Buddha’s Brain

in the SPOTLIGHT Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz Buddhas Brain Neuroplasticity and speculation I n a new visualise to the f wholly in States, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the Society for Neurosciences annual showdown in Washington, D. C. Over the past some(pre no(prenominal)einal) years, he has helped recruit Tibetan Buddhist monks for and directly encouraged interrogation on the fountainhead and conjecture in the Waisman research lab for Brain resource and Behavior at the University of WisconsinMadison.The findings from studies in this unusual sample, as easily as related research efforts, signal that anywhere the contrast of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long- circumstance practitioners had genuinely alte passing the structure and serve of their superstars. In this article we discuss neuroplasticity, which encompasses much(prenominal) alterations, and the findings from these studies. Further, we notice on the colleagued signal affect ( SP) challenges, the flow status, and how SP can contribute to advancing these studies. WHAT IS NEUROPLASTICITY?The term neuroplasticity is officed to describe the wizard changes that extend in response to capture. There atomic number 18 many another(prenominal) different mechanisms of neuroplasticity, ranging from the growth of parvenue connections to the creation of new neurons. When the framework of neuroplasticity is apply to surmise, we suggest that the moral procreation of surmisal is fundamentally no different than separate forms of learning acquisition that can entice plastic changes in the brain 1, 2. WHAT IS conjecture? The term speculation refers to a all-encompassing variety of holds, ranging from techDigital Object Identifier 10. 109/MSP. 2007. 910429 niques designed to throw out relaxation to exercises, performed with a more farr all(prenominal)ing terminal such as a heightened spirit of well-being. It is thus essential to be specialised about the type of sup put bore under investigation. In 3, supposition was conceptualized as a family of complex horny and directional regulatory strategies developed for various ends, including the finis of well-being Buddhist Vipassan? and Mah? mudr? , a a a and ar similarly involve in many popular layperson interventions that draw on Buddhist practices.FINDINGS OF caput CHANGES IN MEDITATION In what follows, we add to pressher the changes in the brain that occur during each of these styles of meditation practice. Such changes include alterations in practice sessions of brain function assessed with functional magnetic resonance resource (fMRI), changes in the cortical evoked response to visual stimuli that weigh the impact of meditation on economic aid, and alterations in amplitude and synchrony of highfrequency oscillations that probably flirt an important role in connectivity among widespread circuitry in the brain.EXPERIMENTAL SETUP The experiments describe below that measure hemodynamic changes with fMRI petition a high-field-strength magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner equipped with the appropriate throb sequences to acquire data rapidly and with the needful fiber optic stimulant drug obstetrical delivery devices so that visual stimuli can be presented to the subject while he or she lays in the bore of the magnet. For the studies that measure brain galvanising employment, a high-density recording organization with amongst 64 and 256 electrodes on the scalp surface is enjoymentd.FA MEDITATION A recent assume 4 used fMRI to beam the skittish correlates of FA ( proceed on page 172) THE terminal NEUROPLASTICITY IS USED TO DESCRIBE THE BRAIN CHANGES THAT expire IN RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE. and emotional balance. here(predicate) we counseling on deuce habitual styles of meditation, i. e. , commissioned attention (FA) meditation and informal supervise (OM) meditation. FA meditation entails voluntarily cerebrate attention on a elect inclination in a sustain fashion. OM meditation involves nonreactively monitoring the content of experience from import to moment, primarily as a means to recognize the nature of emotional and cognitive patterns.OM meditation signly involves the use of FA training to calm the mind and shrink distractions, but as FA advances, the cultivation of the monitoring skill per se becomes the main focus of practice. The aim is to reach a landed e arouse in which no explicit focus on a specific object is retained instead, one remains sole(prenominal) in the monitoring state, attentive moment by moment to anything that occurs in experience. These dickens common styles of meditation ar a great deal combined, whether in a single seance or all over the course of a practitioners training.These styles argon instal with some variation in some(prenominal)(prenominal) meditation systems, including the 1053-5888/08/$25. 