Resize Text: Can meditation clear the fog of war? Walking a fine line between science and religion, doctors and veterans advocates are trying to find out.
During a mortar attack on an American airbase in Iraq, Donnie Apted found himself scrambling under an armored Humvee that was part of a convoy delivering supplies to troops at the Taji airbase near Baghdad.
“I was thirty-five meters from the runway,” said the forty-two-year-old retired member of the Army National Guard. “And I was hiding under the truck while the mortars were coming down. The flashes and bangs—for a long time, I just couldn’t talk to people about what happened.”
Apted, who served in Iraq from June 2003 to May 2004, said that he began to realize something was wrong a few months after he returned home to Conyers, Georgia, about twenty miles east of Atlanta.
“There was lots of garbage in the road on the convoy routes between Baghdad and Taji,” he said. “We would see suspicious stuff on the road, and someone would have to investigate. At home, I began to notice that when I’d drive past something on the road, I’d tense up. Is that going to explode?”
Apted said that after he saw a network news segment on mental illness among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan—“I realized that’s me,” he said—he began to navigate the Veterans Administration healthcare system to try to get help. The first therapist Apted saw put him on antidepressants.
“I hated them,” he said. “But without them I was really irritable, and loud noises could be a trigger. I was not a fun person to be around.”
Apted’s wife kept encouraging him to get the care he needed, and the third therapist he visited told him about a study run jointly by Emory University and the V.A. hospital in Atlanta. Volunteers who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would learn the neuroscience behind their condition and then be trained in mindfulness techniques and breathing exercises as a way of reducing their symptoms.
In doing this, Apted is engaging in a secularized version of a spiritual practice that makes an unlikely connection between former soldiers like him and an ancient lineage of seekers, monks, and yogis. He is also activating an intricate feedback system in the parts of his brain that regulate attention and emotion—a phenomenon that psychologists and neuroscientists are only just beginning to understand.
The scientific study and replication of the experience Apted describes—cultivating concentrated attention on the breath, stepping back from painful feelings, and allowing for a sense of spacious possibility even in stressful situations—has become a big deal in recent years. More than two hundred medical centers in the United States now offer programs in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. And, at a time when government agencies like the National Institutes of Mental Health and private donors like the Fetzer Institute are increasing the pool of grant money available to scientists studying mindfulness, dozens of clinical studies are underway to fine-tune the application of meditative techniques like MBSR to benefit people suffering from an array of ailments—from post-traumatic stress and attention-deficit disorders to generalized anxiety and depression.
But the real story behind the scientific study of meditation may be how the encounter between two meaning-making systems—Western science and Eastern spiritual practice—has begun to alter both the prevailing culture in the community of scientists studying meditation and that community’s perspective on the sources of the social and psychological problems it is working to address.
Like the brains of the war-rattled meditators that clinicians across the country are now studying, the field of neuroscience has begun to demonstrate a remarkable degree of plasticity as a consequence of its exposure to meditation.
Taming the Dragon
Three networks of neurons in a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex are responsible for the different aspects of attention—alertness, orientation, and executive control (which refers to the ability to sustain alertness and orientation as thoughts, feelings, and other distractions clutter the field of awareness).
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data show that as oxygen-rich blood flows to these attention-focused networks during meditation, activity in the amygdala and other structures in the limbic system—an evolutionarily older part of the brain associated with emotion and memory of emotional events—begins to diminish.
“What we’ve learned is that the prefrontal cortex quiets down the amygdala,” said Susan Smalley, a neurogeneticist in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and founder of the university’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. “It’s a feedback system that seems to modulate the whole limbic structure.”
Amishi Jha, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, calls this system “the matrix of mindfulness.”
“There’s definitely an interface between attention and affective changes,” she said.
Jha recently conducted a comparative study of novice and experienced meditators to look for changes in the different aspects of attention and to learn whether prior exposure to meditation was reflected in data from attentional network tests.
