Presentation Title

Introduction• Previously, the field postulated that the adult brain was fixed in two

respects: in that no new neurons are born and the functions of brain structures were thought to be determinate.Recent studies have shown that both of these notions are mistaken, as will be discussed. Another overturned assumption in the field has been the discovery that the brain not only changes throughout one’s life, rather than ceasing with childhood, but that in addition an individual can consciously participate in that change by cultivating various mental states.

• The brain’s potential for modification is referred to as neuroplasticity.• The living brain means continuous changes at the synaptic level

with every new experience, with every new process of learning, memorizing or mastering new and existing skills. Synapses are generated and dissolved, while others are preserved, in an ever-changing process of so-called neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity and Meditation

• is a term that is used to describe the brain changes that occur in response to experience. There are many different mechanisms of neuroplasticity ranging from the growth

of new connections to the creation of new neurons. When the framework of neuroplasticity is applied to meditation, we suggest that the mental training of meditation is fundamentally no different than other forms of skill acquisition that can induce plastic changes in the brain.

• Meditation-induced neurophysiological changes may be of two kinds.

• Changes that occur during meditation practice are referred as state changes.

• Changes which build up over months or years and persist even when the mind is not actively engaged in meditation are referred to as trait changes.

Focused Attention Meditation• The cognitive function that meditation may affect the most is attention, since

meditation is a form of attention training.• The degree of attention was directly related to the magnitude of neuroplastic

efficacy. In other words, attention was found to be vital and necessary if neuroplasticity is to come to fruition. This reflects the Buddhist approach, as focused attention is the foundation for more advanced mental training. As Davidson notes, “attentional training is so important in Buddhism, and it also is recognized to be very important by scientists. In many ways, attentional training can be thought of as the gateway to plasticity.”

• Attention is a mental state that enable the malleability or plasticity of the mind. . However, attention alone will not produce change, rather specific meditative techniques are needed to achieve the desired effect.

Focused Attention Meditation

• The meditation condition was associated with activation in multiple brain regions implicated in monitoring (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), engaging attention (visual cortex), and attentional orienting (e.g., the superior frontal sulcus, the supplementary motorarea, and the intraparietal sulcus).

• Although this meditation-related activation pattern was generally stronger for long-term practitioners compared to novices, activity in many brain areas involved in FA meditation showed in an inverted u-shaped curve for both classes of subjects. Whereas expert meditators with an average of 19,000 hours of practice showed stronger activation in these areas than the novices, expert meditators with an average of 44,000 practice hours showed less activation .

• This inverted u-shaped function resembles the learning curve associated with skill acquisition in other domains of expertise, such as language acquisition. The findings support the idea that, after extensive FA meditation training, minimal 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. This finding may support the idea that, advanced levels of concentration are associated with a significant decrease in emotionally reactive behaviors that are incompatible with stability of concentration.

• Collectively these findings support the view that attention is a trainable skill that can be enhanced through the mental practice of FA meditation.

• Meditation recruits attentional brain areas involved in learning.

According to Lutz, Slagter, et al. (2008), meditation practices involve at least three attention regulation subsystems:

• First, meditation may involve intense object based concentration. Selective attention—or orienting—is the selection of specific information from the flow of sensory input and involves cortical structures known to gate information, such as the temporal-parietal junction, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontal eye field, and the intraparietal sulcus (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002).

• Second, meditation imposes continuous monitoring of the focus of attention. Sustained attention—or alertness—is the maintenance of a state of high sensitivity to a perceived stimulus or mental object over time and most likely involves sustained synchronous activity between the thalamus and the right frontal and right parietal cortical structures—also known as the thalamo-cortical loop

• Finally, meditation also involves transient attention shifts, as when one disengages attention from a source of distraction and redirects it to the intended object of concentration (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Lutz, Slagter, et al., 2008). This involves executive attention—or conflict monitoring—which is the monitoring and resolution of conflicts among thoughts, feelings, and mental plan. This function is managed by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, structures that have also been shown to be activated when one is self-conscious.

The Open Monitoring (OM) meditation

• OM meditation decreases elaborative stimulus processing in a longitudinal study using scalp-recorded brain potentials and performance in an attentional blink task >> 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 capacity of the brain is limited. More specifically, when two targets T1 and T2, embedded in a rapid stream of events, are presented in close temporal proximity, the second target is often not seen. This deficit is believed to result from competition between the two targets for limited attentional resources i.e., when many resources are devoted to T1 processing, too few may be available for subsequent T2 processing .