002008IEEE IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING magazine publisher 176 SEPTEM BER 2007 in the SPOTLIGHT y=4 keep from page 176 % T2 Accuracy Times2 Versus 1 50 40 30 20 10 0 ? 10 Novices Time1 Practitioners PZ P3b to T1 420-440 ms 0 10 1,000 F-Values ms Novices Practitioners r=? 0. 68, p=. 001 Amygdala 0. 2 0. 1 0 ? 0. 1 ? 0. 2 10 20 30 (a) V 20 ? 20 20 ? 20 20 ? 20 20 ? 20 20 ? 20 20 ? 20 (d) 40 50 r=? 0. 64 Time2 +5? V ? 5? V ? 200 scintillate No-Blink T1 T2 ?5 ? 4 ? 3 ? 2 ? 1 0 1 2 3?V T1-Elicited P3b Amplitude Time2 Versus 1 (c) (b) F3 Fc5 Cp5 F4 Fc6 Cp6 V2 500 ccc hundred 0 Blocks 50 Resting State 100 pensive State (e) 150 Time (s) % 100 45 0 Controls % 100 45 * * % 80 Practitioners * * * * * 40 0 current Initial Base withdraw Baseline (g) Meditation State * Controls Practitioners * * 0 * 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (f) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 FIG1 Neuroimaging and neurodynamical correlates of FA and OM meditations. (a) Relationship between degree of meditation training (in years) and hemodynamic response in the amygdala (in blue) to distractor sounds during FA meditation in long Buddhist practitioners.Individual responses in the right amygdala ar plotted (adapted from 4). (b) The step-down in P3b amplitude (a brain-potential world power of resource allocation) to the premiere of two tar retrieve stimuli (T1 and T2) presented in a rapid period of distracter stimuli after iii months of intensive Vipassan? meditation 5. (c) Generally, the greater the decrement in brain-resource allocation to T1 was a over time, the break out open an individual became at accurately identifying T2 (adapted from 5 ). d)(e) Example of high-amplitude da Gamma military action during a form of OM meditation, nonreferential shame meditation, in long-term Buddhist practitioners 6. (e) Time course of da Gamma (2542 Hz) activity force out over the electrodes displayed in (d) during four blocks computed in a 20-s sliding window every 2 s and then comed over electrodes. (f) Intra-individual analysis of the ratio of gamma to behindhand oscillations (413 Hz ) averaged across all electrodes during forgiveness meditation. g) The evidentiary fundamental interaction between collection (practitioner, control) and state ( sign service line, ongoing baseline, and meditation state) for this ratio. meditation in ables and novices. The study compargond FA meditation on an external visual point to a rest condition during which participants do not use meditation and ar merely instructed to adopt a neutral baseline state. The meditation condition was associated with energizing in multiple brain regions implicated in monitoring (dorso side(prenominal) prefrontal cortex), engaging attention (visual cortex), and attentional orienting (e. g. , the uperior frontal sulcus, the adjunct motor area, and the intraparietal sulcus). Although this meditation-related activation pattern was chiefly stronger for long-term practitioners compared to IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING cartridge clip 172 JANUARY 2008 novices, activity in many brain areas involved in FA meditation showed an upside-down u-shaped curve for both classes of subjects. Whereas effective meditators with an average of 19,000 practice hours showed stronger activation in these areas than the novices, expert meditators with an average of 44,000 practice hours showed less activation.This modify u-shaped function resembles the learning curve associated with skill acquisition in other domains of expertise, such as language acquisition. The findings reinforcement the root that, after extensive FA meditation training, nominal effort is necessary to sustain attentional focus. Expert meditators also showed less activation than novices in the amygdala during FA meditation in response to emotional sounds. Activation in this affective region correlated negatively with hours of practice in aliveness, as shown in aim 1(a).This finding may substantiate the idea that advanced levels of concentration are associated with a significant decrease in emotionally reactive behaviors that are dissonant with stability of concentration. Collectively, these findings support the view that attention is a trainable skill that can be stird through the mental practice of FA meditation. OM MEDITATION Another study 5 deep examined the idea that OM meditation decreases elaborative stimulus processing in a longitudinal study using scalprecorded brain potentials and performance in an attentional blink task.The consequence of lessen elaborative stimulus processing is that the subject is able to better attend moment-to-moment to the stream of stimuli to which they are exposed and less likely to get stuck on any one stimulus. The attentional blink phenomenon illustrates that the information processing ability of the brain is limited. More specifically, when two targets T1 and T2, imbed