bodhi tree swaying » Science

The science of lovingkindness

bodhipaksa — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:02:32 +0000

Right at the very beginning of my meditation practice I was introduced to both mindfulness of breathing and the development of lovingkindness meditation. It was explained to me that both of these practices were equally important, that they were complementary, and that alternating these practices prevented imbalance in our approach. It was stressed, in fact, that sometimes lovingkindness practice is more important than mindfulness practice — especially for people who have a tendency toward being angry or over-critical.

I’ve never had cause to doubt any of that advice.

There are many meditators, however, who only practice mindfulness meditation, and often lovingkindness practice is seen as second-best. Generally in western Buddhist practice, there is a heavy emphasis on particular forms of mindfulness meditation. And no doubt because of this arguably narrow emphasis, that’s the form of Buddhist meditation that’s been most commonly studied in the burgeoning research on the effects of meditative practice.

But beside mindfulness there are traditionally many forms of meditation practice, with one common list — the kamma??h?nas (literally “places of work”) including no less than forty forms of meditation. And in the Buddhist scriptures generally, there is a heavy emphasis on lovingkindness (mett?) meditation, especially as part of the four brahmavih?ras, or sublime abodes.

Lovingkindness, fortunately, is becoming better known, and researchers are now studying the effects of practicing that form of meditation, showing that they positively affect health and well-being.

Here are a few highlights:

A study done at Stanford University used a brief lovingkindness meditation exercise to examine whether social connection could be created toward strangers in a controlled laboratory context. Compared with a closely matched control task, even just a few minutes of lovingkindness meditation increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward strangers on both conscious and unconscious levels.
A Duke University Medical Center pilot study tested an eight-week lovingkindness program for chronic low back pain patients. Patients were randomly assigned to practice lovingkindness or were given standard care. Standardized measures assessed patients’ pain, anger, and psychological distress. There were significant improvements in pain and psychological distress in the lovingkindness group — even after the study had ended. There were no improvements in the usual care group. An analysis of patients’ diaries showed that more lovingkindness practice on a given day was related to lower pain that day and lower anger the next day.
Researcher Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took working adults and assigned them randomly to a lovingkindness meditation group or to a control group. Her study found that lovingkindness practice increased daily experiences of positive emotions, which in turn produced increases in a wide range of personal resources, including increased mindfulness, a sense of purpose in life, social support, and decreased illness symptoms. These increments in personal resources predict increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms.
In a study by Richard Davidson, scans revealed significant activity in the insula – a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion – when long-term meditators were generating compassion and were exposed to emotional vocalizations. The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion – such as heart rate and blood pressure – and making that information available to other parts of the brain.
The same study showed increased activity in the temporal parietal juncture, particularly in the right hemisphere. Studies have implicated this area as important in processing empathy, especially in perceiving the mental and emotional state of others.
Compassion meditation has been shown to reduce reactions to inflammation and distress. An Emory University study showed a strong relationship between the time spent practicing meditation and reductions in inflammation and emotional distress in response to stress. Those who practiced the most meditation showed reductions in inflammation and distress in response to stressors when compared to the low practice group and the control group. As one of the researchers noted, “If practicing compassion meditation does reduce inflammatory responses to stress it might offer real promise as a means of preventing many conditions associated with stress and with inflammation including major depression, heart disease and diabetes.”
A review by researchers in the US and Germany suggested that Lovingkindness and compassion meditation “may provide potentially useful strategies for targeting a variety of different psychological problems that involve interpersonal processes, such as depression, social anxiety, marital conflict, anger, and coping with the strains of long-term caregiving.”

In some of these studies, the benefits were revealed after only twelve hours of meditation. Hopefully future studies will reveal yet more about the power of lovingkindness and compassion meditation.

If you’re interested in exploring lovingkindness practice in more depth, we have an extensive, free, self-paced guide, which includes audio guided meditations.

Science can provide meaning

bodhipaksa — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:26:59 +0000

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a fascinating study that touches on Terror Management Theory — something I mention in my book, Living as a River.

A Canadian study showed that when faced with thoughts about their own mortality, a sample of people in the US

expressed relatively more positive reactions to intelligent design theory and its proponent, Michael Behe, and “significantly greater negativity” toward evolutionary theory and its proponent, Richard Dawkins.

People, in other words, would rather believe fairy stories than believe that their lives and deaths were meaningless. But…

In one of their experiments, featuring 269 psychology students, half of the participants read a passage by cosmologist and science writer Carl Sagan.

In it, he argued that “humans can attain meaning and purpose by seeking to understand the natural origins of life.” Even if we are “merely matter,” he wrote, “we can still find purpose, but it must be one that we work out for ourselves.”

Reading that passage produced the opposite result of the earlier studies. Among those who were exposed to Sagan’s notions, thoughts of mortality produced a negative reaction to intelligent design theory and a positive one toward evolution.

