THE EFFECTS OF MEDITATION
From Lynne McTaggart’s “The Intention Experiment”
What is the effect of intense concentration on the activity of the brain?
Does the brain slow down or speed up?
The bulk of the research examining the electrical activity of the brain during meditation indicates that meditation leads to a predominance of either alpha rhythms (slow, high-amplitude brain waves with frequencies of 8-13 hertz, or cycles per second), which also occur during light dreaming, or even the slower theta waves (4-7 hertz), which indicate the state of consciousness during deep sleep. During ordinary waking consciousness, the brain operates much faster, using beta waves (13-40 hertz). For decades, the prevailing view has been that the optimum state for manifesting intention is an alpha state.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, put this view to the test. Davidson attached 256 EEG sensors to each of 8 Tibetan monk’s scalp in order to record electrical activity from a large number of different areas of the brain. The monks were then asked to carry out ‘compassion’ meditation that entails focusing on an utter readiness to help others and a desire for all living things to be free of suffering.
After 15 seconds, according to the EEG readings, the monks’ brains did not slow down; they began speeding up; the monitors showed sustained bursts of high gamma-band activity – rapid cycles of 25-70 hertz. The monks had rapidly shifted from a high concentration of beta waves to alpha, back to beta, and finally up to gamma. Gamma band, the highest rate of brain-wave frequencies, is employed by the brain when it is working its hardest: at a state of intense attention, when sifting through memory, during deep levels of learning, and in the midst of flashes of insight. As Davidson discovered, when the brain operates at these extremely fast frequencies, the phases of brain waves all over the brain begin to operate in synchrony. This type of synchronization is considered crucial for achieving heightened awareness.
Davidson’s research suggests that certain advanced and highly focused forms of meditation produce a brain operating at peak intensity. That the monks could achieve this state so rapidly suggested that their neural processing had been permanently altered by years of intensive meditation.
Studies of yogis have shown that during deep meditation their brains produce bursts of high-frequency beta or gamma waves, which often are associated with moments of ecstasy or intense concentration. Those who can withdraw from external stimuli and completely focus their attention inward appear more likely to reach gamma-wave hyperspace. During peak attention of this nature, the heart rate also accelerates.
In Davidson’s study, the monks concentrated on having a sense of compassion for all living things. It may be that compassionate intention – as well as other similar, “expansive” concepts – produces thoughts that send the brain soaring into a supercharged state of heightened perception.
In his study, Davidson also noticed an association between level of experience and ability to sustain this extraordinarily high brain activity; those monks who had been performing meditation the longest recorded the highest level of gamma activity.
The heightened state also produced permanent emotional improvement, by activating the left anterior portion of the brain – the portion most associated with joy. The monks had conditioned their brains to tune into happiness most of the time.
In later research, Davidson demonstrated that meditation alters brain-wave patterns, even among new practitioners. Those who had practiced ‘mindfulness’ meditation for only eight weeks showed increased activation of the ‘happy-thoughts’ part of the brain and enhanced immune function.
In the past, neuroscientists imagined the brain as something akin to a ‘complex computer’, which was fully constructed in adolescence. Davidson’s results supported more recent evidence that the “hardwired” brain theory was outdated. The brain appeares to reconstruct itself throughout life, depending on the nature of its thoughts. Certain sustained thoughts produced measurable physical differences and changed its structure. Form follows function; consciousness helps to form the brain.
Research suggests that highly concentrated focus over time might enlarge certain parts of the brain. The test of 20 long-term practitioners of Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ meditation showed that those portions of the brain associated with attention, awareness of sensation, sensory stimuli, and sensory processing were thicker in the meditators than in the control group. The effects of meditation definitely were “dose-dependent”: increases in cortical thickness were proportional to the amount of time the participant had spent meditating. This research offered evidence that meditation cause permanent alterations in brain structure: thinking certain thoughts “exercises” the certain portions of the brain and makes it grow larger. Indeed, the cortical thickness of these regions was even more pronounced in the older participants. Ordinarily, cortical thickness deteriorates as a result of aging. Regular meditation appears to reduce or reverse the process.
Besides speeding up, brain waves also synchronize during meditation. Meditation makes the brain permanently more coherent.
Another important effect of concentrated focus is the integration of both left and right hemispheres of the brain. Until recently, scientists believed that the two sides of the brain work more or less independently.
