Although the scientific study of meditation goes back a good 40 years and includes thousands of papers, most research has focused on apparent health benefits and psychological effects, and only in the past decade has the underlying neurobiology come under close scrutiny. But recent progress in this area has been rapid, according to psychiatrist-researcher Charles Raison of University of Arizona.
The people who had been trained in “mindful attention”— a basic meditation technique that involves mental focus—showed reduced activation in the amygdala, a region associated with emotional regulation, while viewing all the images. This is consistent, Desbordes says, with reports of less emotional reactivity and greater stability in meditators, which may account for some of its stress-relieving effects.
In participants who whose meditation emphasized cultivating compassion, their amygdala response dropped in response to positive images, but rose when viewing people in pain, sorrow, or other distress. The implications are unclear: Amygdala activation is often linked to anxiety and other negative emotions, but in this group, Desbordes notes, the altered response was associated with reduced depression scores.
More broadly, meditation is already an accepted form of treatment—for stress-linked and psychiatric disorders, pain, and substance problems—and a better understanding of its underlying neurobiology might refine its use, perhaps helping doctors tailor specific techniques to individuals in a kind of “personalized medicine” approach, says Charles Raison.
Beyond that, “there’s a deeper interest: using meditation as a probe to explicate basic biological and psychosocial processes,” he says. By studying veteran practitioners who can reliably report on their mental states, “we might begin to understand, from a scientific point of view, the underlying mechanics of consciousness.”