It seems the study participants were still looking for meaning in response to an existential threat. But after being told by a trusted source that scientific study can satisfy this longing, they found Darwin’s concepts surprisingly appealing.

So, the researchers conclude, resistance to evolutionary theory can be traced to its “apparent lack of an existentially compelling solution to life’s origins.” But their Sagan study suggests this barrier to acceptance isn’t entirely impenetrable.

This suggests that we need better science communicators (although it would help of course if we had popular media that were interested in good scientific storytelling).

This is also encouraging for me as a Buddhist — and a rather skeptical Buddhist at that, since I place little to no faith in the concept of rebirth — that we can find ways to communicate that life can be meaningful, without resorting to improbably stories about future births.

Empathy and collective intelligence

bodhipaksa — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:14:45 +0000

Scientists have been studying the phenomenon of Group Intelligence, which “is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member.” This is very interesting. So what, you might wonder, determines group intelligence?

(T)he researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions.

So, empathy. If groups are to perform well, the individuals in the group should have the emotional intelligence to be able to read each other’s feelings. This is interesting to me as a Buddhist (who often works with other Buddhists in teams), because there are indications that Buddhist practice increases empathy.

(T)hey also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

So, their working theory is again that the helpful factor is empathy, and that women have more of it, so having more women in a team helps the team’s overall intelligence. This is just an assumption, of course, but it may be a correct one.

What else?

A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant.

That’s really interesting, because it suggests that empathy is such a powerful factor it doesn’t matter if the team doesn’t care about the task they’re performing (motivation), doesn’t enjoy the task (satisfaction), or experiences conflict (unity).

But one person (a.k.a “the leader”) can royally screw things up:

(G)roups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking.

These quotations, incidentally, are from an article in the Boston Globe.

I think this research is very important. Almost all of us work in teams, and if we want those teams to be successful we should be encouraging individual teams members to develop self-awareness and empathy, for example via mindfulness meditation and lovingkindness meditation.

At a national level, I hope that this research will be taken seriously as well. Unfortunately some conservatives are opposed to this kind of research. Eric Cantor, for example, was recently mocking research into team dynamics as being about “soccer” (when actually it wasn’t). And empathy became a dirty word during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. Hopefully, though, pragmatism will win out over dogma, and empathetic team-work will received increased attention. Any economy (or society) that does not embrace empathy is going to be left behind.

Does language change the way we think?

bodhipaksa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:22:09 +0000

From the Wall Street Journal:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

Read the rest of the article…

Moral naturalism

bodhipaksa — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:22:55 +0000

David Brooks of the New York Times is on a roll. He has an interesting article today giving a quick overview of some recent research on morality.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

He raises some interesting points about the current limitations of moral naturalism (of which I’m a supporter by the way — it’s clear by looking at our closest relatives that our sense of morality has an evolutionary basis:

They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

These strike me as valid objections, and as areas that moral naturalists should be exploring

Read the rest of the article…

Robert Wright on the emerging planetary consciousness

bodhipaksa — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:12:29 +0000

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out of Control,” as preparation. And Kelly does say in “What Technology Wants” that technology is increasingly like “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”

Well, I don’t know about the “urges” part, but it’s true that technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way. In fact, the superorganism scenario is in a sense just the cosmic flip side of the diagnosis offered by Carr and other techno-skeptics.

Read the rest of the article…

Vegetarians “do empathy” differently

bodhipaksa — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:46:32 +0000

This is straight from an article by Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today:

An article appeared in PLoS one this May which describes brain differences between Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores in the way they process pictures of animal suffering.

The study in question is a neuroimaging study intent on investigating whether

“the neural representation of conditions of abuse and suffering might be different among subjects who made different feeding choice due to ethical reasons, and thus result in the engagement of different components of the brain networks associated with empathy and social cognition”

The hypothesis behind this study is based on the observation that Vegetarians and Vegans tend to base their decision to avoid animal products on ethical grounds. Assuming that Vegetarians and Vegans – because of their underlying moral philosophies – show greater empathy towards animal suffering, it is very well possible that these differences in empathy extend beyond the animal domain and show up as general differences in the degree of empathy felt towards other humans also; even at a neurological level.

The study – in basic terms – investigates this hypothesis by placing subjects into a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine and looking at the “activation” of different brain areas as subjects view a randomized series of pictures. The pictures used for this study included neutral scenes and an even share of scenes depicting various kinds of animal and human suffering.

The first main finding of this study is that, compared to Omnivores, Vegans and Vegetarians show higher activation of empathy related brain areas (e.g. Anterior Cingular Cortex and left Inferior Frontal Gyrus) when observing scenes of suffering; whether it be animal or human suffering.

