Introduction to Meditation

“Happiness comes through taming the mind; without taming the mind, there is no way to be
happy.”

- The Dalai Lama

Consider this. Let’s say scientists discover an extra-ordinary new drug offering a wide range of

benefits. It reduces stress, alleviates fear, increases self esteem, improves memory and

intelligence, improves creativity, reduces anxiety and depression, and increases happiness.

Moreover, it is natural, has no harmful side-effects and is free. Would you take this drug?

Well, such a drug does exist. It is meditation. Okay, meditation takes a little more work (and

time) than popping a pill, but you get the point.

Scientific research on meditation started in a meaningful way only in the 1970s, but has grown

exponentially since then. There are numerous studies that have repeatedly confirmed the wide

ranging benefits of meditation – including all of the benefits mentioned abovei. And yet, very

few people actually practice meditation on a regular basis. Maybe they think meditation is only

for monks and fakirs, and “flaky new age types”, not regular folks with jobs. That is a pity

because meditation is indeed a wonder drug and everyone – young and old, sick and healthy,

retired and employed – can benefit from it. In this series of articles (of which this is the first), I

am going to try to persuade you to take up meditation. I will explain why you should make

meditation a part of your daily life, and how you can do it. Along the way, I will introduce you

to the fascinating scientific research that has been done in this area.
The Cortical Lottery

One scientist who has revolutionized research on meditation is Dr Richard Davidson. Dr.

Davidson has a PhD from Harvard University and is the Director of the W.M. Keck Laboratory

for Functional Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2006,

Time magazine named Dr. Davidson as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The prefrontal cortex of the brain is the part of the brain just behind the forehead. Scientists

have known for some time that most people show an asymmetry in brain activity in the

prefrontal cortex, i.e. there is more activity either in the left prefrontal cortex or in the right

prefrontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Dr. Davidson discovered that persistent activity in the left

prefrontal cortex was associated with positive emotions such as joy, optimism and vitality while

persistent activity in the right prefrontal cortex was associated with sadness, anxiety and worry.

The ratio of the left to right prefrontal activity for a person’s brain turns out to be a pretty good

predictor of a person’s mood and sense of well-being. For example, ten month old babies show

higher left prefrontal activity when approached by their mothers and higher right prefrontal

activity when approached by strangers; also ten month old babies with higher right prefrontal

activity are more likely to cry when separated from their mothers than babies with higher left

prefrontal activity.ii Another study of two and a half year old kids found that those kids who

upon entering an unfamiliar room clung anxiously to their mothers and spoke reluctantly to

other kids, were most likely to have prefrontal activity predominantly on the right side.iii Yet

another study found that people show positive changes in this ratio when they are asked to recall

happy memories, or when they watch funny or happy film clips.iv In short, research has

repeatedly confirmed that having more activity in the left prefrontal cortex than the right is an

extremely desirable attribute.

About five years ago, Dr. Davidson performed tests on Lama Oser, a European convert to

Buddhism who had trained as a Tibetan monk, and had over thirty years of experience in

meditation. His objective was to check if the ratio of left to right prefrontal activity for an

experienced meditator was any different from that of the average person. While Lama Oser

engaged in meditation, Dr. Davidson scanned the Lama’s brain with state of the art brain

mapping devices. He found that the ratio of left to right prefrontal activity for Lama Oser had

the most positive value out of all the 175 individuals who had ever been tested at that point of

time. In other words, the ratio of left to right prefrontal activity for Lama Oser was literally off

the charts.

Discussing the results of Dr. Davidson’s tests on Lama Oser, and the impact meditation can have

on our well-being, Daniel Goleman says:v

The implications of these findings for our emotional balance are profound: we each have a
characteristic ratio of right to left activation in the prefrontal areas that offers a barometer of the
moods we are likely to feel day to day. That ratio represents what amounts to an emotional set
point, the mean around which our daily moods swing. Each of us has the capacity to shift our
moods, at least a bit, and to change this ratio.

Abusive Bosses and the Amygdala

Fear, and its more persistent cousin, anxiety, are widespread in the workplace today and the

source of almost all our emotional problems at work. There are numerous situations at work that

trigger these emotions – a performance review with the boss, a presentation before a large

audience, a crucial meeting with an angry client. You may have experienced the fear of being

yelled at by the boss, the fear of losing your job, or simply the fear of looking stupid in front of

your colleagues.
If you have ever experienced fear or anxiety, you should get acquainted with the amygdala, a small

almond shaped bunch of neurons deep inside your brain. And there is no better person to help you

make this acquaintance than Dr. Joseph Ledoux, who runs the Centre for Neuroscience of Fear and

Anxiety at New York University. The amygdala has a central role to play in fear and anxiety and Dr

Ledoux, the world leading scientist on fear and anxiety has spent most of his professional life

studying the amygdala. (He even plays in a band called the Amygdaloids.)

