Philospher Ken Wilber can stop his brainwaves on demand. This is the famous EEG machine recording where Ken enters various meditative states, one of which is a type of “thoughtless,” “image-less,” or “formless” state, whose correlate is that his brainwaves come to an almost complete stop, as clearly recorded on this portable electroencephalograph (EEG) machine. (This video is discussed in One Taste, April 10 entry.)

We asked Ken to do a short 10-minute commentary on these various meditative states and the corresponding brain-wave patterns that are shown on the EEG machine in the video. Ken enters four meditative states (nirvikalpa closed eyes, nirvikalpa open eyes, sahaj, and mantra-savikalpa), each of which has a very distinctive brain-wave pattern. In his commentary, Ken emphasizes that the patterns shown on this machine may or may not be typical, but they do emphasize that profound consciousness states can be evoked at will, and these show immediate correlation in brain-wave patterns.

If nothing else, seeing somebody’s brainwaves flatline in about 4 seconds is a sight not easily forgotten! It also explains why we once heard Ken’s girlfriend say, upon delivering news that she thought might not be happily received, “Now, um, honey, make your brain waves go to zero….”

More seriously, as Ken often says, “If you want to know God, you’ve got to get your brain out of the way first. It’s just one big stupid filter….”

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Use it or lose it. We know that about our bodies.

But a growing line of research now shows that the same is true for our brains. How we live, and what we do, can actually have a profound impact on the physical structure of the brain.

If we are what we eat, as the old saying goes, we may also be what we think. Or how we think, as well as how much we think.

One treatment for some of our mental ills may well lie in the practice of meditation, an awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind.

ABC

The Study: An independent team of researchers sought to explain last summer’s discovery that higher levels of the hormone oxytocin make people more trusting and lower levels make them less so. They suspected that the hormone suppresses the activity of the brain region known as the amygdala, the area that processes fear and communicates it to the rest of the brain. To test this, they had a small sample group of 15 men inhale either oxytocin or a placebo before performing a task in which they sorted pictures of angry or fearful faces and threatening scenes. During the test, the researchers monitored the subjects’ brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found that the oxytocin group indeed had reduced activity in the amygdala.

What it Means: Social phobia, anxiety, depression, and even some aspects of autism are influenced to varying degrees by amygdala activity. A long-acting oxytocin-like medication could, in theory, provide some relief from all of these disorders, and do so faster than, for example, anti-depressants. It’s far too early to expect anything on the pharmacy shelves soon, but the discovery of this brain mechanism does open a promising new door.

TIME

Until an oxytocin pill comes out, we’ll just have to rely on meditation.

Previous studies have documented clear changes in the EEG during meditation, especially an increase in alpha waves (as typically occurs with eyes closed) followed by theta bursts. Although this brain state is clearly a form of wakefulness, meditation, like sleep, is also reported to be relaxing and restorative. Again, like sleep, we do not know what is restored, but we can at least use well-validated and accepted measures of sleepiness to test whether meditation might be restorative in similar or different ways than sleep. Although many people have used meditation to assist sleep, such as in cases of insomnia, virtually no work has addressed the interactions of meditation, sleep, restoration and performance. Therefore, we have begun a series of studies using the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) before and after periods of mediation and differing sleep debts.

Our first study measured PVT performance in the mid-afternoon(when vigilance typically wanes a bit) before and after 40 minute periods of meditation, sleep, or a control activity. All ten subjects underwent multiple sessions of each activity and showed a significant improvement in PVT measures five minutes after meditation and a significant decline in performance after a nap(presumably due to sleep inertia). An hour later both of these effects are reduced. Seven of the ten subjects were also tested following a full-night of sleep deprivation which lowered the PVT performance. The relative improvement from this lowered baseline condition was even greater following meditation in this sleep deprived state in six out of the seven subjects and all seven reduced their number of lapses. The subjects in this study had limited prior meditation experience. This suggested that meditation serves a performance-enhancing and perhaps restorative role even in novice meditators. We are now in the process of performing longer term studies in expert meditators who spend several hours a day in meditation to address whether meditation may be able to partially replace sleep. Preliminary data thus far suggests some replacement, but much more work is needed.

...Which brings us to the study by Antoine Lutz and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, a prestigious and austere journal. The authors compared EEG in two subject groups before and during meditation—not of an object or activity, but of a pure feeling of unreferenced compassion.

One subject group was composed of young students trained for a week in meditative technique; the second group consisted of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners with 15 to 40 years of meditation training and practice. The EEG methodology was rigorous, and the results were clear. Compared to novice meditators, the highly trained Tibetan Buddhist meditators had markedly higher amplitude, long-range global gamma synchrony in bilateral frontal and parietal/temporal regions. An increase in gamma synchrony was also observed in baseline measurement (before meditation) which became enhanced and more global during meditation in the trained Tibetan meditators.

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