At the end of an eight-week MBSR program, the group of participants who were new to meditation showed marked improvement in their ability to focus or orient attention, while seasoned practitioners who participated in a one-month meditation retreat scored higher on tests that measure alertness or “receptive” attention.
“This outcome echoes classical meditation texts that suggest that receptive attention can’t be explicitly instructed,” Jha said. “Instead, it’s a consequence or natural byproduct of the long-term development of concentrative attention.”
Smalley, who specializes in psychiatric disorders that manifest in children and adolescents, has studied the effects of mindfulness practice in groups of teenagers and adults with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
“It looks like mindfulness practice directly affects executive attention in people with ADHD,” she said. “In fact, the more difficulties a child has, the more they were able to benefit from mindfulness practice.”
Lidia Zylowska, a psychiatrist who has collaborated with Smalley, said that the form of mindfulness training used in the ADHD study is an updated version of the meditative medicine developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the 1980s.
“Instead of following the thought or being aware of the thought,” she said, “we’re working with people to train them simply to notice the thought then return to a more neutral focus like the breath and awareness of the body.”
This strategy of “nipping thoughts in the bud,” as Zylowska describes the process, shifts the aim of meditative practice away from the impulse to analyze or change thoughts and toward an entirely new relationship to mind-chatter.
“We’re training non-reactivity,” Zylowska said. “It’s the nature of the mind to be distracted, so the emphasis is on returning to breath rather than staying with the breath—developing a strong intention to return. Then a thought is just a thought, a feeling is just a feeling.”
The implication for PTSD and other attention-related disorders is clear: Over time, mindfulness techniques allow practitioners to begin to diminish the intensity of painful feeling-states as they learn to shift the focus of their attention away from thoughts related to past events and toward their experience in the present moment.
Zylowska said this means that, “Over time, as the reciprocal relationship between executive attention and the limbic system improves, people feel less flooded” by unwanted thoughts and feelings.
The generally accepted scientific description of the reciprocity between the amygdala’s “fight-or-flight” response to emotional stimulation and the regulating function of attentional networks in the prefrontal cortex brings to mind a classic image in Chinese Buddhism: Kwan Yin (who embodies the compassion that spontaneously arises from Samadhi, or undistracted awareness of the present moment) perched atop a dragon.
“I like that image,” Zylowska said with a laugh. “Compassionate attention tames the dragon.”
She adds that uncovering the mechanism behind that centuries-old representation of meditative experience is the next goal for scientists studying meditation.
“We understand that it happens,” she said, “but not how.”
Changing One’s Experience of Experience
“There’s nothing I can point to in my life that isn’t practice,” said Chris Gendo Bowman, a fifty-four-year-old Buddhist monk who began meditating in the early 1990s. “I can’t get away from it. It’s even creeping into my sleep time.”
Bowman describes his practice as shikantaza, an advanced form of objectless meditation in which the practitioner cultivates an expansive, lucid awareness of the present moment without focusing on or excluding anything within his or her field of experience—what Amishi Jha calls “receptive attention.”
“As much as I can,” Bowman said, “I try to embody no separation,” the Zen Buddhist ideal of pure moment-to-moment existence in which both rumination on the past and expectation for the future drop away.
A childhood abuse survivor and recovering alcoholic since 1981, when a drinking binge induced a grand mal seizure, Bowman said that although there was nothing spiritual about his decision to stop drinking—“a train was coming, and I realized that if I wanted to live, I had to get off the tracks,” he said—his Zen practice has been a spiritual pursuit from the beginning.
“Coming to practice was perfection from day one,” he said. “It felt like coming home.”
Bowman still periodically contends with the fiery rage that he once tried to douse with alcohol, though now he faces his dragon head-on.
“Anger immediately takes over my whole being,” he said. “I feel it all over my body, especially in the gut. I just have to wear it down with my practice, which means struggling to keep from struggling and bringing my attention back to where I am about 50,000 times.”
He said the intensity of the angry feeling-state slowly diminishes over two or three days. The difference between his current bouts with anger and his experience as a younger practitioner is most apparent at the close of each episode.
