Transcriber: Nabil Tbolbi Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Host: In the effort of telling multiple stories
and sharing many stories,
our next speaker is going to give yet another perspective on health.
So with that, please join me in welcoming Clifford Saron,
who's going to be talking about some of the physiological aspects of meditation.
(Applause)
Clifford Saron: Thank you.
In the summer of 1974, while I was still an undergraduate,
I had the opportunity to attend a remarkable summer school.
It was the inaugural summer of a new Buddhist University in Boulder Colorado,
The Naropa Institute.
I found myself in an evening meditation class
taught by Joseph Goldstein
before anyone had known that name.
It was at dusk, and the room that he was teaching in
got dimmer and dimmer and harder and harder to see.
And he said, "If you notice your experience closely,
you'll see that there arises in the mind
an intention to turn on the light."
Noticing your experience carefully, arising in the mind, an intention.
In that single sentence,
my understanding of the mind
from neuroscience, introspection and now Buddhism
came together, and I was hooked.
Intentions arise in the mind,
telling us we are in no particular location;
we are embedded in this body in this environment,
responding to cues from within and without.
I pursued investigating experience through many meditation retreats
that were, morning till night, silent times of sitting and walking.
In one of those retreats,
I had an asthma attack.
I was determined to use meditation to clear the attack.
The more I tried, the worse it got.
Eventually, I felt, when I could barely breathe anymore,
my hand grow large and my self grow small,
and I was able to lovingly care for my sick body by my own hand.
So I got up and I took a spray.
(Laughter)
In that simple act of self care, I could breathe again,
and I learned an important lesson
of how well I was able to ignore common sense
and how capable I was of my own care.
This process of introspection and examining our experience
is also tied with becoming our own parent,
and it led me to think about what is going on when we meditate.
One question we could ask scientifically is,
What do people do when they meditate?
But it's very difficult to answer that question;
your mental practice doesn't give you a particular signal.
But you can ask a more important question, I think.
What do people do differently - having meditated ?
This is scientifically tractable.
So some central characters in my journey -
This is a picture of myself with glasses
at the time I was having this asthma experience,
but not at that very moment,
and my friend Richie Davidson,
who is a well-known psychologist, neuroscientist, meditation researcher,
who, years later, asked me to fill in for him
in presenting our data to the Dalai Lama in India
at a Mind and Life conference in 1990.
I roomed with Francisco Varela,
arguably the intellectual father of the dialogue between Buddhism and science.
And he said, "You know, we're too old to [inaudible],
we should do something."
So, we connected with Alan Wallace,
who was a Buddhist scholar, teacher, translator for this meeting,
who also was interested in the scientific assessment of Tibetan mental training,
and we embarked on an expedition.
So here, in the foothills of the Himalayas,
I bring you to Dharamsala in 1992.
And we brought a bunch of equipment to try to see
what might be going on with monks
who were in retreat in the foothills above Dharamsala.
We met many extraordinary monks;
most wouldn't tell us one word about their meditation experience.
They said, "If you want to learn,
meditate."
This was alone one of the few individuals
who talked to us about his meditation practice.
It was like interviewing a fine cabinet maker
lovingly showing you the tools of their trade.
When my mind is in despair, I do this technique.
When I feel lethargic, I do this technique.
When I'm overexcited, I use this to calm my mind.
Here's an example.
On the left, a monk doing an attention task,
and the monk on the right
will record his facial expressions in response to videos.
But there are cross-cultural issues of trying to do this kind of work.
Why are these monks laughing?
Because we've put an electrode cap on Francisco Barela's head
when everyone knows the mind is here.
Finally, this man told us a life-changing talk
about the nature of compassion.
We asked him how sadness and compassion could differ,
and he said that sadness could catalyze the arising of compassion,
but they were separate mind streams.
In fact, one had to love the conditions of suffering
as deeply as a mother loves her child,
in order to adequately get an insight into their causes and conditions
and how to most creatively be of benefit.
But these monks,
they were extraordinary individuals;
they may always have been extraordinary.
So we need to do a longitudinal study
without the cross-cultural problems in the West
to find out the effects of meditation.
So we embarked on the Shamata Project I'm going to talk to you about today.
That has four aims:
Can attention be trained
through practicing focused attention meditation?
Can training in loving kindness,
compassion and other beneficial aspirations
support calm focused attention and improve emotion regulation?
Are improvements in attention related to psychological function?
What are the subjective, neural and physiological correlates of this training?
These are large aims.
How do you mount such a project?
We wanted to run two three-month retreats,
an initial one with an equated control group,
taught by Alan Wallace,
and a second one that the control group would do.
So, we advertised in Buddhist publications and email lists,
and we had 142 people
willing to be randomly assigned to one of two meditation retreats,
and we found 60
who were experienced and healthy enough to participate in the study.
And we created two matched groups that were matched on all these factors.
And just about five years ago,
we randomized half to a first retreat and half to a second
in the spring and fall of 2007.
And the second retreat group - the control group -
we flew them in to the retreat center
to be tested just alongside the retreatants.
So on to the Shambhala Mountain Center,
in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado.
Here is a meditation lodge we were able to rent for almost nine months.