• The study found that three months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation (a common style of OM meditation) reduced brain-resource allocation to the first target, as reflected in a smaller T1-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation. This is illustrated in Figure 1(B), which shows the reduction in P3B amplitude (a brain-potential index of resource allocation). In this figure, the scalp-recorded brain potentials from electrode Pz, time-locked to T1 onset as a function of T2 accuracy (detected (no-blink) vs. not detected (blink)), time (before or after three months), and group (practitioners vs. novices) are shown. The scalp map shows electrode sites where this three-way interaction was significant between 420 and 440ms. The reduction in brain-resource allocation to T1 was associat smaller

attentional blink to T2, as shown in Figure 1(C).

• As participants were not engaged in formal meditation during task performance, these results provide 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 (a) less elaborate stimulus processing and (b) the development of efficient mechanisms to engage and then disengage from target stimuli in response to task demands.

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• Open monitoring meditation increases processing capacity in the visual system. This evidence comes from a study using the attentional blink paradigm. In this paradigm, two stimuli are presented in close succession. As a result of allocation of all attention resources to the first stimulus, the second one is often not perceived. However, both behavioral and eventrelated potential results show that intensive 3-month openmonitorin retreats decrease the attentional engagement in processing the first target, thus allowing subjects to process and perceive the second one.

Meditation Improves Perceptual Attention Capacity

• Perceptual pre-attentive processes are sometimes under voluntary control—as, for instance, when we focus our attention on an object or sound—although they may also b affected by environmental cues. Selective visual attention focused on an object may b involuntarily influenced by the surrounding objects; for example, distracting visual stimuli of high contrast have been shown to automatically redirectthis type of attention . Below, we show how meditation affects involuntary allocation of low-level attentional resource.

• In the auditory domain, pre-attentive processes involve the automatic detection of environmental changes and can be studied in the laboratory through the brain’s electrical response (event-related potential) to a flow of frequent auditory stimuli interspaced with infrequent ones. The amplitude of the differential electrical activity between frequent and infrequent stimuli, called mismatch negativity, was found to increase immediately among expert practitioners after a focused attention meditation session. Focused attention training and the higher degree of awareness of the body and sensations induced by meditation might be responsible for increased sensory cortex sensibility. According to one interpretation, neuronal populations tuned to different stimuli inhibit each other and compete for attentional resources (Naatanen, 1992). Neuronal populations tuned to properties of the standard stimulation respond less vigorously upon repeated stimulation and become desensitized. Thus when a deviant activates a distinct new neuronal population, these fresh afferents respond more vigorously, eliciting mismatch negativity.

• Meditation would make these perceptual systems sharper and more sensitive.

Meditation Decreases Perceptual Habituation

• Neural and perceptual systems tend to habituate to repetitive presentation of stimuli, to which early responses are larger than later ones. Meditation has been shown to decrease perceptual habituation to repetitive stimuli. This type of effect has been mostly observed in open-monitoring meditation, in which the practitioner develops attention to the present moment-to-moment experience without allowing his or her attention to wander. In this meditation, each stimulus is seen as fresh and new in the present moment. As an individual practicing open monitoring works on perceiving each experience as it arises in the moment without judging, it might cut off automatic brain mechanisms responsible for habituation, establishment of routines, and action scenarios. A classical habituation paradigm involves repetitively presenting the same stimulus and observing the decrease in the induced 10-Hz brain alpha wave amplitude with the number of stimulus presentations. Non-habituation was demonstrated with open-monitoring meditators where the electroencephalographic alpha rhythm amplitude did not decrease after repeated stimulus presentations.

• These findings are also consistent with Cahn’s study (2008) showing less automated recruitment of frontal attentional circuits when rare and salient auditory stimuli are processed during Vipassana open-monitoring meditation practice.

Meditation Reduces Neural Population Competition inHigher Perceptual Areas

• Reported results of a study of 23 Tibetan Buddhist monks who have been engaged in either focused attention or open-monitoring meditation. These monks were asked to perform a “binocular rivalry” task during which they were presented with two images, one before each eye. Under these circumstances, they were randomly experiencing either both images simultaneously or each of them alternatively for 2–3 seconds as the images competed for attentional resources in the visual system. No effects of open-monitoring meditation were observed either during or after the practice. However, monks practicing focused attention meditation were able to maintain a stable, superimposed percept of the two competing images for a longer than normal duration. These results suggest that selective and sustained attention allows conflicting stimuli to be perceived simultaneously by long-term expert practitioners both during and following focused attention meditation. This also points to the remarkable influence of meditation training on the brain, as no other mental training has been shown to affect allocation of attentional resources responsible for binocular rivalry. Open-monitoring meditation also seems to allow meditators to more efficiently process stimuli competing for attentional resources

• Studies 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 best understood in terms of a succession of dynamic global states. Compared to a group of novices, the adept practitioners self-induced higher-amplitude sustained electroencephalography (EEG) gamma-band oscillations and long-distance phase synchrony, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes, while meditating. Importantly, this pattern of gamma oscillations was also significantly more pronounced in the baseline state of the long-term practitioners compared with controls, suggesting a transformation 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 crucial role in the constitution of transient networks that integrate distributed neural processes into highly ordered cognitive and affective functions .