In order to understand how our brain circuitry works, let’s consider the example of a door slamming

shut loudly behind you. The sound enters your ear. From the ear, the stimulus, i.e. the sound, goes

to the thalamus (the brain’s receiving room for most sensory information), from where it then

reaches the amygdala along two neural pathways. The first pathway is short – it goes directly from

the thalamus to the amygdala. This pathway is also extremely fast – it takes a stimulus about 5

milliseconds to traverse this path. The second pathway is longer (and slower) but contains more

information; the stimulus goes from the thalamus to the auditory cortex where the sound is

associated with memories and this combined stimulus then travels back to the amygdala. When you

hear a door slam shut behind you, the alarm that makes you jump travels along the first, shorter and

quicker, pathway. If the sound, instead of being the slamming of a door, had been the rattle of a

rattlesnake, or the movement of a predator, the response being quicker by a fraction of a second,

could mean the difference between life and death. Therefore, evolution has made sure that the

amygdala acts independent of awareness. In fact, and this is the part that I find absolutely amazing,

if the second pathway is cut off (such as by damaging the brain cells along that path), you would

become deaf – literally – because you would no longer be able to hear any sounds, but you would still

jump if a door is slammed shut behind you!

There is one other thing we need to know about the amygdala and the cortex (the thinking part of the

brain). There are more neural pathways from the amygdala to the cortex than there are from the

cortex to the amygdala. This means that the amygdala can control the cortex but the cortex can’t

control the amygdala. For example, our anxieties often control our thoughts, but our thoughts can
seldom allay our anxieties. In other words, once the amygdala has played its part, it is very difficult

for the cortex to overrule it. If the amygdala has decided that something is scary and has reacted to

it, it has already pumped the body with cortisol and other hormones. A split second later the cortex

does a more detailed evaluation and realises that the stimulus is actually not scary, but by then it is

too late. You are already experiencing fear even though your cortex has evaluated that fear is not

justified. It is extremely hard to override what the amygdala "thinks" and "feels" simply by conscious

rational thought.

This has been demonstrated by pioneering work by Dr. Paul Ekman at the University of California,

San Francisco. Dr. Ekman and his team study the startle response in people. They tell the

participant undergoing the test that a loud sound such a gun shot is about to go off next to them, and

the participant has to try and suppress any reaction on his face. Dr Ekman has done this test with

numerous individuals and none of them have been able to suppress the startle response. This is of

course not surprising in view of what we have just discussed about the amygdala, which controls the

startle response.vi The cortex knows that the gun shot is being fired in a lab, away from the body, so

it poses no danger at all. But the amygdala triggers the startle response, by over-riding the cortex’s

assessment.

Enter Lama Oser, who we have met earlier in Dr Richardson’s experiments with left to right

prefrontal activity ratio. Dr. Ekman performed the test on Lama Oser to check his startle response.

For this test, Dr. Ekman used a very loud sound (close to the top of human tolerance – equivalent to

a gunshot going off close to the ear) and videotaped Lama Oser’s facial expression in response to the

sound. He gave Lama Oser the standard instructions for this test - Lama Oser was asked to try to

suppress the startle response so that someone looking at him would not know if he had flinched.

Some people can do this better than others but of the hundreds of people who had ever been tested

no one had ever come even remotely close to being able to suppress it. Earlier research had found

that even police sharpshooters who fire guns everyday were unable to suppress the startle response.
But Lama Oser could. Dr. Ekman explains, "When Oser tries to suppress the startle, it almost

disappears. We've never found anyone who can do that. Nor have any other researchers.” This is an

amazing result. The startle response is supposed to be outside our voluntary control. And yet, Lama

Oser, an experienced meditator, through concerted meditation practice, seemed to be override what

the brain is wired to do.

