Who is doing the loving? Self-referential brain network

activation during loving kindness meditation!

Judson Brewer MD PhD Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic

Assistant Professor Department of Psychiatry

Yale University School of Medicine www.ytnc.yale.edu

Talking about ourselves is rewarding!

Tamir PNAS (2012)

Nucleus Accumbens

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think,

And everything you do, Is for your self,

And there isn't one.”!

-Wei Wu Wei

Expertise and approach •  Expertise:

– I’m an expert in suffering – 10,000+ hours of logged experience

•  Approach: – Clinical studies of mindfulness training

for addictions (not presented today) – fMRI studies of experienced meditators

• Neural mechanisms of meditation

Personal interest in compassion •  I’m an expert in suffering!

Changes how we see the world

CAR HONKS

Cue/Trigger

Pleasant Unpleasant

CRAVING

Behavior

Memory (“me”)

(sight,  smell,  thought,  emo.on,  body  sensa.on)  

1  

2  

3  

4  

5  

6  

7  

Birth (of self-identity)

Brewer, Elwafi and Davis Psych of Addictive Behavior (2012)

METTA

How common is Mindlessness?

• Prevalence: ~50% of waking life is spent mind-wandering.

• No happier when mind is wandering vs. on task.

•  “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

Killingsworth and Gilbert, Science 2010

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Andrews-Hanna Neuron (2010)

Overlap between DMN and Self-referential processing

Whitfield-Gabrieli Neuroimage (2011)

PCC mPFC

“Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we

could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”

"-William James

Experienced meditator study (n=12)

Meditation hours Mindfulness 7748.3+4250.5 Loving Kindness 1060.1+958.9 Other 1756.8+2476.6 Total 10565.2+5148.9

Mindfulness meditation practices Concentration Loving-

kindness Choiceless Awareness

In the next period, please pay attention to the physical sensation of the breath wherever you feel it most strongly in the body. Follow the natural and spontaneous movement of the breath, not trying to change it in any way. Just pay attention to it. If you find that your attention has wandered to something else, gently but firmly bring it back to the physical sensation of the breath.

Please think of a time when you genuinely wished someone well (pause). Using this feeling as a focus, silently wish all beings well, by repeating a few short phrases of your choosing over and over (for example: May all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be safe from harm.)

In the next period please pay attention to whatever comes into your awareness, whether it is a thought, emotion, or body sensation. Just follow it until something else comes into your awareness, not trying to hold onto it or change it in any way. When something else comes into your awareness, just pay attention to it until the next thing comes along.

Attention directed at single (physical) object

Attention directed at physical and mental objects

Attention focused, but not directed to specific object

Task of MT?

•  The “task” common to all of these meditation techniques is the training of attention away from self-reference and mind-wandering and toward one’s immediate experience.

•  (Don’t feed the self!)

Task of MT?

•  (Don’t feed the self!) •  Really?

•  How can you be doing something without you doing something?

•  “The sense of acceptance of present moment experience involves some kind of perspective on oneself. Likewise, the wish for others to be happy in the loving kindness meditation is a wish from someone, not no one, and embodies an action tendency and intentionality, which are aspects of self.” (NIH grant reviewer, 2011)

2 min

baseline

Trial Time Course

30 sec

Instructions

4.5 min

Choiceless Awareness Meditation

Concentration Meditation

Loving Kindness Meditation

2x Trial (randomized between conditions)

Decreased DMN activity during meditation in experienced

meditators

z = 21

(all meditations, Experienced > Novice)

x = -6

Brewer et al PNAS (2011)

-0.5

-0.3

-0.1

0.1

0.3

BO

LD s

igna

l cha

nge

(%)

z = 21 x = -6

Meditators Controls -0.5

-0.3

-0.1

0.1

0.3

Meditators Controls

Replication Study (n = 21 meditators, 27 controls)

PCC

x = 3

FWE corrected, p < 0.05

(Loving kindness, Experienced > Novice)

Experienced meditators show decreased intrinsic connectivity

during loving kindness meditation

FWE corrected, p < 0.05

x = -3

“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first

principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the

easiest person to fool.” !

