What a face Lucia had this afternoon! What will have happened to him? He hasn’t opened his mouth, but that gesture of hers says it all. Let’s see if he’ll drop a garment tomorrow when I meet him at the gym. By the way, I have to return to him at once that book so good that he left me. And get the new Murakami novel. Tomorrow I stop by the bookstore on the way to the store. What did I have to buy? Oh yeah! Eggs, peppers, yeast and breadcrumbs. You have to do with Lucia, whoa! This is what goes through your head in just half a minute while driving, taking a shower, or washing dishes after dinner. A rush that does not stop. A leap from the past to the future, and then back to the past again.“From what happened to what is to come. They call it mental wandering and it is triggered by a brain structure called the default neural network. Thanks to it, humans can create, have great ideas and experience eureka moments! jumping mind. The only downside is that, according to recent calculations from Harvard University (USA), we devote no less than 47% of waking time to mental wandering.Too many hours with the mind elsewhere, they say. Above all, because they have verified that this continuous loss of contact with the present moment makes us unhappy.
Those who practice meditation are well aware of those leaps from branch to branch that our monkey mind gives incessantly, as they call it in the Zen tradition. The main meditative practices propose that we focus our attention on the breath, on sounds or on a specific point in the body. But without losing sight of the fact that, as we do so, our sesera will inevitably disperse at some point. In fact, meditation is not about preventing various thoughts and feelings from surfacing. It only proposes us to observe them, see where our attention has flown and, then, without judging or losing our cool, try to regain focus. Go back to the here and now one, two, three, and as many times as necessary. As if attention was a muscle that, based on training, would end up gaining strength and elasticity.
“There is no point in trying to annihilate the monkey mind because within the nature of the human brain is continually traveling back and forth in time,” explains Clifford Saron, a researcher at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California. in Davis (USA), as well as an experienced meditator. However, he also recognizes that, in situations that require concentration, when we need to focus all our attention on a specific matter, it would be good for us to be able to tame that mental skipper.
We must not forget that attention was an evolutionary solution to a very human problem that we experience today more than ever: information overload. Not even our Paleolithic ancestors were able to process everything that happened around them. Filtering out external distractions and being able to narrow down what we focus on in each moment helped our species retain sanity.
Himalayan adventure
What can meditation do for us in this regard? Neuroscientists have been asking that question for years.
Determined to clear all doubts, in the 1990s, Saron and Richard Davidson, another pioneering researcher in the rigorous study of yoga, embarked on a curious adventure. Piles of electrodes, electroencephalographs, computer monitors, batteries, and generators were thrown onto my back. And with that luggage they climbed the slopes of the Himalayas, until they reached McLeod Ganj, a hill station inhabited by a handful of yogi masters with an experience like no other. They carried in their pockets a letter signed by the Dalai Lama himself, asking the monks to agree to these foreigners monitoring their brain function while meditating. The Dalai Lama wholeheartedly supported this cooperation between Buddhism and science, because he was convinced that if meditation became secularized and stripped of its religious aspect, all the good it had given Buddhists would be of great use to the rest of humanity. I thought it would make Westerners happier.
Unfortunately, that was a failed attempt. The yogis were not convinced so quickly. Those machines intimidated them too much. Luckily, a few years later, a monk –and biologist– of French origin named Matthieu Ricard appeared, who offered himself as a guinea pig to Davidson. He even helped convince twenty-one experienced meditators to travel to the United States for neuroscientists to study his brain, “for the good of humanity.” Research from then on has shown that yogis focus very quickly and hold their attention at one point with little effort, that they barely turn the past or anticipate the future, and that they tolerate pain better. And all thanks to meditation.
Training pays off
Saron lived these experiments with enthusiasm, but they knew little. So a few years ago he launched an even more ambitious challenge: the Shamatha project. It brought together thirty researchers interested in the neuroscience of meditation. He reserved a center for it for three months, in the middle of the Colorado mountains, surrounded by forests and lakes. And it took to this natural place dozens of first-time yogis, completely opposed to those super-experienced Tibetan monks so that for ninety days they learned to meditate from the hand of Master Wallace.
This expert instructed them in shamatha, a meditative practice that boasts of stabilizing attention and teaching how to resist distractions better than any other. He gave only two sessions a day. Then he invited them to practice on their own for six more hours each day. The results were noticed immediately. After the retreat, improvements in the participants’ attention span were evident. When they were engrossed in something, their concentration seemed limitless. If they were shown several lines whose lengths varied almost imperceptibly to anyone, they immediately spotted the differences. To top it all off, they suddenly struggled wonderfully with stress, their sense of control and well-being had exploded, and they had become much more sensitive to the pain and suffering of others.
