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Page 1Mindfulness Meditation Alters the Brain | Psychology Today

09/06/2011 4:46:14 PMwww.psychologytoday.com/blog/choke/201106/how-mindfulness-meditation-alters-the-brain

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ChokeWhat the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to.

y Sian Beilock, Ph.D.

How Mindfulness Meditation Alters the Brainindfulness quiets brain regions responsible for our sense of self

ublished on June 3, 2011 by Sian Beilock, Ph.D. in Choke

s no secret that the age-old practice of meditation has gained mass appeal. Meditative practices are

o longer just for health gurus and Yogis, they are now embraced by politicians, celebrities, athletes

nd even those of us who don't make the cover of US Weekly.

editation techniques has been shown to help alleviate anxiety, chronic pain, and even reduce

ymptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Given these stress-reducing benefits, it's no

onder they are becoming so popular. Yet, despite meditation's broad appeal, we still don't have a

omplete grasp of why it works.

ake Mindfulness training as an example. Mindfulness is defined as a heightened awareness of the

resent moment that comes about through attending to your thoughts intentionally and non-

dgmentally. People learn to think about their thoughts and emotions as passing events, rather than

dging them or attributing importance to them. Doing so has been shown to have positive effects for

hronic anxiety and depression . In short Mindfulness training reduces vulnerability to emotional

stress.

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But, how?

A new paper published this month in the journal Social Neuroscience

provides some answers to this question. Researchers at the University

Cape Town in South Africa asked people who had undergone an 8-week

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention to perform a 12

minute mindfulness meditation while their brains were scanned using fMRI.

During the meditation, people were asked to open their awareness to

present-moment bodily sensations, thoughts and emotions without judging

or reacting to these mental and physical events.

When the researchers compared brain activation during mindfulness

meditation to brain activation during a control task where the meditators

randomly generate numbers in their head, they found that several brain

areas associated with the monitoring of bodily states - including the insula

and the prefrontal cortex - were actually less active during meditation.

Interestingly, damage to the insula has been linked to less intense

emotional reactions. Less activity in the insula during meditation, then,

likely translates into less reactivity. And, as I have blogged about before,

the refrontal cortex is instrumental in su ortin hei htened self-

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Tags: academic achievement, anxiety, anxiety and depression, bodilysensations, brain, brain activation,

brain areas, brain training, car accidents, cell phone , choking under pressure, chronic anxiety, chronic

pain, clutch, cognitive , cognitive demands, connectivity, control, cortisol, decisionmaking, depression,

distraction, driving, dual-task performance, emotional distress, executive function, expertise, fmri, health

gurus, heightenedawareness, impulse, inner voice, insula, intelligence, mass appeal, meditation

techniques, meditative practices, nerves, neuro, obsessive compulsive disorder, performance, poor

performance, prefrontal cortex, present moment , pressure, reasoning, rumination, safety, self-control,

social neuroscience, standardized tests, stereotype threat, stress, stress reduction, switch, symptoms of

obsessive compulsive disorder, test anxiety, thinking, training, working memory

ways that lead us to distance ourselves from, well, our self.

"Mindfulness" is a capacity for heightened present-moment awareness that

we all possess to a greater or lesser extent. Training this capacity seems

to have a quieting effect on brain areas associated with our subjective

appraisal of our self. By considering thoughts and feelings as transitory

mental events that occur, but are separate from the self, people are able to

lessen their hold on their worries and positive mental health outcomes

follow.

For more on meditation and its effects on the brain, check out my book

Choke !

Follow me on Twitter !

_

Ives-Deliperi, V. L. et al. (2011). The neural substrates of mindfulness: An

fMRI investigation. Social Neuroscience.

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