“Now there’s a sudden drop-off toward the end,” he said, “and the drop-off is always just a little sooner.”
Donnie Apted, the Iraq War veteran, had similar problems whenever he passed litter on the freeway or heard a loud noise. And his anger carried over to his first meeting before being enrolled in the clinical trial. “After I told the woman I contacted about what was happening when I would see stuff on the side of the road,” Apted recalled, “she said, ‘You’ll be able to look at it from another perspective.’ I literally laughed in her face! I didn’t want to see it at all!”
Yet he progressed quickly. “The biggest thing is the stability that comes with the breathing technique,” Apted said. “We started with mountain pose—just standing solid and following the breath. Follow the breath in, follow the breath out.”
He also learned what he calls the “shuttle” technique, which he was able to put to use, with the help of one of the clinicians running the study, during a flashback to the mortar attack in Taji.
“She told me to go into the memory of the attack then come back to my breathing and awareness of my body,” he said. “Learning these techniques completely changed what I feel. I still get startled, but I don’t have the rage I used to have.”
John Briere, director of the psychological trauma program at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, describes experiences like Bowman’s and Apted’s as “being traumatized again.”
“Being triggered means to re-live the traumatizing experience,” said Briere, who specializes in the application of mindfulness techniques in trauma therapy.
Developing emotion-regulation skills using meditative practice—that is, engaging the feedback loop between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system through the cultivation of Samadhi—allows practitioners both to diminish the force of triggered emotions and to increase their tolerance for painful feeling-states.
“It’s essentially learning to change one’s experience of experience,” Briere said.
That description of what the dedicated meditator is doing points toward a tension at the heart of scientific studies of meditation: Are clinical studies of mindfulness inducing what might be considered classical religious insights? And, if that’s the case, what are the consequences of the scientific validation of the benefits of those insights—for both Western science and the practitioners who are being studied?
“Someone who learns to quiet the mind for five minutes might realize that Samadhi isn’t a dream state but a new perspective on reality,” said Clifford Saron, an assistant research scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. “That’s immense, but that’s not part of the agenda in a scientific culture where there’s not much support for self-reflection.”
Saron is also the principal investigator of the Shamatha Project, a privately funded study of the effects of meditation training on attention and emotion regulation using one of the largest cohorts and involving one of the widest arrays of research disciplines in any such study so far. He said that one of the most intriguing sets of data from the project examines not stress enzymes and EEG readings—although those data definitely intrigue him—but the relationship between the depth of a subject’s commitment to meditative practice and the degree of measurable transformation he or she experienced during the study.
“Society wants to secularize meditative practice,” he said. “But we don’t yet know the relationship between belief and motivation”—an essential factor in a practice that often requires practitioners to contend with difficult and painful emotional material, particularly in the case of ailments like PTSD.
“It’s a deep thing,” Saron said. “It’s not just popping a pill.”
Charting the Next Frontier
Although Saron is concerned that many of his fellow scientists fail to appreciate that they are dabbling in alchemy when they place their subjects into the crucible of meditative practice, an outside observer might remark that it is the scientists themselves who have been most dramatically transformed by their encounter with Buddhism.
“There’s a decidedly counter-reductionistic trend in contemplative neuroscience,” said Amishi Jha, who was an organizer of this year’s Mind and Life Summer Institute, an annual gathering of scientists and Buddhist scholars that originated as a conversation between the Dalai Lama and a handful of Western neuroscientists in the 1980s.
“One of the results of the research into meditation has definitely been push-back against the prevailing scientific culture,” she said.
Still, if the drift of the conversation in neuroscience is toward the belief that the human mind is more than the sum of its parts, there remains considerable resistance to the Eastern notion that the human brain is not the seat of conscious awareness.
“If a scientist were to start talking about mind in the classical Buddhist sense,” said Lobsang Rapgay, “they would never be invited to any of these academic conferences.”
Rapgay was born in Tibet and, when he was four years old, fled China with his family for Dharmsala, India, where he eventually studied Tibetan medicine and became a translator for the Dalai Lama.