But would those unusual changes continue six months later? And eighteen months later? And after a few years? That was the question that haunted Saron from the start. So, seven years after the retreat, he tried to reunite the study participants again. Forty of them came to the call, who, according to what the investigator told them, had continued practicing meditation for around an hour a day. After subjecting them to various tests, Saron and his colleagues found that, despite the passage of time, the subjects retained much of what intensive meditation had brought them. His capacity for sustained attention was still oversized.
At last, this neuroscientist could shout out loud that the positive effects of this practice are far from ephemeral. When meditation enters our lives, the brain changes. It is clearly not something exclusive: as the mind is enormously plastic, any repeated activity, from playing a musical instrument to playing golf, restructures the neural tangle. However, in the case at hand, there is evidence that “it is excellent training to learn to perceive reality in a less stressful way and to cultivate positive emotions, and that has highly recommended short and long-term consequences on well-being and health, ”says Perla Kaliman, biochemist, a leading researcher on this topic and author of the book The Science of Meditation. From the mind to the genes.
More mental capacity
Various studies identify changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cerebral cortex – rational and planning -, the cingulate cortex – linked to self-control -, the insula – related to empathy – and the hippocampus – seat of memory. In addition, people who meditate for a certain time have many more folds in their cerebral cortex. With a fundamental advantage, and that is that this greater gyrification – as it is called in neuroscientific jargon – allows information to be processed faster.
Another thing that is triggered by meditative practices is resilience: this is, as defined by the SAR, “the ability of a living being to adapt to a disturbing agent or an adverse state or situation.” This means that those who meditate do not break before setbacks and extreme situations; they even come out strengthened from them. Something that the Shamatha project also confirmed. The curious thing is that we not only acquire mental but also physiological resilience. Because meditation, and here comes the good, disrupts our biomolecules.
Intensively training several subjects for three days to teach mindfulness or mindfulness, David Creswell and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) demonstrated that this increases connectivity between two opposing neurological areas. : the erratic default neural network, of which we spoke earlier, and the executive attention network, key to directed attention and planning.
On top of that, this coincided with a decrease in the levels of an inflammation molecule called interleukin-6. It is a glycoprotein that is secreted by T lymphocytes, macrophages, endothelial cells, and fibroblasts. Both changes were the result of an increased ability to manage stress, one of the main triggers for inflammatory responses. Considering that chronic inflammation is behind heart disease, diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, depression and Alzheimer’s, it is not to be taken as a joke.
Kaliman was precisely one of the pioneers to scrutinize the biochemical effects of meditation. When she started practicing yoga, the scientist in her couldn’t resist. “The benefits that I experienced through these practices surprised me so much that I had no choice but to explore what happens inside the cells of the meditators,” confesses this researcher based in Barcelona. He soon discovered that “microscopic changes were taking place that settle in cells and adorn our DNA.”
Age, more bearable
Those changes in DNA decoration that Kaliman talks about metaphorically are, in fact, epigenetic modifications. That is, variations that affect DNA reading, how genes are expressed, but not the genome sequence that we inherited from our parents. They are transformations caused by the physical and social environment, by habits, even by the decisions we make. They influence our state of health and how the passage of time affects us. They are also reversible.“In collaboration with Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, we have detected very rapid epigenetic modifications and a possible decrease in the expression of inflammation genes in immune cells by expert meditators,” says Kaliman. And he adds—: More recently, we have also demonstrated, together with Raphaëlle Chaix [eco-anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)], that the rate of cellular aging measured by the epigenetic clock can change and slow down as the greater the number of years of experience in meditation.”
Happy telomeres
Kaliman has just touched on a key topic Saron has also been interested in: how meditation delays senescence. One of the main – and most surprising – conclusions of the Shamatha project was that this practice slows aging. The participants in the withdrawal had higher levels of telomerase than those in the control group. The levels of this enzyme are not a trivial matter. It turns out that the ends of the chromosomes, the telomeres, play a fundamental role in the aging of cells: they work like a clock that controls life expectancy. Every time a cell divides, its telomere shortens. If its length is reduced too much, the cell stops dividing and dies. And it is hopeless, unless telomerase kicks in and rebuilds the telomere.Following this reasoning, having an extra load of telomerase can be a source of youth .