When our ancestors were roaming around in jungles an active amygdala was a huge asset – it could

mean the difference between life and death. But in the corporate world today, an active amygdala is

a liability. Fear and anxiety are learned emotions, and the workplace provides plenty of

opportunities to learn these emotions. And once we have learnt to be afraid, an overactive

amygdala, by making us continually afraid or anxious, even when there is no justifiable reason for it,

severely undermines the quality of our life. What serves us best now is a calm amygdala, not an

active one.

Lama Oser clearly had gained mastery over his own brain and his emotions. As the experiments

conducted by Dr. Ekman and Dr. Davidson show, Lama Oser had a calm amygdala and a positive

ratio of left to right prefrontal activity.

But here is the important question. Was Lama Oser an exceptional case, the highly positive tilt

in his left to right prefrontal ratio being the result of a genetic accident, or did the results simply

reflect that he had progressed far along a continuum that we could all aspire to? If Lama Oser’s

results are unique, then they are interesting but not of any practical use for you and me. After all

not many of us will be able to train full time as a Tibetan monk and devote thirty years to the

practice of meditation. However, if Lama Oser’s results reflect progress along a continuum, then

you and I can take heart. It would mean that although we may not be able to practice meditation
to the same extent as Lama Oser, we can do some practice and still favourably alter our left to

right prefrontal activity ratio.

To determine this, Dr. Davidson and his colleagues performed a study with employees of a

biotechnology company.vii Due to the competitive nature of the biotech market, employees at

this company reported having to work routinely under severe deadlines which created stress.

Most of us, whether we work in biotech or banking, can completely relate to their situation.

Employees were divided into two groups, one underwent a meditation training program and the

other (which was the control group) was put on a wait list. The meditation group underwent a

two to three hour class each week for eight weeks plus a one day meditation retreat where they

meditated for eight hours. The brain function of both the meditation group and the control group

were tested before the commencement of the meditation training programme, immediately after

the completion of the meditation training programme, and finally, four months after the

completion of the meditation programme. The first finding was that the meditation group

reported that their positive emotions went up and negative emotions such as anxiety went down.

This was, of course, expected and in line with the results of numerous other studies on

meditation done previously. Dr. Richardson’s main interest was in checking if the brain

function, specifically the left to right ratio of prefrontal activity, could be altered by a relatively

short training programme in meditation. Dr. Davidson and his team found that in the final set of

tests, four months after the meditation programme ended, the meditation group indeed showed a

significant improvement in the left to right prefrontal activity.

We are born with either an active left prefrontal cortex or an active right prefrontal cortex. It is

determined by our genes. But no matter how we have fared in the cortical lottery, we can

increase our happiness by meditating.

Owen Flanagan, Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, says:viii

Antidepressants are currently the favoured method for alleviating negative emotions, but no
antidepressant makes a person happy. On the other hand, Buddhist meditation and mindfulness,
which were developed 2500 years before Prozac, can lead to profound happiness, and its
practitioners are deeply in touch with their glowing left prefrontal cortex and their becalmed
amygdala.

That is something to think about.

i
Shauna Shapiro, Gary E. R, Schwartz and Craig Santerre (2002); Meditation and Positive
Psychology. In C. R. Snyder and S. J. Lopez (Editors), Handbook of Positive Psychology, (pp
632-645), Oxford University Press, New York.
ii
R. J. Davidson and A. J. Tomarken, Laterality and emotion: An electrophysiological approach.
In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (pp. 419-441). Amsterdam:
Elsevier.1989.
iii
R J Davidson and M Rickman, “Behavioural Inhibition and the Emotional Circuitry of the
Brain: Stability and Plasticity During the Early Childhood Years. In L A Schmidt and Schulkin
(editors) “Extreme Fears and Shyness: Origins and Outcomes, New York, Oxford University
Press, 1999.
iv
Daniel Goleman, The Lama in the Lab, Shambala Sun, March 2003.
v
Daniel Goleman, The Lama in the Lab, Shambhala Sun, March 2003.
vi
In 1996, psychologists at the Univesity of Padua in Italy reported the case of a 32 year old man,
whose startle response was muted – as a result of his amygdala being damaged. A. Angrilli and
others, “Startle reflex and emotion modulation impairment after a right amygdala lesion”, Brain,
1996, Vol 119(6) pp 1991-2000.
vii
Richard J. Davidson, Jon Kabat-Zinn, et al; “Alterations in Brain and Immune Function
Produced by Mindfulness Meditation”, Psychosomatic Medicine.
viii
Owen Flanagan, The colour of happiness, New Scientist vol 178 issue 2396 - 24 May 2003,
page 44