Mindfulness meditation- provides insight and wisdom

• used to treat range of mental pathologies, including stress, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In a study conducted by neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz andcolleague Lewis Baxter, patients suffering from OCD who went through mindfulness based therapy showed a dramatic decrease in activity in the orbitalfrontal cortex, the area activated by the disorder, compared to control subjects.

• Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for the treatment of depression. While patients under usual treatment served as the control group with 34 percent free of relapse, of those under mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, the rate increased to 66 percent. That comes out to be a 44 percent reduction in the relapse rate among those involved in mindfulness therapy, as reported in 2000.3. In 2004, Teasdale, along with colleague Helen Ma, replicated the study, finding the same results of reduced relapse. These findings indicate top-down plasticity, because transformation originates in cognitive activity, that is, the mind initiates changes in the brain.

• Mindfulness- based therapy has been found to produce alterations in patterns of prefrontal brain activity that has previously been found to accompany a positive affect.

• Courses on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction now extend beyond the hospital setting for chronic patients and are applied to a wide array of individuals.This method, with a primary basis in Buddhist practice, is now being used to treat chronic pain, anxiety disorders, general psychological well-being, psoriasis, and recurrent depression.

• Recent studies have revealed that this type of therapy also produces changes in brain structure, showing again that meditation can induce neuroplasticity.

Loving-kindness meditation• Whereas emotions had been previously thought to be localized in certain areas of

the brain, studies began to reveal that every area of brain dedicated to emotion is also devoted to some aspect of thought; both emotion and cognitive processing share the same neural circuits.

• This neuroanatomy is consistent with the Buddhist notion that thoughts and emotions are inseparable parts of the same mental event and only further the hypothesis that cognition, with mental training can alter the circuitry of emotions.

• Davidson continued to investigate the possibilities of emotional plasticity. Using an fMRI to measure activity in the amygdala, the area of the brain associated with emotions such as distress, fear, anger, and anxiety, he found that simply by having the aspiration that a person in a photo be free of suffering, subjects, even without mental training, can alter activation in the brain. Thought was altering emotion

Loving-kindness meditation• In another experiment, Davidson tested eight Buddhist adepts along with eight non-

meditators as controls, to engage in loving-kindness meditation while their brain waves were measured by EEGs. The prominent presence of gamma waves was noticed at once, the signal continuing to rise over the meditation period.

• Gamma waves are believed to generally be associated with mental effort in addition to being the signature for activity between widespread brain circuitry and seem to be related to consciousness and perception. Even during neutral mental activity, the monks’ increase in gamma waves was larger than had ever been recorded in previous neuroscience experimentation.

• Davidson found a linear relationship between the number of years practiced and their baseline gamma signal, showing that the degree of mental training is related to the degree of change.

• During meditation, the brains of experienced meditators and the control subjects alike both showed activity in areas related to monitoring emotions, planning movements, and positive emotions such as happiness. For the adepts, however, there was increased activation in the right insula and caudate, the network associated with empathy and maternal love and that is exactly the desired effect of this type of meditation.

The Links Between Brain, Body, and Emotion

• Asymmetries in brain electrical activation have been linked with the way people react to emotional situations and regulate their emotions.

• In individuals who tend to react positively and let go quickly of negative emotions, the baseline electrical activity of the brain exhibits greater left-sided anterior activation than recordings of individuals who are more prone to nourishing negative emotions (for a review, see Davidson, 2004). After 6 months’ practice of mindfulness and MBSR meditation, healthy participants showed enhanced left-sided prefrontal electrical activity in the alpha band after induction of both positive and negative feelings (Davidson et al., 2003). The same study found increased left-sided PFC activity to be associated with reduced anxiety and negative affect as well as increased experiences of positive affect. These results correlate with previous ones demonstrating that people with more left-sided baseline activation in the PFC have a more positive outlook on life than individuals with right-sided PFC activation (Davidson, 2000)

