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The following video about meditation includes clips from an interview between Dr. Josephine
Briggs, Director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the
National Institutes of Health and Dr. Richard J. Davidson, Founder of the Center for Healthy
Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There are many interesting challenges related to
bringing science to the study of meditation and
modern neuroscience has increased the tools available for studying this ancient practice.
One of the key strategies or methods that we use to interrogate the human brain is functional
magnetic resonance imaging. This has provided an important window for us to look at brain
activity that is unfolding in time with relatively good spatial resolution, and we can interrogate
the brain systems that become activated.
It is now established that the meditative state can
be associated with changes in electrical function of the brain, and recent studies using imaging
tools, such as fMRI, suggest there may actually be
changes to the anatomy of the nervous system as well.
While modern neuroscientific tools provide light
on some aspects of the brain and pain, there remain
other challenges for studying meditation. One example
is the challenge of designing rigorous trials that
capture how people incorporate meditation into their
daily lives and what impact that has on potential benefits.
We don't even know the percentage of participants who engage in regular formal meditation practice,
say a year or two years following an eight week mindfulness based stress reduction course.
And so what we need to tease that apart are longitudinal studies where we have really
good measures of a person's cognitive and emotional style if you will, their phenotypic
characteristics, before they get randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a rigorously
matched comparison group. They then go through the training and they are followed for several
years. And you can then investigate what the characteristics were in advance of the training
before they were randomly assigned to see if any of them actually predict the extent
to which people continue to practice. We don't yet have that evidence, and I think it's really
important, and if you actually look very carefully at scatter plots in published data, one of
the things that is strikingly apparent is that for any meditation practice that's been
scientifically investigated the response to it is typically quite variable. There are
some individuals that show changes of the sort that the investigator might have predicted,
but there are clearly a substantial number of others who do not.
For more information please visit nccih.nih.gov/meditation