“In one of my last works together with Saron, we found that, after a three-week meditation retreat, the telomeres of the participants’ immune cells had lengthened, and that more than twenty genes related to the regulation of telomeres had changed his expression, ”explains Kaliman. These data suggest a certain rejuvenation of immune cells in response to a meditation retreat, provided it is not too short.
But beware, all these benefits should not make us easy prey for those who try to do business with it. Not long ago, you could read an ad on the internet saying: “If you have decided to meditate, congratulations! Because you have also chosen to sleep more soundly, lower your blood pressure, reinforce your defenses, improve your relationship and reduce your stress, all in one. ” Do Kaliman and Saron support the message? No. What’s more, everyone who seriously investigates the science of meditation mistrusts both mindfulness quacks and Om-effect apps that promise to make you “a more creative and smarter guy” in a few months.
Not suitable for opportunists
One thing must be clear: it is not a magic pill that can be prescribed without more when stress overwhelms you, you face an important exam, wrinkles begin to mark on your forehead, the relationship with your boss is tense or your defenses weaken. In fact, when Kaliman talks about the conclusions about the neurophysiological and biological benefits of meditation, he is always very careful and uses expressions like “can improve” or “could change”.
Hard to measure
Meditation is not going to make you the hacker of your own brain. The only thing that neuroscientists can assure is that a great majority of meditators do or do not experience this or that benefit. But “the answer is individual, and we must never forget that”Saron insists. “In those three months that the Shamatha project lasted, most of the participants reported having observed an important improvement in what we could call their sense of meaning in life,” explains the expert with one of the graphs in his scientific article in the screen. “But, look, there were some for whom the meaning of life was reduced as a result of that experience,” he says, pointing to certain points on the diagram. Why? “We do not know. Maybe their expectations about the effects that meditation was going to have were not fulfilled, or whatever else ”, the neuroscientist conjectures. He says that, in any case, the moral is that “we cannot generalize, much less prescribe it as the remedy for this or that evil.” On the other hand, it emphasizes, “They meditate because they want to.”
No one has imposed it
Another handicap to keep in mind is that analyzing such a subjective experience with objective and external tools is not easy.. Science can learn a lot about the mind by evaluating the effects of meditation, but without ever losing sight of its limitations. “Can you imagine an exhaustive study of what the experience of, for example, being a father means for the body and the mind? Saron asks us. Too complex, yes? Well, just the same thing happens with meditation ”. There are biological, molecular, brain changes, there is little doubt about that. But there is much more. “Sometimes when they ask me what it is good to meditate on, I like to answer that it serves to raise a child and be prepared to let it go when it is time to leave the nest, it serves to be more sensitive to the suffering of oneself and others, it serves to develop daily empathy and that the dozens of people you come across every day are not indifferent ”, Saron points out. support for mental health.
In addition to lengthening the telomeres, meditation seems good for many things that cannot be measured in the laboratory. But, maybe, there are people who get the same benefits as taking care of their garden, or playing the violin. Kaliman agrees with his colleague on the importance of nuancing the limits of the research, but without undermining its enormous potential. He argues that the rigorous science of meditation, which has taken so many years to carve out its niche, is here to stay. And that it has many things to teach us about the functioning of the human brain, still full of unknowns despite the tremendous progress of neuroscience in recent decades.
Currently, the Spanish researcher is up to her neck in several projects that, she admits, “touch the nerve”. One is the Silver Santé Study, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 health program. “It is coordinated by neuroscientist Gaël Chételat, and the objective is to investigate the effects of meditation on quality of life, mental health, and the risk factors and markers of Alzheimer’s disease in people over the age of sixty-five”, comments. for the good of the world. The second project is a collaboration between the NGO Innocence in Danger Colombia (IEP) and the Center for Healthy Minds of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). “We are exploring the impact of a non-pharmacological intervention, which includes meditation and yoga,
They have evidence that neglect of parental care, mistreatment, and abuse not only change individuals’ epigenetics but are passed on to subsequent generations. If someone suffered some type of abuse, it will also be reflected in the epigenetics of their children and grandchildren. Kaliman’s hope is to reverse this effect through regular meditation practice. It augurs that “if we help in this way to break the cycles of repetition of these toxic behavior patterns in future generations, we can contribute to building a better world, with less suffering and less violence.”