• Longitudinal study of transcendental meditation shows decreased brain activation in the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulated cortex in response to acute pain (immersion of the hand in hot water) after 5 months of TM daily practice in participants who were new to meditation. This study further suggests that TM practice does not change actual pain sensations (as pain rating didn’t change pre– or post–TM practice and never significantly differed between beginners and long-term practitioners) but does reduce emotional distress associated with pain, resulting inenhanced tolerance of acute pain,

• Studies show that meditation actually affects two important areas of the brain emotion circuitry: the amygdala and the PFC. The amygdala is engaged in producing autonomic, endocrine, and somatic responses as well as directing attention toward affective stimuli that are potentially important, such as potential threats or potential sources of food (Davis & Whalen, 2001). The PFC downregulates neural activity in the amygdala and the two areas share reciprocal connections. Less body arousal and EEG brain activation has been observed in response to negative affects for yoga practitioners (Aftanas & Golosheykin, 2005). Consistent with this, when one i engaged in focused attention meditation, fMRI studies show that amygdala activity in response to emotional negative or positive sounds is decreased in long-term Tibetan expert practitioners compared to novice ones. Interestingly, the more hours participants have spent meditating in their lifetimes, the more important is the decrease in amygdala activity (Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007). However, fMR studies show that when engaged in focused compassion meditation, expert meditators from the same tradition exhibited greater amygdala activation in response to

• emotional stimuli than novice practitioners.

Consciousness, brain, neuroplasticity • Changes in consciousness and its content following different brain

processes and malfunction have long been studied. Cognitive sciences assume that brain activities have an infrastructure, but there is also evidence that consciousness itself may change this infrastructure.

• The two-way influence between brain and consciousness has been at the center of philosophy and less so, of science.

• This so-called bottom-up and top-down interrelationship is controversial.

• Ongoing processes of synaptic reinforcements and decay occur during wakefulness when consciousness is present, but also during sleep when it is mostly absent. We suggest that consciousness influences brain neuroplasticity both during wakefulness as well as sleep in a top-down way.

The two-way interrelationship between consciousness

and brain biochemistry and neural networks

• Changes in memory involve continuous structural changes in the brain, both during wakefulness and during sleep.

Block and MacDonald (2008) consider two types of consciousness.:

• - a phenomenal consciousness that goes beyond cognitive accessibility. Phenomenal consciousness consists of rich experience and feelings, and only part of it reaches thoughts. “although much of the detail in each picture is phenomenally registered, it is not conceptualized at a level that allows cognitive access.

• -a narrower access consciousness “a subject can have an experience that he does not and cannot think about.”Access consciousness consists of information held in the cognitive system for the purposes of reasoning..

• Accordingly, there is a more localized core neurological basis for phenomenological consciousness, and there is a broader total neural basis which initiates a level of access consciousness, e.g., a level that involves abstract concepts and language. The core neurological basis can interact with the total neural basis in both a bottom-up and top-down fashions.

• Block and MacDonald think that the brain records experiences within a phenomenal consciousness in core neural bases of consciousness. They provide an example of the fusiform face area, at the bottom of the right temporal lobe in the brain, which is activated with a visual experience of faces, and might be regarded as the core neural basis of face perception. Not like phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness involves the whole brain or the gestalt brain, which Block and MacDonald call the total neural basis of consciousness. Gestalt brain includes working memory, attention, high level information processing and integration, rationality, intentionality and introspection, achieving a high state of consciousness which can in turn influence changes in specific parts of the brain structures and functions, language, thoughts and reports.

• What can be said of access consciousness as a function of the whole brain? It can include imagined objects and events independent of having experience. It is capable of creative and seemingly uncaused function. That is, it can initiate a chain of events without identifiable causes. We have many evidences that consciousness can cause physical changes. It has features such as intentionality and purpose that are hard to explain by past events. It can change itself and it has a self healing capacity which means that in general it can both improve and cure itself—at least to a certain extent. These capabilities of consciousness have been utilized in rehabilitation plans for patients who suffered brain strokes, or for improvement of attention and memory decline in old adults by cognitive training programs.

• Using Block and MacDonald’s concept of consciousness we can conclude that the content of consciousness can be changed by experience, but also outside of experience.

CONSCIOUSNESS,BRAIN,AND LANGUAGE

• Different parts of the brain may be activated by different linguistic content. For example, emotional text can cause activity in parts of the brain that have to do with emotions within the limbic system, such as the amygdala, while decision process may activate other areas such as the prefrontal cortex. Language activates Broca’s area for articulation and Wernicke’s area for comprehension, both reside in the left brain hemisphere.Some of the linguistic activities that take place in wakefulness stay with us and become stable in the form of long term memories.

