Chinese Mandarin - Brain scans tell why meditation works

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Brain scans tell why meditation works

(LiveScience.com)
Updated: 2007-07-01 11:15

If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research
that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the
brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation's purported
emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their
negative emotions in an effort to "let them go."

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their
feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people
up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan
the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given
moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces
making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of
words describing the emotion - such as "angry" or "fearful" or two
possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one
female name.

When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the
most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they
saw.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in
the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region - an area associated
with thinking in words about emotional experiences - became more active,
whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional
processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces,
the brain scans revealed none of these changes, indicating that only
emotional labeling makes a difference.

"In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a
yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting
the brakes on your emotional responses," Lieberman said of his study,
which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires
to determine how ��mindful�� they are.

Meditation and other ��mindfulness�� techniques are designed to help
people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and
sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often
acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to ��let them go.��

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful
dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a
stark difference��the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in
the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect
in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

"These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of
mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying
reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health," said
David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study,
which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.

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