William RevilleMindfulness meditation aims to help people in making healthy choices, writes Professor William Reville
Meditation has become quite popular. Transcendental meditation (TM), a mantra-based practice from the Vedic tradition, used be the most popular form of meditation but has now ceded first place to mindfulness meditation.
Meditation might be viewed as a form of alternative medicine but, unlike the situation for many members of the alternative medicine family, there is a growing scientific consensus that regular meditation confers benefits on practitioners. Recent research confirms that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for depression, at least as effective as drug-based therapy. Extensive scientific investigations are afoot to understand how meditation affects the human brain and this work is summarised by Matthieu Ricard and colleagues in Scientific American, November 2014.
Ricard defines meditation as the cultivation of basic human qualities such as a more stable and secure mind, emotional balance, a sense of caring mindfulness, even love and compassion and developing a more serene way of living. Meditation is a universal contemplative tradition found in all the great religions, but strongest in Eastern religions.
Secular context
The three best known forms of meditation were developed by Buddhism and are now practiced worldwide in a purely secular context.
Focused-attention meditation calms and centres the mind in the present moment while remaining vigilant to distractions.
Mindfulness meditation has been defined as “the art of conscious living” (Jon Kabat-Zinn – Professor of Medicine, University of Massachussets Medical School) and as “a means to focus the mind in order to see clearly what is happening in each moment” (Martine Batchelor – former Buddhist nun).
Mindfulness meditation develops awareness of all that is happening without preoccupation with any particular thought.
It helps meditators to handle normal daily problems more easily, to develop a sense of well-being and to cultivate less emotionally reactive responses to emotions, thoughts and sensations, preventing their distressful escalation out of control. And compassion and loving kindness meditation fosters an altruistic outlook towards others.
Meditation was practiced in early Christianity but became marginalised over the years. It was revived in recent times largely due to the efforts of Benedictine monk John Main (1926-1982), but is not widely practiced. Christian meditation is similar to TM but uses an ancient Christian prayer word as the mantra.
Main said that Christian meditation will “verify the truth of the Faith in your own experience”.
He emphasised that this meditation does not replace other forms of prayer but “it revives their meaning”. [Further details at http://www.wccm.org/content/what-meditation]
Neuroscience shows that the adult brain remains transformable through experience – neuroplasticity. For example, if I take up learning the piano, the brain region that controls my keyboard fingering will get progressively larger as I gradually master the instrument.
A striking illustration of the plasticity of the brain was the discovery that the part of the brain that deals with spatial relationships is unusually highly developed in London taxi drivers who spend two years acquiring detailed knowledge of the vast London street network before receiving their taxi licences.
Something similar happens in meditation. Several studies have shown that meditation affects brain structure and function, ‘rewiring’ brain circuits to produce discernible effects.
Meditation enhances the capacity of meditators to remain vigilant and this has been demonstrated by measuring the capacity to detect images rapidly presented to the eye.
Subjects were asked to detect two numbers rapidly flashed on a screen amid a succession of letters. When the second number is flashed 300 milliseconds (ms) after the first, participants often miss it (‘attentional blink’), but if the delay is 600 ms the second number is easily detected. Experiments have shown that mindfulness meditators can perceive numbers flashed at 300 ms intervals more reliably than non-meditators.
Several other studies have demonstrated the power of mindfulness to ameliorate depression.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is effective in reducing relapses of major depression (Psychiatry Research Vol. 187(3), 2011) and on April 21, 2015 Willem Kuyken and others published research online in The Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962222-4/abstract) showing that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is at least as effective as anti-depressant drug medication in preventing severely depressed patients from slipping back into depression.
Ricard and co-authors also report that mindfulness meditation can reduce anxiety, improve sleep patterns and reduce the effects of pain. Pain intensity is not reduced, but it bothers meditators less than non-meditators.
Further information on therapeutic uses of mindfulness is available on Oxford University’s Mindfulness Centre website.
There is evidence also that meditation can diminish biological stresses at the molecular level. Our body cells are highly sophisticated biochemical machines and their biochemical activities are controlled by genes, made of DNA, located in cellular structures called chromosomes.
Cells in most tissues frequently divide in two, prior to which the chromosomes also divide in order to provide identical copies for each daughter cell.
Chromosomes have special DNA segments at their ends called telomeres and when chromosomes divide the telomeres shorten.
When telomeres shorten below a critical length the cell stops dividing and enters senescence.
Longevity of cells is regulated by an enzyme called telomerase that prevents the shortening of the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes. Meditators have higher telomerase activity than control groups, suggesting meditation slows cellular aging.
I learned TM many years ago at an American university and practiced it intermittently over the years. I found it helped me to more easily handle the ‘ups and downs’ of everyday living. But, meditation is a tool whose value depends to some extent on the ends to which it is recruited. Some American colleagues took the TM training course at that time primarily because they hoped meditation would enable them to get by with less sleep, allowing them to work longer – hardly the most life-enhancing ambition. And, to take an extreme example, Anders Breivik, the 2011 Norwegian mass-murderer, used meditation to numb himself in order to kill.
I recently took a course on mindfulness meditation and I now practice the technique. I find it quite effective.
Mindfulness adds flavor to the ordinary experiences of everyday living and builds in space allowing one to consider optimal choices when decisions have to be made. You need a system of values to guide you, but the ultimate goal of mindfulness meditation is to allow us to make healthy, loving, peaceful and compassionate choices.
William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.ie