He then trained as a Western clinical psychologist and moved to the United States twenty years ago. Now an assistant professor at UCLA, he said that although from a conservative Buddhist perspective the movement that is reshaping neuroscience isn’t the transmission of Dharma, the philosophy of the Buddha, in a looser sense one can see the marks of Buddhist teaching in scientific trends that will likely provide the impetus for the wider acceptance of mindfulness practices in American public life.
“When you’re replacing maladaptive behavior and correcting inattention to interdependence and interconnectedness,” he said, “you’re treating dhukka”—the ailment usually translated as “suffering” in the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.
That observation points toward a broader form of cultural response originating from the neuroscientific study of meditation. As researchers begin to trace the root causes of the kinds of suffering for which meditative practice seems most effective as a remedy, they are learning that the tens of thousands of traumatized veterans that are expected to flood the healthcare system in the coming years represent only the first wave of victims in an epidemic of trauma.
“PTSD is underdiagnosed,” said John Daishin Buksbazen, a psychotherapist who works with traumatized veterans and a Zen practitioner since 1968. “It’s not limited to survivors of acute forms of trauma like rape or war. A significant portion of the population is traumatized by cumulative exposure to traumatizing experiences that are simply an unacknowledged part of our culture.”
In other words, stressors like economic uncertainty and global political instability—the “background noise” of the modern era—play out in daily life as road rage, domestic strife, addictive behavior, and other expressions of anxiety or depression.
Thus what neuroscientists are discovering, said Buksbazen, is the common thread of trauma linking the particular expressions of a dysfunctional attentional-limbic feedback system that are variously described as PTSD, attention-deficit, and mood disorders.
And like Rapgay, Buksbazen still sees some of the constraints of a Western mindset in the approach most neuroscientists take to the study of mindfulness.
“One of the big errors of neuroscience is thinking it’s about the brain,” he said. “Meditation isn’t something you do in your head. If you look for neural clusters, they’re in the heart, the abdomen. There’s just not a lot of attention being paid to interaction between neural clusters elsewhere in the body.”
That conceptual shift from a narrow focus on the brain to an inquiry into meditation’s effects on larger human
systems will not be long in coming. The scientists who are studying changes in the brains of meditators have already started to refine and expand their focus as they begin to add gene-mapping technologies to their repertoire of investigative techniques.
“If you’re seeing physiological change in one region of the body,” said Susan Smalley, “you’re bound to see genetic change that will influence the entire organism. That’s the next frontier.”
Like the proverbial fluttering butterfly that sets in motion the intricate chain of events that eventually produces a hurricane, the increase in blood flow to attention centers in the prefrontal cortex alters the limbic system, which changes the nervous and cardiovascular systems, which in turn subtly reshapes interlinking functions in the rest of the body.
Smalley also said that in the syncretism between mindfulness practice and Western scientific culture she sees evidence of what Jonas Salk called metabiological evolution—shifts not only in physiological and genetic structures but also related developments in the underpinnings of human culture.
That claim may sound grandiose, but consider that the primary vectors for metabiological evolution are remarkably mundane: human relationships.
Donnie Apted said that his experience in Iraq and his subsequent exposure to mindfulness training have helped him reach out to his father, a Vietnam veteran who has suffered as a consequence of his own history of trauma.
“We’ve talked more over the past couple of years than we’d ever talked before in my life,” Apted said.
Apted’s young children are also the beneficiaries of the compassion that has spontaneously arisen as he has learned to cultivate undistracted awareness of the present moment.
“My oldest son is starting to play baseball,” said Donnie Apted, “and I noticed he was getting uptight while he was learning to hit the ball. So I went up to him and said, ‘Close your eyes and just follow your breath. Can you feel it? Just watch it go in and out. Now open your eyes and hit the ball.’ And he did it! This isn’t some weird religion—you’re not going to end up with a dot on your forehead. It just works.”
Nick Street's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. He is also an ordained Soto Zen priest in the lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi.
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