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11/27/2003
Meditating over Hot Cocoa
Recently, with winds outside gusting to near-hurricane intensity
and temperatures dropping rapidly, I found it relaxing to sit down
with a cup of hot cocoa. In an American Chemical Society
(ACS) news release, researchers at Cornell University were cited
as finding that hot cocoa is a veritable powerhouse of beneficial
cancer and heart disease fighting antioxidants. Indeed, hot cocoa
has about twice the antioxidants as red wine and three times as
many as green tea. Hot cocoa also is a better choice than a
chocolate bar, thanks to hot cocoa’s much lower quantity of
saturated fat. The heat in hot cocoa is thought to increase the
amounts of antioxidants.
I try to give proper acknowledgment in these columns but I have
a problem with the cocoa. An article by Jeanie Larche Davis
posted November 7 on the AOL News site credits the work to Ki
Won Lee, “lead researcher” and a food science researcher at
Seoul National University in South Korea. The work will appear
in the December 3 issue of Journal of Agricultural and Food
Chemistry, an ACS journal. The ACS release cites Cornell’s
Chang Yong Lee, “head of study”, and his team. However, the
study was funded by a Korean agency. Hoping to be politically
correct, I’ll credit both Lees and their colleagues.
Trying to resolve this discrepancy left my mind in a troubled
state. Time for another cup of hot cocoa. It’s not good for the
mind to be troubled on an ongoing basis, a common situation for
many people in the workplace. A brief item by Maia Weinstock
in the December 2003 issue of Discover magazine cites a study
by psychologist Nadia Wager, of Buckinghamshire Chilterns
University College in England, and her colleagues on the perils
of such a situation. They studied a group of nursing assistants
under a boss they found unfair or unreasonable with a control
group of satisfied nursing assistants. The individuals in the
dissatisfied group exhibited elevated blood pressures (on average
15 millimeters of mercury higher systolic and 7 millimeters
higher diastolic) when they interacted with the unpopular boss.
These blood pressure spikes were thought sufficient to elevate
significantly the risk of heart disease or stroke. A troubled mind
can influence one’s health.
The understanding of the human mind is “the greatest adventure
of the 21st century”, according to Charles Vest, president of
MIT, at a signing ceremony in February 2000. The ceremony
celebrated the beginning of the formation of MIT’s McGovern
Institute for Brain Research, made possible by a $350 million
grant from MIT alum Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. and his wife Lore
Harp McGovern. It was the largest donation ever to MIT. This
past September the Institute co-sponsored a conference at MIT
on “Investigating the Mind”. The other sponsor was the Mind
and Life Institute, an institute founded in the 1980s to encourage
a dialog between Buddhist scholars and Western scientists. It
was clear that the MIT conference was something special, given
that one of the participants was the Dalai Lama.
The elite in the world of meditation has got to be those Buddhist
monks. We’ve all heard tales of how they can control their pulse
rates or blood pressures at will and put themselves in the deepest
states of meditation. With today’s scientific and technological
tools for imaging the brain and its functioning, the time is ripe
for serious scientific studies of the nature of meditation and the
capabilities of our brains to enter a different state of mind. The
Dalai Lama and the innate spirit of inquiry characteristic of
Buddhism have combined to persuade some monks to subject
themselves to studies employing these modern tools.
What are some of these tools? The CT (computed tomography)
scan (also known as CAT scan) and conventional MRI (magnetic
resonance imaging) are what are termed “static” brain imaging
techniques. Both yield pictures of slices (tomograms) of the
brain or other parts of the body and, as anyone who has
undergone these procedures knows, may take a half hour or so to
get a complete picture. But what we really want when it comes
to the emotional states and actual workings of the brain are
“functional” pictures of, for example, blood flow in the brain at a
given moment.
Until relatively recently, the technique of choice was PET
(positron emission tomography). A PET scan requires the
injection of a radioactive isotope of perhaps carbon, oxygen or
fluorine that emits a particle known as a positron. A ring of
detector tubes picks up the radioactive decay products (gamma
rays) of the positrons and the brain “lights up” in those areas of
positron activity. An obvious disadvantage of PET is that the
subject is injected with radioactive material and repeated
injections are not necessarily benign!
The past few years have seen the development of a faster, safer
approach, functional MRI (fMRI). Whereas a PET scan may
take 30 seconds, a whole brain fMRI scan may take just 2 or 3
seconds with something called rapid acquisition echo-planar
hardware. I won’t pretend that I understand what is involved
here except that it is fast! With fMRI we can get an idea of
blood flow in the brain and repeat the measurement without any
known risks to the subject’s health. The PET scan does have an
advantage in that it isn’t as “noisy” as an fMRI scan. Picture the
noise on your TV screen – a lot less if you’re wealthy enough to
have HDTV!
Who is a good subject for undergoing such procedures? One
monk in particular, Matthieu Ricard, is eminently suited. Ricard
is a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris
who decided decades ago to become a practicing monk in
Tibetan Buddhism. Now he has agreed to both collaborate and
be a subject in a project with Richard Davidson at the University
of Wisconsin. The objective is to study trained meditators to
glean information on the mechanisms of brain function as well as
to search for new therapeutic approaches in psychology.
The studies are in their very early stages but there are three areas
of special interest – attention span, visual imagery and positive
emotions. The first two areas involve conflicts between
conventional Western and Buddhist beliefs or claims. For
example, some trained meditators claim to be able to hold their
attention on a single object for hours. Western studies indicate
that holding attention that long is impossible. Controversial too
is the claim by some meditators that they can do the opposite,
switch their attention from one object to another as many as 17
times in a second or less.
Some monks claim to be able to hold a visual image in mind for
hours to help cleanse their minds of “value judgments”. On the
other hand, Western neuroscientists claim that the brain has to
clear images quickly to avoid “smearing” of images as the eye
moves from one image to the next. The monks who claim this
power say it may take decades to achieve this capability. The
problem here is to persuade those few monks who claim to
possess this extreme visual imagery to forego contemplation long
enough to travel and submit to the tests.
The area that has been the most productive to date, according to
the Science article, is that of positive emotions. Buddhists strive
to achieve mental states that promote well being in the
achievement of states of joy, compassion and “loving kindness”.
Davidson has shown that activity in the frontal regions of the
brain is associated with emotional states. Using Ricard and other
experienced monks, he has found that, when meditating, the
monks have a much higher ratio of brain activity in the left
frontal region compared to the right frontal region of the brain.
When told to meditate on compassion, this ratio increased
significantly, much more than in control subjects who were not
trained meditators. The brain can be trained.
As a good scientist should, Davidson had to consider the
possibility that the monks’ brains weren’t different before they
became monks. So, he took a group of employees from a nearby
business and trained them for a couple of months in the
meditative process. Sure enough, those who were trained
showed increased left-frontal brain activity both when meditating
and at rest.
This preliminary study and others suggest that, indeed,
meditation can be a mind-altering tool for the better. Consider
the Dalai Lama’s parting words to the conferees at the MIT
meeting. It was a simple, yet profound bit of advice, namely
“encourage positive emotions, discourage negative. Then you
will be more happy.” Who could quarrel with that?
Allen F. Bortrum
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