Taming your own shrew

I have been watching a show called “Superhumans” on cable where they scientifically test individuals who claim to have certain rare and extraordinarily abilities. So far, they have shown amazing individuals including one who can withstand pain like no other, one who can complete three Rubik’s cubes while blindfolded after having studied it for only a few minutes, one with incredible strength that he can stop a motorbike trying to run at maximum speed with a rope he held with his mouth, an extreme contortionist and a few others. I can’t wait for others whom they will show. But I can almost bet that they do not yet have this in their line-up: the happiest human on Earth.

Every person has moments of happiness but it is characteristically a transient thing. The bad news about happiness is that it does not last forever; the good news is that it returns. But what if you can make it a permanent state? I think if you can be permanently happy, then you can be called “superhuman,” not to mention, being stalked by all else who want advice on how to reach that state.

Scientists who have been studying meditation have been for over a decade, finding that indeed meditation can have profound effects on your brain. A few years ago, neuroscientists hooked Mattieu Ricard, a French monk with a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, to 256 brain sensors and they found that his brain activity was characterized by waves that have never been seen before in science literature characteristic of compassion and awareness. It was part of a big study that looked at how meditation, short- or long-term, affect the attention, emotional balance and even compassion of its practitioners. The brain of Ricard, who has had at least 50,000 hours of meditation, was reported to have produced images of brain activity that earned him the title in popular media the “happiest man on Earth.”

Last Nov. 1, another study appeared in the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience entitled “Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state” by Gaëlle Desbordes, Lobsang T. Negi, Thaddeus W. W. Pace, B. Alan Wallace, Charles L. Raison and Eric L. Schwartz. They focused on what happens to the amygdala — that part of your brain that is so charged with “potential” emotional response. I call it the “shrew” because it seems to be the most volatile of brain parts. Studies, including the big study I mentioned above, have already identified changes in the response of the amygdala as evidence that this is the one that needs to be internally tamed if we would want to temper our emotional response to what life throws at us. This study wanted to see if indeed, meditation has an effect on taming this shrew even when the subjects had long finished their meditation.

And it turns out that indeed, meditation, for as little as 16 hours total for eight weeks, could tame this shrew even when these same subjects were not meditating. Looking at the images of the amygdala in the fMRI (brain scan that shows blood flow in the brain in parts where it is active), they saw that it tempered itself when subjects were shown scenes charged with varying degrees of emotional content. What is even more interesting is that it would seem that meditation seems to also activate the amygdala when subjects demonstrate compassion which is not mere empathy but empathy coupled with a desire to ease the suffering of another. This was true of the subjects who spent more time meditating.

Studies, including this latest one, have shown that meditation “shapes” the amygdala in a way that it enables its practitioners to be more attentive, emotionally balanced and even compassionate even when they are not meditating.

I think it is about time we let the science of meditation bleed into ordinary life. Science has shown we need not be monks to gain from meditation. We all have our own shrews inside our heads that we still might be able to screw just right through meditation with focus on attention and compassion. We unceasingly complain about wars between our neighbors, office mates, sectors of governments, political factions and countries. Maybe with this kind of meditation, we could still solve those wars within ourselves and in effect, cause less wars outside.

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