in a rapid stream of events, are presented in close temporal proximity, the entropy target is often not seen.This deficit is believed to result from competition between the two targets for limi ted attentional resources, i. e. , when many resources are devoted to T1 processing, too hardly a(prenominal) may be available for accompanying T2 processing. The study in 5 found that ternary months of intensive training in Vipassan? meditation (a common style of a OM meditation) decreased brain-resource allocation to the first target, as reflected in a smaller T1-elicited P3b, a brainpotential index of resource allocation. This is illustrated in epithet 1(b), which shows the reduction in P3b amplitude.In this figure, the scalp-recorded brain potentials from electrode Pz, time-locked to T1 onset as a function of T2 truth detected (no-blink) vesus not detected (blink), time (before or after three months), and group (practitioners versus novices) are shown. The scalp map shows electrode sites where this three-way interaction was significant between 420 and 440 ms. The reduction in brain-resource allocation to T1 was associated with a smaller attentional blink to T2, as shown i n Figure 1(c).As participants were not returnd in formal meditation during task performance, these results contribute support for the idea that one long-term effect of OM meditation may be reduction in the propensity to get stuck on a target as reflected in less elaborate stimulus processing and the development of efficient mechanisms to engage and then disengage from target stimuli in response to task demands. Previous studies 6 of high-amplitude pattern of gamma synchrony in expert meditators during an emotional version of OM meditation support the idea that the state of OM may be shell understood in name of a succession of dynamic global states.Compared to a group of novices, the adept practitioners self-induced high amplitude sustained electroencephalography (EEG) gamma-band oscillations and long-distance stagecoach synchrony, in particular over lateral fronto-parietal electrodes, while meditating. Importantly, this pattern of gamma oscillations was also sig- nificantly more pronounced in the baseline state of the long-term practitioners compared with controls, suggesting a sack in the default mode of the practitioners as shown in Figure 1(g).Although the precise mechanisms are not clear, such synchronizations of oscillatory neural discharges may play a essential role in the constitution of transient networks that integrate distributed neural processes into highly legitimate cognitive and affective functions. An example of high-amplitude gamma activity during a form of OM meditation, nonreferential compassion meditation, in long-term Buddhist practitioners 6 is shown in Figure 1(d) and (e). The intra-individual analysis of the ratio of gamma to slow oscillations (413 Hz) averaged across all electrodes during compassion meditation is illustrated in Figure 1(f).The abscissa represents the subject numbers, the ordinate represents the difference in the mean ratio between the initial state and meditative state, and the black and red stars indicate th at this development is greater than two and three times, respectively, the baseline standard deviation. The significant interaction between group (practitioner, control) and state (initial baseline, ongoing baseline, and meditation state) for this ratio is shown in Figure 1(g). The relative gamma increase during meditation was higher in the postmeditation session.In the initial baseline, the relative gamma was already higher for the practitioners than the controls and correlated with the length of the long-term practitioners meditation training through life (adapted from 6). SP CHALLENGES While SP has a ludicrous opportunity to contribute to this novel effort to chart the manner in which the brain may be transformed through the mental practice of meditation, there are several associated challenges. Among these challenges are the characterization of different signatures of brain function that distinguish among different meditation practices,IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE 173 JAN UARY 2008 in the SPOTLIGHT continued the parsing of variance in brain activity that may be due to changes in peripheral physiology such as respiration, and the co-occurrent measurement of electrical and hemodynamic signals to harness the best temporal and spatial resolution possible. meet ON BRAINCOMPUTER INTERFACES 1 of the interesting implications of the research on meditation and brain function is that meditation might help to stamp down neural noise and so enhance signal-to-noise ratios in certain types of tasks.In contexts where brain-computer interfaces are being developed that are based upon electrical recordings of brain function, training in meditation may help oneself more rapid learning. This idea warrants imperious evaluation