• The interrelationship between the content of consciousness and brain activity as demonstrated by language seems to be concomitant. But how are experiences, thoughts and other mental events recorded in the brain? What happens when we study a new language or develop our knowledge and skills of our first language? Such activities start with consciousness and some brain activity (as can be observed by fMRI and other imaging technologies), and with acquisition of new short term explicit memories, that may later become long term and implicit through farther changes in the brain. On their side, practicing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of language, and knowledge acquisition might be accompanied by the development of automatic unconscious performance of new skills and knowledge.

Neuroscientist Eric Kandel has made a distinction between:

• “implicit memory” that is acquired involuntarily “from the bottom up” and assists automatic forms of response to stimulation

and• - “spatial memory” which serves consciousness

and is the result of willful “top-down” registration of new memories in the brain hippocampus, a process triggered by voluntary attention originated in the cerebral cortex.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN DURING SLEEP

• During wakefulness memory encoding and retrieval take place most effectively ( Diekelmann and Born, 2010), but sleep also promotes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory and its integration within pre-existing knowledge networks (Karni et al., 1994Askenasy et al., 1997). Memory consolidation during sleep is often considered as an off-line brain process of stabilization of such newly acquired information, but there is also consolidation of false memories of events that never happened. Acquired information is transformed, restructured, abstracted, integrated with previously acquired memories, prioritized according to its emotional significance, distorted, inferred and combined with false memories within the process of memory consolidation during sleep(Payne et al., 2009).

• Memory consolidation involves structural changes in the brain. The creation of proteins, changes in neural pathways and the creation, destruction, enhancement, and regress of neuronal synapses which are parts of the dynamic neuroplasticity of the nervous system. Long term memories can become implicit, automatic and uncontrolled such as in riding bicycles, and explicit such as records of events and facts.

• Consciousness is essential for an episodic and explicit memory acquisition.

During sleep

• many parts of the brain showmuch reduced activity while others continue to be active. Certain sensorial inputs to the brain are disconnected, as well as certain outputs, as muscles and movement control. Consciousness changes and decreases in functions including voluntary control, self awareness and reflective thought. But consciousness also increases in its emotional involvement and impaired memory(dream amnesia) (Nir and Tononi, 2010). Nir and Tononi conclude that “dream consciousness can not be reduced to brain activity in REM sleep,” and that dream isa powerful form of imagination where presumably brain activity flows in a “top down”manner.

In a state of dreaming:• the external world is almost absent and an internal world exists in the brain

and takes over consciousness. The content of dreams is the segregated and integrated external reality deposited in the hippocampus, posterior temporal fusiform gyrus, orbito-frontal area, limbic area, and all over the brain which takes the place of reality. The moment we switch to the wake state the implicit perception is differentiated from the explicit perception and is recognized within consciousness to be a false perception.

• The unreal aspect of dreaming is later recognized by the dreamer, and dreams are mostly separated from real experiences. Dreamers are conscious when awakened that the visua imagery that they have experienced was false due to the instant instauration of the Gestalt brain. In the wakefulness state there are normally no self-generated implicit perceptions that are not caused by real experiences. Upon arousal from a dream, con- sciousness allows the interpretation of the imagery as false. It is a chaotic combination of recollected experiences presented in the mind as occurring now. The ability to experience past implicit visual perceptions characterizes dreams, as the ability to experience explicit perception characterizes visual consciousness during wakefulness.

Dreams

• that dreams include self generated brain images and are results of implicit perception. They are formed by brain networks in the gestalt brain through the activity of neurons and synapses already consolidated and generating false memories integrated with true memories. In this way dream can change the brain by the activation of relatively large neuron ensembles, eliberated from the consciousness control.

• We can farther speculate that thinking, moral judgments, complex learning (i.e., language acquisition), and many other mental activities, require a concept of strong emergence of consciousness and top-down brain processes. There are other similar states of affairs that are quite common in biology, e.g., swarm behavior

• Consciousness is essential for an episodic and explicit tmemory acquisition-ex: to learn a second language, we must usually make a conscious effort to store the vocabulary and the grammatical rules of this language in our memories. When learned in this way, a second language depends on declarative memory (also known as explicit memory). Sometimes, however, people learn a second language “in the street” without having to pay much attention. In this case, the learning process is much the same as it was for their first language and, as in that case, is handled by procedural memory