Further, pictures of animal suffering (in contrast to pictures human suffering) recruited specific brain regions in Vegans and Vegetarians that were not differentially recruited by Omnivores. These were areas which are thought to be associated with higher-order representations of the self and self values (e.g. medial Prefrontal Cortex).

In addition to generally higher activations in the above mentioned areas, a second main finding of this study is that there are certain brain areas which only Vegetarians and Vegans seem to activate when processing pictures of suffering. In particular, when viewing pictures of human suffering, Vegetarians in this study recruited additional brain areas thought to be associated with bodily representations that distinguish self from others. (Notably these areas were particularly active when mutilations were shown).

Fascinating stuff. Read the full article here…

Awareness of impermanence heightens appreciation of the present

bodhipaksa — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:43:18 +0000

A key Buddhist teaching is a list of five reflections that the Buddha said everyone should contemplate daily. The reflections are:

1. I am subject to old age.
2. I am subject to sickness
3. I am subject to death.
4. I will be separated from all that is dear to me.
5 I am responsible for my own actions and destiny.

Basically it’s saying: life is short, make the most of it, take responsibility for yourself.

And I just came across a nice piece of research showing that your attitude to time affects your ability to fully appreciate the present moment.

This is from an article in Science Daily, last year:

Psychologist Jaime L. Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how our behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college seniors participated in this study, which occurred 6 weeks prior to graduation. Every day for two weeks, the students were to write about their college experiences, including the activities they participated in. The experiment was designed so that some of the students were to think about graduation as a far-off event and some students were told to think about graduation as occurring very soon.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that the students’ behavior was influenced by how the graduation deadline was framed (that is, whether graduation was occurring shortly or in the future).

It turns out that the students who thought of graduation as occurring very soon reported participating in more college-related activities compared to the students who thought of graduation as a far-off event. Kurtz surmises that when faced with the imminent end of college, students were more motivated to take advantage of the time they had left in school and participate in as many events as possible—the students realized it would be their last chance to engage in college-related activities.

Kurtz notes that although it may seem counterintuitive, these findings support the idea that “thinking about an experience’s future ending can enhance one’s present experience of it”. In addition, Kurtz suggests that “focusing on the fact the experiences like these are fleeting enhances enjoyment by creating a ‘now or never’ type of motivation”.

Fascinating stuff. I’m kind of bummed that I only just stumbled across this research, since I could have quoted it in my forthcoming book, Living as a River, which is about embracing impermanence. A point I make in that book is that although we may put a lot of effort into banishing thoughts of death and impermanence, assuming that such thoughts would be depressing, an awareness of impermanence can actually be life-enhancing. People, for example, who were asked to imagine the death of their significant other, found that their relationships improved.

Another Buddhist teaching is a list of cognitive distortions known as viparyasas — literally “topsy-turvies.” These cognitive distortions lead us to believe, for example, that the things that will make us happy will actually make us unhappy, and vice versa. Thinking that reflecting on impermanence will make us unhappy is a perfect example of a viparyasa.

Is empathy declining?

bodhipaksa — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:22:47 +0000

A long term study of students at the university of Michigan suggests that empathy has been declining since the 1980s and 1990s, with a particularly steep drop after 2000:

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

The researchers suggest that the media may be to blame: “…this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

They also hypothesize that the rise in socla media — where people have “friends” they don’t even know — and an increasingly competitive world, may be factors.

I suppose it’s possible that students are simply becoming more honest. Perhaps people in the past felt it was more socially acceptable to claim compassionate feelings they didn’t really have. In a way I hope it’s something like that: it’s bad enough having our health insurance companies, banks, etc, being managed by the people who run them now. What happens if a “less empathetic” generation starts running the country. Then, I think, we’re really screwed.

The physical roots of intelligence

bodhipaksa — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:51:21 +0000

There’s an interesting little snippet in the Boston Globe today:

Perhaps heartfelt decisions are smarter than we think. A team of psychologists in Germany [Werner, N. et al., ”Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated with Benefits in Decision-Making,” Psychophysiology] asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the decks with better returns. It seems that people who are in touch with feedback from their own body have an easier time learning from positive and negative experiences.

I was talking about something similar in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True (I’ll let you know when the podcast goes online). She asked me about writing as a spiritual practice and I explained how an awareness of gut feelings allows me to recognize and correct bad writing. While I’m writing, or editing earlier writing, I’ll sometimes notice a strange discomfort in the pit of my belly. I often don’t notice consciously that there’s a sentence that is ambiguous or grammar that is contorted, but some subconscious faculty seems able to pick up on bad writing and alerts me by creating a feeling (in Buddhist terms this is a vedana). This isn’t exactly the same as following one’s heartbeat, but it’s a physical sensation nonetheless. And it’s interesting to see a suggestion that an awareness of physical sensations can allow for better decision-making.