Meditation is in the news a lot, especially with so much exciting research being conducted on the effects of meditation on the brain.
I recently read one such interesting study by Virginia Tech’s Read Montague, PhD in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Dr. Montague et al. looked at the differences in decision making between Buddhist meditators and non-meditators, specifically at brain activity during decision making.
The researchers took functional MRIs while the 26 Buddhist meditators and 40 control participants played the Ultimatum game.
During this game, one player divides up a sum of money and the second player can either accept or reject the offer, which then ends the round.
The point is to see how someone reacts when they are given an offer they might perceive as “unfair.” It’s a trick question in a way however, because respondent gets nothing if they refuse the “unfair” offer.
In previous studies using this game, the anterior insula (associated with disgust and with determining social norm betrayal) was activated when offered an unfair division. In fact, the strength of this activity predicted whether the offer would be rejected.
In this study, a similar result was again found in the control participants. These participants accepted an unfair offer only ¼ of the time.
In the Buddhist meditators, however, the anterior insula showed no real activation during unfair offers. Interestingly, the meditators were willing to accept an “unfair” offer in more than ½ of the trials.
This could indicate that the meditators did not react with negative emotions with unfair offers. They instead drew upon the posterior insula, a part of the brain associated with interoception and attention to the present moment, when making their decision.
So what does this have to do with improved decision making?
Basically, the meditators stripped the negative emotion from the decision-making process, leaving what might be considered a more rational way of making decisions.
I bet that some of you are thinking: these meditators are suckers.
Perhaps, but think of it this way.
While many of us would disdainfully dismiss an offer of $10 that we felt was unfair, and thus end up with nothing, they took the “unfair” label off the offer and ended up with $10.
Who came out ahead in this scenario: the person with $10 who is no longer thinking about the incident or the person with nothing who is still righteously stewing about the unfairness of the offer?
Now who is the sucker?
There is a lot that we can offer our patients in the way of improved brain functioning, when we get them to see the possibilities that meditation can provide.
Check out our courses on mindfulness to learn more.
Has research like this convinced any of your “hard-sell” patients to try mindfulness meditation or perhaps to stick with a mindfulness regimen? Please leave a comment below.
Great ingsthi. Relieved I’m on the same side as you.
Strange reactions above, lacking insight, or so it seems to me in buddhist meditation.
And with western arrogance, or male arrogance assuming a reply is legitimate. Buddhist medidators focus on forgiveness and compassion, forgiving even their torturers in Chinese prisons, even high ranking tibetan lama’s.
Thus to me it seems the offering of an unfair deal remains totally with the one dividing the sum of money, having nothing to do with the meditator, leaving him or her free to either accept or decline without any emotional consequence of either. The accepting may even not be for gain, but to thank the one sharing for sharing. A total different focus. No sense of entitlement that most people suffer from in this world. Having learned to walk the world with a begging bowl, what is given is what you are entitled to and thus grateful for.
Another related angle on this is the implicit assumption in the editorial that damping down our emotional reaction to an unfair offer makes our decision process better, “more rational” as it were. This seems like an archaic way to think of decision making to me.
For example we see dramatically from Damasio’s popular writings about his work with patients that deprived of their emotional signals, their decision making process degrades rather than improves. Good decision making is a complex stew of pattern recognition, subtle signals, mental simulation, and also some varying amount of interpretation through deliberate reflection and metacognitive skills … as well as formal methods that help compensate for our known biases and weaknesses. Only the latter, the formal methods, really directly represent what we typically call “rational” methods as opposed to “non-rational” alternatives, and they are a relatively small (although sometimes critically important) part of expert decision making.
So I also question the hasty assumption that evidence of self-regulation of emotional reaction equates to improve decision making. It is an important ability to have available for some situations. Applied in the wrong way to the wrong situations, it is a distinct negative factor in decision making.
We’re left with the question of whether the meditators are applying the right abilities in the right situations, rather than just whether they tend to dampen down their negative social judgments in the Ultimatum game.
There’s a lot of leeway for interpretation from what I can see here. What I can’t seem to tell from the data provided above is whether the meditators for example didn’t detect and respond to unfair offers, which would mean they lack important social intelligence that we need to navigate human interactions, or whether they perhaps recognized them and regulated their own decision making so they didn’t react to them.
The latter could well reflect an enhanced kind of decision making through self-reflective ability, at least under many kinds of conditions. That’s closer to the way the editorial here seems to interpret this, but I don’t see a way to distinguish these interpretations from the findings given.
Without those kinds of details, we don’t know if this data is showing us evidence that meditation facilitates reflective thinking in some ways, or evidence that meditation dampens down our intelligence in some ways by promoting a particular kind of tradeoff in neural activity.
Or could it be that both are true?
I’ve found in the past that when researchers go to look for evidence for benefits of something like meditation they often tend to miss the tradeoffs involved and selectively interpret the results in terms of only the perceived positives that turn up. That’s where the followup commentaries by peers and critics often lend new light.
Thanks for shangri. Always good to find a real expert.
Sayalay Susila was trained at the same masontery in Burma where my step son was a fully ordained Buddhist monk. It is a world famous and revered meditation center. The practice in that location is remarkable and very much in accordance with the descriptions in the earliest Buddhist canon. I have had the privilege of hearing Dhamma talks and meditating with Sayalay Susila twice. She is highly realized. This retreat is a remarkable opportunity.
Meditation is very interesting. I think its success is tied to the process rather than the religious content. For me there are two basic factors which are, relaxed deep breathing and a ability to stay in the the “here and now” while lightly or deeply perceiving and observing “pop ups” (thoughts and attitudes etc) This I think is referred to as non-attachment.
At some point, I will need to discipline my self into regular practice. For now I begin to meditate every time when the ringing in my ears (tinnitus) occurs or in particular activities like walking.
These are such important findings for impulse control and quality of life issues. When you are aware that feelings change, that the brain has a negativity bias, what is the point of all the suffering we bring upon ourselves and others?
I would like to know how early an age this type of work can be effective? As a school psychologist with elementary and middle school age kids, I’ve seen countless applications for meditative interventions. Neuroplasticity supports the importance of starting mindfulness work as early as human development makes it feasible.
Dear Ruth,
In 1973 I went to the School of Economic Science, for studies meditation, contemplation, reflection, philosophy, languages as Sanskrita, studies of the Bhagavad Gita, Bible, physical work, yoga, healthy food. etc.
I was in 1982, 1985 in California to join conferences of the Religious Science in Monterey for the study Science of Mind of Ernest Holmes. I was intrested in studies of the Gnosis.
When I started with this I realy got the label of being strange, mad, weird etc. by the people as my family, neighbours, friends. It was out of the box.
I am glad, happy that now meditation is common, it is the bridge to a complete other world, thinking, living.
I studied the chemie of the essential oils in 2003, I received from a scientist in Amsterdam a program for students on my pc to work on my homework to get a glimp of this world. Essential oils are powerful. Also in that time it was weird to do that.
I am happy that meditation, yoga, using essential oils in wellness, healthy food are normal now.
Greetings,
Joke Sturk
You get a lot of respect from me for writing these helpful aresclti.
It never occured to me that Buddhist monks had so much in common with standard politicians.