When the brain goes ohm

I sometimes get my ideas for this column in cartoon form that just pops in my head. This time, I had this caricature in my mind where I go up a mountain in search of some self-proclaimed guru living in a cave. I am holding the latest news from science (and some clean change of clothes for him), telling him that he may just be right on the positive effects of meditation but that maybe it would be wise to lay off some substances in the forest known to induce hallucinations that make him think that he has been chosen as some special speaker with the latest message from the world beyond and that he should now have his own cable channel for that purpose.

In an article entitled "Meditation builds up brain," Alison Motluk reported in NewScientist.com on Nov. 15, a study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in DC by a team of researchers in the University of Kentucky in Lexington led by Bruce O’Hara. This study is posed amid previous studies that showed that in meditation, "brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronize." This was proof that a "calm" state does not mean that nothing is going on in the meditating brain. In fact, it is saying that it would seem that in the calm state of meditation, your neurons fire (forming messages) like they are in some kind of dance. This is in contrast to your neurons randomly firing messages, probably like the order of news by our major TV networks where the news stories are presented without any perceptible order and delivered with thunderous tones as if we were all deaf or unable to decide for ourselves what to pay attention to.

Does meditation make people more alert?  This was the question the researchers wanted to answer. To do this, the Kentucky researchers used the "psychomotor vigilance task," apparently a well-established test for alertness that had the subjects looking at an LCD screen and pressing a button when they saw an image appear on the screen. The 10 subjects (none of them experienced in meditation), all had 40-minute periods of sleep, meditation or reading or conversation. The result: every single subject showed significant improvement in their alertness only after meditation. Sleep, conversation or reading did not make them more alert. Only meditation did and even after a night without sleep. They plan to find out more about the effect of meditation by studying those who really routinely engage in meditation.

This finding may be good news to professions that depend on this kind of alertness such as drivers, especially professional drivers (and whom they serve). I have been told of incidents of drivers of public transportation taking drugs to keep them awake so that they can work more hours. Increasing reports of these incidents may have prompted the drug test required for drivers. Bus and taxi company owners or even the LTO should now find it worthy to engage a meditation study to be done on public transportation drivers to determine the conditions that would influence this alertness such as the length of meditation, time of meditation, etc. It may just solve the "kamikaze" driving behavior of drivers of taxis, buses and jeepneys.

But is alertness all there is to meditation? Motluk was also wise to go to the Massachusetts General Hospital to talk to Sara Lazar whose team has been looking at the brains of those who meditate (with meditation experience ranging from one to 30 years), comparing them with those who do not meditate. They, indeed, found out that "meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula." This means that meditation seems to do to your brain what those heavy weights in the gym do to your muscles: they flex them and make them "bigger."

A "bigger" brain does not really mean you will have a head that inflates like a balloon to make room for a growing brain. If you do, you have some other problems. It also does not mean you will have the inflated ego of a public official’s brain since only politics does that, so do not worry. Lazar said this "bigger brain" neurologically means "wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections." Translation: Since brain activity is characterized by blood flow and neural connections, "wider blood vessels" and "increased branching and connections" spell good news since it would mean that chances are, you are able to engage your brain more – you are thinking more! And you know who else has this kind of structures in the brain seen in people who meditate? According to the report, it has also been seen in the brain images of accomplished athletes, musicians and linguists.

Now, I wonder what the brain images of our public officials can tell us? Knowing that meditation makes you more alert to surrounding realities, enables calm and the growth of a wider network in your brain to sort your thoughts out, approximating the beautiful concentrated minds of superb athletes, musicians and linguists, I am very curious and interested to see brain images of our public officials. I wonder what shape their prefrontal cortex, their right anterior insula, glia and astrocytes are in. We have billions of neurons in our brain and the connections between these neurons are what keep our brains working. Judging from how our public officials conduct themselves and "serve" the public, I am not so sure many of these public officials and politicians can actually perform even the simplest connections between two neurons that are sitting as close as those who sit inside a Foto-Me booth. Sometimes, I doubt if politicians are able to even make a connection between already conjoined Siamese twin neurons if there were such a thing. I have even seriously wondered if these politicians have difficulty remembering their own names because otherwise, why do they have to boldly paint their names in public (I repeat, "public") infrastructure everywhere like public toilets, pedestrian bridges, waiting sheds, ambulances and trash cans? Surely, they are not pushing us to think that they are just narcissistic nuts and even more certainly, it is not to remind us that we owe them for a job they wanted and had been elected or appointed to do, right? Surely, shmurely.

Maybe a real study that involves functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI can clue us in on whether it is neurologically realistic for us to expect our politicians to come up with the quality of thoughts that the excellent athletes, musicians and linguists are able to exhibit in their own fields. Oops, an answer in the form of a cartoon popped in my head again: A politician hanging his/her brain image beside his/her portrait in public offices for the public to see so we can retract our opinion of their performance and say: "Tsk, tsk, tsk… pardon us, sir/ma’am, we were fools to expect a modicum of intelligence from a brain image like that." But I made a mental rundown in my mind on what it would take to realistically launch a scientific study like this. Thoughts of results-rigging entered my mind…. then "brain-tapping" issues"… staff of politicians hounding science researchers to reflect "bloodflow" in the otherwise, no-traffic areas of the brains of their bosses.

Never mind. What for, anyway? Maybe a neurological study will just add salt to our already open wounds from experiencing the kind of service we get from our politicians. Why argue with fact, especially when evidence is found everywhere – with their names written in public toilets and trash cans?

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