The is a cool article I found at Deric Bownds' Mindblog. The article - Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise - is posted at the open source PLoS ONE site. This study is further proof that meditation changes the brains of those who do it - and possibly that different forms of meditation create different changes.
Here is a relevant passage from the results:Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise
1 University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America, 2 West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States of America, 3 University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom
Abstract
Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another's pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.
Citation: Lutz A, Brefczynski-Lewis J, Johnstone T, Davidson RJ (2008) Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise. PLoS ONE 3(3): e1897. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001897
Editor: Bernhard Baune, James Cook University, Australia
Received: November 30, 2007; Accepted: February 15, 2008; Published: March 26, 2008
As predicted there was a Group-by-State-by-Valence interaction in several regions critical for empathy (insula cortex, somatosensory cortex (SII), Fig. 1.A, Table 1). The interaction was a function of experts showing a larger increase than the novices during meditation vs. rest in response to emotional (positive and negative) vocalizations vs. neutral vocalizations (Figs. 1.B–C, Table 1). The activation in insula cortex during compassion was a function of the intensity of the meditation as verbally reported, which was stronger during the good vs. the poor blocks of meditation across the two groups (Figs. 1. D–E, Table 1). Since there was no difference between states in response to the neutral sounds in the clusters from figure 1 (table 1), following our prediction we ran a follow-up 2*2*2 ANOVA using only negative and positive sounds in a voxel-wise analysis. There was only one cluster showing a Group by State by Valence interaction, which was located in the right insula (3667 voxels, corrected p<0.05, href="http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001897#pone-0001897-g002">Fig. 2.A). The effect was produced by a stronger activity in the responses to negative vs. positive sounds during meditation vs. rest for the experts compared to the novices (Fig. 2.B, t = 2.1, df = 28, P<0.05, href="http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001897#pone-0001897-g002">Figs. 2.C–D) and ACC (Table 2). Together these results support our main hypothesis that the brain regions underlying emotions and feelings are modulated in response to emotional sounds as a function of the state of compassion, the valence of the emotional sounds and the degree of expertise.In essence, experienced practitioners of Loving Kindness meditation showed greater results in the crucial brain areas associated with compassion (the insular and anterior cingulate cortices) than those with less experience and those at rest.
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