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By Matt Danzico BBC News, New York
The study peers into brains of monks
In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken
neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain
scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.
But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a
harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious
diseases?
Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York
University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they
meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves
during the exercise.
Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent
Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) machine.
The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks' heads as they meditate inside
its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating.
Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find
how some meditators achieve a state of "nonduality" or "oneness" with the
world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.
Zoran Josipovic looking at brain scans on a computer The study specifically
looks at the default network in the brain, which controls self-reflective
thoughts
"One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it
cultivates attentional skills," Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed
skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being.
"Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be
very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and
optimise in a way we didn't know previously was possible."
When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced
practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves
and their environments, Dr Josipovic says.
And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to
be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings.
Shifting attention
Dr Josipovic's research is part of a larger effort better to understand what
scientists have dubbed the default network in the brain.
He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic
network and the intrinsic, or default, network.
Zoran Josipovic prepares a Buddhist monk for a brain scan in an fMRI machine Dr
Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators during
the study
The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused
on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.
The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve
themselves and their emotions.
But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw,
when one rises, the other one dips down.
This neural set-up allows individuals to concentrate more easily on one task at
any given time, without being consumed by distractions like daydreaming.
"What we're trying to do is basically track the changes in the networks in the
brain as the person shifts between these modes of attention," Dr Josipovic
says.
Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced
meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same
time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both
sides of the seesaw simultaneously.
And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external
networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a
harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment.
Self-reflection
Scientists previously believed the self-reflective, default network in the
brain was simply one that was active when a person had no task on which to
focus their attention.
But researchers have found in the past decade that this section of the brain
swells with activity when the subject thinks about the self.
The default network came to light in 2001 when Dr Marcus Raichle, a neurologist
at the Washington University School of Medicine in the US state of Missouri,
began scanning the brains of individuals who were not given tasks to perform.
The patients quickly became bored, and Dr Raichle noticed a second network,
that had previously gone unnoticed, danced with activity. But the researcher
was unclear why this activity was occurring.
Other scientists were quick to suggest that Dr Raichle's subjects could have
actually been thinking about themselves.
Start Quote
It's a major and understudied network in the brain that seems to be very
involved in a lot of neurological disorders, including autism and Alzheimer's
End Quote Cindy Lustig University of Michigan, associate professor of
neuroscience
Soon other neuroscientists, who conducted studies using movies to stimulate the
brain, found that when there was a lull of activity in a film, the default
network began to flash - signalling that research subjects may have begun to
think about themselves out of boredom.
But Dr Raichle says the default network is important for more than just
thinking about what one had for dinner last night.
"Researchers have wrestled with this idea of how we know we are who we are. The
default mode network says something about how that might have come to be," he
says.
And Dr Raichle adds that those studying the default network may also help in
uncovering the secrets surrounding some psychological disorders, like
depression, autism and even Alzheimer's disease.
"If you look at Alzheimer's Disease, and you look at whether it attacks a
particular part of the brain, what's amazing is that it actually attacks the
default mode network," says Dr Raichle, adding that intrinsic network research,
like Dr Josipovic's, could assist in explaining why that is.
Cindy Lustig, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the
University of Michigan, agrees.
"It's a major and understudied network in the brain that seems to be very
involved in a lot of neurological disorders, including autism and Alzheimer's,
and understanding how that network interacts with the task-oriented [extrinsic]
network is important," she says. "It is sort of the other piece of the puzzle
that's been ignored for too long."
Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators,
both monks and nuns who primarily study the Tibetan Buddhist style of
meditation, to better understand this mysterious network.
He says his research, which will soon be published, will for the moment
continue to concentrate on explaining the neurological implications of oneness
and tranquillity - though improving understanding of autism or Alzheimer's
along the way would certainly be quite a bonus.