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Meditation Changes Pain Signal Processing Patterns

A new study reveals one of the mechanisms through which meditation acts as a painkiller, or as a way of reducing the intensity with which people perceive pain. The work shows that pain processing patterns are modified even after brief sessions of meditation.

Test subjects who were analyzed during the new experiments showed that after only four days of meditation sessions, the human brain becomes capable of altering its own response to pain.

All that participants had to do is practice a mindful awareness of their bodies and consciousnesses, the team behind the research says. They made a presentation of the study at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, which was held in San Diegoon November 16.

One of the thing that puzzled the scientists about practitioners' brain was that measurements revealed lower levels of activity in regions of the cortex that are regularly involved in relaying sensory information.

Additionally, the brain regions that control the painful part of the body are less activated as well. What goes into overdrive are the areas that are involved in modulating pain. As such, test subjects told scientists that they experience less intense pain, and that the feeling was not all that unpleasant.

The new conclusions add to previous studies, which revealed that practicing meditation can reduce anxiety levels, make people more relaxed and that it also aids in regulating individual emotions. As far as pain goes, meditation simply makes the feeling less distressing.

“It's really all about the context of the situation, of the environment. Meditation seems to have an overarching sense of attenuating that type of response,” says scientist Fadel Zeidan, quoted by LiveScience.

The expert holds an appointment as a post-doctoral researcher at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and is also the author of a new paper detailing the findings, which was presented at the conference.

During the experiments, participants were asked to practice what is known as mindfulness meditation. This means that they simply sat down comfortably, thought about the present, and cleared their minds, all while breathing at a steady rhythm.

“The preliminary results are very interesting and promising. You don't necessarily need to be a monk to experience some of the benefits related to meditation,” Zeidan explains.

In another study the researcher and his group conducted, published in the March issue of the esteemed Journal of Pain, Zeidan reported that as little as 30 minutes of meditation per day for three days can lead to a significant reduction in the pain response of test subjects.

The correlation held even if the participants weren't actually meditating, but rather just sat there quietly, relaxing.

Meditation Changes The Structure of The Brain

Engaging in meditation even for brief periods each day has visible effects on the human brain, say the conclusions of a new scientific study. It would appear that the practice triggers a reorganization of cortical areas related to sense of self, stress, empathy and memory, among many others.

The correlation was found to be valid even for people with no prior experiences of this nature, who took part in a brief mindfulness meditation program. The work was conducted by experts at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

They say that brain-imaging techniques revealed that change after only eight weeks of practicing the meditation methods, which is a very short time indeed. Details of the study will appear in an upcoming issue of the scientific journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

What makes this research special is the fact that it demonstrated for the first time that meditation can produce changes in the structure of gray matter in the human brain. These are the first scientific, verifiable evidence to attest to the fact that the change is real.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” explains researcher Sara Lazar, PhD.

“This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing,” adds the expert, who was the senior author of the new study.

In past studies the researcher and her team conducted, it was demonstrated that the brains of experienced meditation practitioners were considerably different from those of individuals who did not practice meditation.

Cortical areas associated with attention and emotional integration were a lot thicker in the practitioners, the team reported at the time. However, in the other studies, it was impossible to determine a causal link between meditation and the boost in cortical thickness.

The new study, which was based on using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the brain of test subjects, does exactly that. The research was carried out at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness.

“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” adds Britta Hölzel, PhD.

“Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change,” she says.

Hölzel, who is first author of the new paper, holds an appointment as a research fellow at MGH and also at the Giessen University, in Germany, PsychCentral reports.

Attention Can Be Improved by Taking Breaks

A new investigation suggests that people who listen to their inner instincts telling them to take a break from a strenuous activity every once in a while are much better at concentrating than their peers who choose to remain focused on the task at hand.

Most people experienced this situation at least once – when choosing to concentrate harder on a task rather than take a break, only to find themselves losing focus faster than before. In retrospect, listening to your inner self might have been the best way to go about finishing the task.

These discoveries – which seem like common-sense to a point – go against established theories on the nature of attention. They also demonstrate in an empirical manner that turning your attention from an activity just for a little bit can help you get better at focusing on it once the break is finished.

Scientists are conducting investigations into this issue because workers have often reported the same problem – their performance/efficiency at doing a task declines if they do the same thing over and over again. This happens primarily because they lose focus.

In scientific terms, this is called a vigilance decrement. The phenomenon occurs when attention resources begin to get depleted, explains the leader of the new study, Universityof Illinois psychology professor Dr. Alejandro Lleras.

“For 40 or 50 years, most papers published on the vigilance decrement treated attention as a limited resource that would get used up over time, and I believe that to be wrong,” the expert argues.

“You start performing poorly on a task because you’ve stopped paying attention to it. But you are always paying attention to something. Attention is not the problem,” he goes on to say.

According to Lleras, the human brain may be wired in this manner. Previous studies have demonstrated that, if exposed to the same sound, image, or feeling for a long time, the mind starts to ignore it.

“Constant stimulation is registered by our brains as unimportant, to the point that the brain erases it from our awareness,” Lleras explains, quoted by PsychCentral.

“So I thought, well, if there’s some kind of analogy about the ways the brain fundamentally processes information, things that are true for sensations ought to be true for thoughts,” he adds.

“If sustained attention to a sensation makes that sensation vanish from our awareness, sustained attention to a thought should also lead to that thought’s disappearance from our mind!” the expert says.

The main conclusion of the new investigation is really quite simple – deactivating and reactivating your objectives helps the mind perceive them as new every time you return to work. This in turn prevents the brain from considering the stimuli a background “noise” and ignoring it.

“From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks, it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!” Lleras concludes.