published in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), shows that the stress hormone cortisol is released when we speed up and are under pressure and its purpose is to help the body recover from stress and regain a state of balance. However, when the stress is persistent, ongoing and chronic, an elevated level of cortisol  is maintained and this, paradoxically, is associated with cardiovascular risk factors. In other words, as we learn about in the MBSR Programme, the body’s own stress response system can become a problem when it remains switched on in response to deep ongoing stress.

Nicole Vogelzangs,  from the  VU University Medical Center in The Netherlands,  states: “Previous studies have suggested that cortisol might increase the risk of cardiovascular mortality, but until now, no study had directly tested this hypothesis“. The results of our study clearly show that cortisol levels in a general older population predict cardiovascular death, but not other causes of mortality.”

So creating a gap in the ongoing rush of your day and paying attention to your life is not just a nice option, but is crucial for your ongoing health. Then,  developing adaptive ways to work with the stress in your life, rather than simplistically wishing to escape to a stress-free world, is the next step. These ways could include looking at your diet, doing exercise such as walking or yoga, structuring your week so as to get some time in nature, making time just for yourself, and developing a meditation practice. If you click on the “Stress ” Category in the blog or on the “Effects of Mindfulness” you will find more posts or research on this subject.

Meditation is pointless

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A friend of mine – who ironically is starting a meditation retreat this week in the US – expressed the opinion not so long ago that sitting meditation was just pointless. I knew what she meant at the time, but knew also that she had to discover its real value for herself.  In one sense she was right – sitting practice is waste of time because it is a dedicated period of non-doing. On an outward level it appears to achieve nothing. Another aspect which she drew attention to was the fact that nothing really changes day to day: you sit, you get distracted, you return to the breath, you get distracted, day after day.

One difficulty in meditation is the the results are not immediately tangible while the actual practice can be difficult. The point to meditation, however, is precisely by doing “nothing” and slowing down, gaps are created between activities and we work on our capacity to be aware of what is going on. And it seems that when one is aware, things tend to fall as they should.

However, we can probably find scientific backing for stating that this “pointless” activity is, in fact, achieving something simply while we are sitting. It has been shown that people who meditate activate a different part of their brain that is associated with less anxiety and a better outlook on life. By not activating the anxious parts of the for dedicated periods of each day, our bodies are less likely to be tense, less likely to trigger well-conditioned patterns when faced with difficulties.

Daniel Goleman & Tara Bennett-Goleman*, suggest that meditation works because of the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Simply put, the amygdala is the part of the brain that decides, among other things, if we should get angry or anxious, and the pre-frontal cortex is the part that makes us stop and think about things. However, the amygdala is prone to error, such as seeing danger or exaggerating anxiety where there is none. Because there is roughly a quarter of a second gap between the time an event occurs and the time it takes the amygdala to react, the slowing down practicing in meditation may allow us be able to intervene before an automatic response takes over, and perhaps even redirect it into more constructive or positive feelings. In other words, meditation seems to develop emotional brain fitness and therefore this pointless activity may not be pointless after all.

Bennett-Goleman, Tara, 2001. Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind can Heal the Heart, Harmony, (2001).

Mini-Movies and other strategies

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We have a tendency to do anything to avoid our life as it actually is –  its unsatisfactory nature, its lack of clarity, the way it can give rise to anxiety. Our fear-driven instinct is to get away, to escape. One way we do this is by imagining a different future, a better place, a life with a better script. This is how Rich Hanson describes it , in his excellent book, Buddha’s Brain:

The brain produces simulations…even when they have nothing to do with staying alive. Watch yourself daydreaming  or go back over a relationship problem, and you’ll see the clips playing – little packets of simulated experiences, usually just seconds long. If you observe them closely, you’ll spot several troubling things:

  • By its very nature the simulation pulls you out of the present moment. There you are, following a presentation at work, running an errand or meditating, and suddenly your mind is a thousand miles away, caught up in a mini-movie. But its only in the present moment that we find real happiness, love or wisdom.
  • In the simulator,  pleasures seem pretty great, whether you are considering a second cupcake or imagining the response you will get to a report at work. But what do you actually feel when you enact the mini-movie in real life? Is it as pleasant as promised up there on screen? Usually not.
  • Clips in the simulator contain lots of beliefs…. In reality,  are the explicit and implicit beliefs in your simulations true? Sometimes yes, but often no. Mini-moives keep us stuck, by their simplistic view of the past and their defining out-of-existence possibilities for the future, such as new ways to reach out to others or dream big dreams.

In sum, the simulator takes you out of the present moment and sets you chasing after carrots that aren’t really so great.

Rich Handon, Ph.D, Buddha’s Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom, p., 44.

How you talk about others says a lot about you

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We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.
The Talmud

New research carried out at Wake Forest University has found that we reveal a lot about ourselves in the way we talk about others. They found that how positively we speak about others is linked to how happy and emotionally stable we are ourselves. The study, which appears in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found strong associations between how positively a person judges others and then how happy, kind-hearted,  emotionally stable and capable they are described by others.

By way of contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. As Dustin Wood, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study states,  A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively. The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.

Thus our speech about others reveals information about our own characteristics, such as our well-being, and our mental health. Mindfulness helps us be more deliberate in the words we use, by enabling us be more aware of  all the discussions taking place in the committee of voices running our minds. By practicing right speech, this study seems to suggest that we not only help our relationships become kinder. We also change our own level of happiness.

Wood et al, “Perceiver Effects as Projective Tests: What Your Perceptions of Others Say About You”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,  July 2010