The left side was depicted as the “accountant”, responsible for logical, analytical, linear thinking, and speech; and the right side as the “artist”, providing spatial orientation, musical and artistic ability, and intuition. But the evidence shows that speech and many other functions are produced in both sides of the brain and that the brain works best when it can operate in its totality. During meditation, both sides communicate in a particularly harmonious manner.
Besides increasing cognitive processing, meditation also appears to integrate emotional and cognitive processes. Meditation appears to affect not only the brain’s reasonable, analytical function, but also the unconscious and intuitive function, resulting in greater activation of the part of the brain responsible for what is usually called “the gut instinct”. Meditation increases not only our ability to receive intuitive information, but also our conscious awareness of it. ‘Mindfulness’ meditation enables its practitioners to become aware of unconscious processes, and to remain exquisitely sensitive to external stimuli.
Meditation also appears to permanently enhance the brain’s reception, by enlarging certain mechanisms of perception by which we receive information, while tuning out “noise” and clarify the reception. We turn into a larger, more sensitive “radio”.
Some people are born with a larger-than-normal “antenna” and better reception than usual. This appears to be the case with psychic gifts that allow remote viewing, the ability to perceive objects or events beyond normal human vision.
Science has demonstrated that by thinking certain thoughts it is possible for us to alter and enlarge portions of our brains to become larger, more powerful receiver. But is it also possible to develop a larger transmitter? To discover some of the qualities that enhance transmission, the best place to look seems to be among talented healers.
Psychologist Dr. Lawrence LeShan, who has studied how gifted healers work, discovered that they share two important practices, besides entering an altered state of consciousness:
- they visualize themselves as uniting with the person to be healed, and
- imagine themselves and that person as being united with what they often describe as the ‘absolute’.
Healers had also described turning off the ego and eliminating their sense of self and separateness. They had the sense of assuming the body and vantage point of the person to be healed. One healer actually felt his body changing, with shifts of patterns and distributions of energy. Although the healers did not take on the disease or pain, they sensed it once they had visualized themselves as being at one with the person being healed. At this point of union, the healer’s perception markedly altered and their motor skills diminished. They were suffused by an expanded sense of pure presence, and grew unaware of the passage of time. They lost awareness of the boundaries of their own bodies, and even experienced an altered sense of bodily image.
Other healers experienced a more profound loss of identity; to carry out their work, they had to be at one with the person they were healing; to become that person, complete with his or her physical and emotional history. Their own personal identity and memory receded and they entered into some space of joint consciousness, where an impersonal self carried out the actual healing. They saw themselves as the “hose” – the channel for healing energy to travel through; they acted as vehicles for a greater force beyond themselves.
Elisabeth Tag interviewed 40 healers of every persuasion. She found that a quality of loving compassion or kindness was essential in sending out a positive intention to heal. But no matter what their approach, most of them agreed on a single point: the need to get out of the way. They surrendered to a healing force. They had framed their intention essentially as a ‘request’ – please may this person be healed – and then stepped back.
Healers described their experience as a sense of total surrender to a higher being. All believed that they were a part of a larger whole. To gain access to the cosmic, non-local entity of true consciousness, they had to set aside the limiting boundaries of the self and personal identity, and merge with the higher entity. With this change of consciousness and expanded awareness, the healers felt they got onto an open line to this larger information field, which offered to them flashes of information, symbols, and images. Words would appear, seemingly from nowhere, giving them a diagnosis. Something beyond their conscious thought would carry out the healing for them.
One of the best-studied healers, Harry Edwards, wrote that a healer worked by handing over his will and his request for healing to a greater power. To Edwards, the most important act was moving aside, shedding the personal ego, making a conscious attempt to get out of the way.
The most important aspect of the healers’ process was undoubtedly their surrender – their willingness to give up their sense of cognitive control of the process and allow themselves to become pure energy.
When healers are healthy, are in a positive state of mind, their light is more likely to shine brighter. The most effective healer of all may be the one who has been healed himself/herself.
Studies show that meditation and other altered states such as healing can affect the temporal lobes of the brain, which house the ‘amygdale’, a cluster of cells responsible for the sense of “I” and our emotional response to the world: whether we like or dislike what we perceive. Intense focus with intention on some other being appears to “switch off” the amygdale and so remove the neural sense of self.
Scientific experiments demonstrated that we can remodel particular portions of our brains, depending on our different types of focus and different thoughts
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