-Richard Feynman

How do we confirm our findings?

•  Typical method: correlate with self-report •  Self-report may not correlate well with

activation patterns during “long” periods of meditation – Memory bias – Subjective bias

•  Can we reduce bias by providing real-time feedback?

1 min

baseline

Real-time meditation feedback

3 min

meditate “active” feedback “dummy” feedback

Scheinost et al (under review)

Real-time Neurofeeback (PCC ROI)

Run 1

Run 4

Expert Novice

Decreased self-related activation

Increased self-related activation

Run 1 Run 6

On run 6, I had a familiar memory image appear, one of a pond, willow tree and fields of my parents farm. I noticed the strong red deflection in response to this, although I don't appear in the image. I went back to the image to see if there was a sense of watcher-subject and noticed

that image has a sense of being seen through a child's eyes. The somewhat desolate feeling landscape corresponds to that child's

subjectivity. So there is a subject there, even though I never noticed it before, the scanner feedback made me look for it. If you look at run 6 you can see me exploring the image in a long run of red in the middle.

Then I remembered I wasn't doing the task so I let it go for a while. Then I started imaginging myself in the future, telling Jud about what I had discovered about childhoold memories, which you can see clearly

in the second run of red at the end of run 6.

Repeating name Exploring image Future thinking

On task

EXPERIENCED MEDITATOR

Experienced Meditator

Concentration meditation Loving kindness meditation

(the self is optional)

Experienced Meditator Tonglen meditation

Friend Romantic Partner

Summary •  DMN deactivates during meditation •  PCC may be an important target of meditation

– Deactivates during loving kindness (and other) meditation (2 studies)

– Decreased intrinsic connectivity during loving kindness meditation

•  Realtime feedback may be useful: – for confirming results – Capturing variability within task blocks – Pointing out aspects of experience

• Neurophenomenology (Varela, Lutz, Thompson)

What about compassion? •  If compassion meditation is a selfless

practice: – Should decrease PCC activity

• Differentiate from empathy and others – Can neurofeedback from PCC be

helpful for individuals learning to practice? • Follow outcomes: empathy fatigue, pro-social behavior etc.

“Whatever joy there is in this world All comes from desiring others to be happy, And whatever suffering there is in this world

All comes from desiring myself to be happy.” !

-Shantideva

Many Thanks!

www.ytnc.yale.edu FUNDING: NIDA (R03 DA029163-01A1, K12 DA00167, P50 DA09241), Mind and Life Institute (Varela award), Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (UL1 RR024139),Yale Stress Center (UL1 DE019586-02), VAMC MIRECC

Subjects Theresa Babuscio

Keri Bergquist Sarah Bowen (UW) Willoughby Britton

(Brown) Kathy Carroll

Neha Chawla (UW) Justin Chen

Michael Cohen Todd Constable

Jake Davis (CUNY) Cameron Deleone

Colin DeYoung Hani Elwafi

Reza Farajian Jeremy Gray

Michelle Hampson Hayley Johnson

Yoona Kang Hedy Kober

Cheryl Lacadie Daniel Libby Sarah Mallik

G. Alan Marlatt (UW) Candace Minnix-Cotton

Charla Nich Xenios Papademetris

Marc Potenza

Maolin Qiu Deidre Reis

Bruce Rounsaville Dustin Scheinost

Rajita Sinha Yi-Yuan Tang (UOregon)

Tommy Thornhill Nicholas Van Dam (SUNY)

Katie Witkiewitz (WSU) Andrea Weinstein

Jochen Weber Patrick Worhunsky

x = -6 y = -60

x = -6

Con

cent

ratio

n Lo

ving

-kin

dnes

s

y = -60

(Experienced > Novice)

FWE corrected, p < 0.05