Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left
THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 4, 2003
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology
graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well
meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My
professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my
subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly,
my results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.
To be sure, over the years
there have been scores of studies that have looked at
meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the
adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I
see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis,
by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for
meditation's singular ability to soothe.
The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of
an unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the
Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and some
of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United
States. The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five
days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss how
people might better control their destructive emotions.
One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between
modern science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson,
director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at
the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent
research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis,
has identified an index for the brain's set point for
moods.
The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are
emotionally distressed - anxious, angry, depressed - the
most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on
the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and
the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for
the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.
By contrast, when people are in positive moods - upbeat,
enthusiastic and energized - those sites are quiet, with
the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.
Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a
quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by
reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and
left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with
surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right,
the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while
the more activity to the left, the more happy and
enthusiastic.
By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has
established a bell curve distribution, with most people in
the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those
relatively few people who are farthest to the right are
most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety
disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky
few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and
recovery from them is rapid.
This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a
biologically determined set point for our emotional range.
One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky
enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become
paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so after the
events their daily moods are about the same as before the
momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set
point changes little, if at all.
By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the
left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out
to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175
people measured to that point.
Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the
meeting between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India.
But the finding, while intriguing, raised more questions
than it answered.
Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who
become monks? Or was there something about the training of
lamas - the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or
spiritual teacher - that might nudge a set point into the
range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama
wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to
be shared for the benefit of all?
A tentative answer to that last question has come from a
study that Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon
Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical
School in Worcester.
That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic
diseases of all kinds, to help them better handle their
symptoms. In an article accepted for publication in the
peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Drs. Davidson
and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training in
mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its
Buddhist origins and now widely taught to patients in
hospitals and clinics throughout the United States and many
other countries.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a
high-pressure biotech business for roughly three hours a
week over two months. A comparison group of volunteers from
the company received the training later, though they, like
the participants, were tested before and after training by
Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.
The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in
the training time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness
training, the workers were on average tipped toward the
right in the ratio for the emotional set point. At the same
time, they complained of feeling highly stressed. After the
training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted
leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their
moods improved; they reported feeling engaged again in
their work, more energized and less anxious.
In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point
can shift, given the proper training. In mindfulness,
people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop
those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson
hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in
the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from
the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.
Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was
that mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their
immune systems, as gauged by the amount of flu antibodies
in their blood after receiving a flu shot.
According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if
people in two experimental groups are exposed to the flu
virus, those who have learned the mindfulness technique
will experience less severe symptoms. The greater the
leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger the
increase in the immune measure.
The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the
continuing sensations and thoughts more closely, both in
sitting meditation and in activities like yoga exercises.
Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly
trained lamas have come to be studied. All of them have
spent at least three years in solitary meditative retreat.
That amount of practice puts them in a range found among
masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and concert
violinists.
What difference such intense mind training may make for
human abilities has been suggested by preliminary findings
from other laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing data
come from the work of another scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman,
director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the
University of California at San Francisco, which studies
the facial expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also
participated in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai
Lama.
Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can
read another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight
changes in facial muscles.
As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be
published by Times Books in April, these microexpressions -
ultrarapid facial actions, some lasting as little as
one-twentieth of a second - lay bare our most naked
feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they cross
our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal
for those who can read them our emotion of the moment,
utterly uncensored.
Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read
these moments. Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people
can learn to detect these expressions in just hours with
proper training, his testing shows that most people -
including judges, the police and psychotherapists - are
ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than
someone making random guesses.
Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan
practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six
emotions tested for, and the other scored perfectly on
four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a
perfect score on all six, considered quite rare. Normally,
a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.
Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama,
inspired Dr. Ekman to design a program called "Cultivating
Emotional Balance," which combines methods extracted from
Buddhism, like mindfulness, with synergistic training from
modern psychology, like reading microexpressions, and seeks
to help people better manage their emotions and
relationships.
A pilot of the project began last month with elementary
school teachers in the San Francisco Bay area, under the
direction of Dr. Margaret Kemeny, a professor of behavioral
medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's immune system
findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other measures
of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with
120 nurses and teachers.
Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays
has intrigued other investigators. Under the auspices of
the Mind and Life Institute, which organizes the series of
continuing meetings between the Dalai Lama and scientists,
there will be a round at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama
will meet with an expanded group of researchers to discuss
further research possibilities.