in the future. FUTURE take form Ongoing and future work focuses on a few distinct directions. One of the crucial areas requiring attention is the characterization of changes in connectivity among the various brain circuits that are diligent by these practices. The development of new methods to essay different aspects of connectivity (both structural and functional) provide be extremely valuable in furthering this line of inquiry.The goal of such work is to better understand how different circuits are combine during meditation to produce the behavioral and mental changes that are said to occur as a result of such practices, including the packaging of increased well-being. AUTHORS Richard J. Davidson (emailprotected edu) is a director and Antoine Lutz (emailprotected edu) is an associate scientist, both with the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of Wisconsin-Madison. REFERENCES 1 A. Berger, O. Kofman, U. Livneh, and A. Henik, Multidisciplinary perspectives on attention and the development of self-regulation, Prog.Neurobiol. , vol. 82, no. 5, pp. 256286, 2007. 2 R. A. Poldrack, Neural systems for perceptual skill learning, Behav. Cognit. Neurosc. Rev. , vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7683, 2002. 3 A. L utz, J. P. Dunne, and R. J. Davidson, Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness An introduction, in The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, P. D. Zelazo and E. Thompson, Eds. Cambridge, U. K. Cambridge Univ. Press, in press. 4 J. A. Brefczynski-Lewis, A. Lutz, H. S. Schaefer, D. B. Levinson, and R. J. Davidson, Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. , vol. 104, no. 7, pp. 1148311488. 5 H. A. Slagter, A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, A. D. Francis, S. Nieuwenhuis, J. M. Davis, and R. J. Davidson, Mental training affects use of limited brain resources, PLoS Biol. , vol. 5, no. 6, pp. e13800010008, 2007. 6 A. Lutz, L. Greischar, N. B. Rawlings, M. Ricard, and R. J. Davidson, long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude synchrony during mental practice, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. , vol. 101, no. 46, pp. 1636916373, 2004. SP I N D I A N A U N I V E R S I T Y P U R D U E U N I V E R S I T Y F O R T WAY N E unveiling DIRE CTOR OF THE CENTER OF EXCELLENCE IN WIRELESS COMMUNICATION RESEARCH atomic number 49 University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) Department of engineer invites applications and nominations for the position of Founding Director of the centralise of virtuousness in radio receiver communicating Research. 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Develop and teach courses for the Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) electrical engineering concentration that would lead to a graduate certificate in wireless communication. Develop and offer credit and non-credit victor development experiences for regional employees. Participate in IEEE 802. X standards development.Coordinate and host conferences on the application of wireless technology with an emphasis on defense applications and emerging technical wireless technologies. This position offers a unique opportunity to build a Center of Excellence in Wireless Communication Research and to significantly expand industry-university cooperative research in the fields of wireless networks. IPFW offers a competitive salary and benefits incase and an excellent work environment. Fort Wayne is the second largest city in Indiana and is locate within several hours of Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Indianapolis.It boasts affordable housing, a low cost of living and a safe environment in which to instal a family. The region is home to septet major defense contractors employing over 1,800 engineers working in the fields of wireless communication, sensing element networks, C4, network-centric systems, and defense products. Applicants with extensive industrial earlier than university career experience will be given serious consideration and are strongly encouraged to apply. Candidates demonstrating extensive affaire networks within the business and governmental sectors will be preferred. To apply for this position, occupy visit our Web site at www. ipfw. obs. Applicants should submit a cover letter addressing wireless communication and DoD knowledge and experience, add up/vita, statement of research and teaching experience, and the call and contact information for at least three references . The committee will amaze review of applications immediately and the search will remain open until the position is filled. For supererogatory information regarding IPFW and the Department of Engineering please visit the Web sites at www. engr. ipfw. edu and www. ipfw. edu. ,3) LV DQ (TXDO 2SSRUWXQLW(TXDO $FFHVV$IILUPDWLYH $FWLRQ (PSORHU IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE 174 JANUARY 2008