Here's Alan Wallace, now grey like the rest of us,
teaching in the second retreat.
What is he teaching?
Two contemplative practices that are complementary.
The first concerns focusing the mind;
the second concerns cultivating these beneficial aspirations
so that you have a profound and deep ethical embedding
for undertaking focusing your mind.
In terms of focused attention,
main technique: mindfulness of breathing.
Feel the sensations of the breath at the tip of your nostrils.
When your mind wanders, bring it back.
You can broaden that awareness
to the field of all of sensations, thoughts and images,
and even within that field,
find your awareness and focus on that.
Beneficial aspirations:
loving kindness - the wish for others to be happy and self to be happy;
compassion - the wish for self and others to be free of the causes of suffering
and suffering;
empathic joy - taking pleasure in other people's success;
and equanimity -
not distinguishing those near to you from those far from you.
What do we expect?
Improved ability to focus;
increased access to your experience;
faster recovery from provocation;
ultimately, a diminution of destructive tendencies.
How can we measure these?
We took a very comprehensive approach -
I don't have time to share all of with you today -
self-rapport, physiological measures,
15 different computer-based experiments.
We had to build laboratories -
two, side by side, in this meditation lodge.
Here's a participant ready to do a task.
Here's our lab.
We built a blood lab for physiological measures.
So, what do we find?
We look at psychological improvements from a battery of questionnaires;
we combined many traits into a term we call "Adaptive Functioning."
This is increases in things like well-being and resilience,
decreases in aspects of psychology such as depression and anxiety.
And if you look at red here -
we equate the groups at the beginning -
the retreat group goes up,
stays up five months after the retreat;
the control group doesn't change at all between the beginning and end.
But when they become retreatants,
they show the same pattern as the initial retreat group.
We also looked at physiological psycho-biomarkers.
These are your chromosomes.
The ends of your chromosomes are telomeres -
sequences where the DNA binding complex combines with the DNA
to replicate your cells.
Telomeres get shorter as cells divide.
There's an enzyme - telomerase - that repairs the shortening of telomeres.
This actually relates to your longevity.
We find, in the post-retreat,
significantly greater telomerase in the retreat group
than the control group,
but more interestingly,
change in a psychological sense of purpose in life
relates to the amount of telomerase you have at the end of the retreat,
but not in the control group.
What about attention?
You do 500 hours of attention training.
We give you a hard task:
you're going to see, every two seconds, a long line,
and you're going to see short lines, one in ten, roughly.
But we make the long line steady,
and the short line, we bring it up longer and longer and longer
until you can't tell the difference between long and short.
And then, we back it off just a tad.
And for 32 minutes,
every time you see a long line, you push a button,
when you see a short line, which is now barely short at all,
you withhold.
This is a response inhibition task.
It turns out that the low line - these are the two retreats combined -
you fall off in your ability to do this task,
and after training, it improves;
the dark line is the end of the retreat.
Critically,
how well you improve on this low-level response inhibition task,
actually predicts your psychological adaptive functioning.
And this is the statistical model we use,
which, fortunately, I don't have time to explain to you.
What about emotions?
We take a developmental approach to emotions.
Three months sounds like a long time to meditate full-time,
but actually, in terms of reshaping the way you regard the world emotionally,
it's not really that long.
We do expect decrease in rejection emotions in response to suffering.
Rejection emotions are anger, disgust, contempt.
And potentially, in their place, we expect an increase in sadness.
Overall, less moving away from suffering,
more in line with what that monk was talking about
regarding generating a compassionate response.
How do we do this?
We evoke emotion with intense films.
And some of what I'm going to show you may be a bit disturbing.
On the right, you see frame grabs of unobtrusive video
obtained while this woman watches a documentary about the Iraq war.
This soldier is talking about how hard it is
to see husbands carrying dead wives.
All the numbers on the left represent the analysis
of facial-expression data from just 12 seconds.
Every frame of video,
we characterize the position of all 44 muscle groups on the face
using Paul Ekman and Wally Friesen's Facial Action Coding System,
and then we can apply those data to a standard dictionary
in order to assess the emotional expression someone shows.
What do we find?
After three months of meditation,
retreatants, compared to controls,
show decreased number of rejection emotions,
which is what we predicted.
We see increased probability of the expressions of sadness.
These results suggest that there's been an enhancement
to be able to keep in mind complex and painful realities
without pushing them away.
This, of course,
may be the crucible for the arising of a compassionate response
when confronted with suffering in yourself or others.
I've got an incredible team.
In terms of the adaptive functioning data,
I want to highlight the work of Baljinder Sahdra,
in terms of connecting that to the response inhibition data,
it's her and Katherine MacLean and Emilio Ferrer - who's faculty here.
In terms of the telomerase, that was led by Tonya Jacobs
in collaboration with Elissa Epel, Liz Blackburn and Jue Lin at UCSF.
In terms of the emotion data,
that was led by Erika Rosenberg.
Anthony Zanesco and Brandon King are our FACS coders extraordinaire,
having spent thousands of hours
paying attention to every muscle movement of our participants' faces.
And we have extraordinary generous funders;
they’re Fetzer Institute and the Hershey Family Foundation.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)