Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [86]
Davidson could have predicted the results, but it was nice to have hard evidence: to wit, the human brain can be molded and changed. It is plastic. The students’ brains shifted slightly between the times they were resting and the times they were engaging in compassionate meditation. But when the monks viewed the photographs, the parts of the brain associated with empathy and mother’s love lit up like Times Square. Ditto for the area of the brain involving planned movement: their brains were saying, Hey! Get up—do something! Moreover, their brains confirmed what the monks already knew. They were happy monks: the left prefrontal area was a cauldron of activity, to a degree never seen from pure mental activity.
More intriguing, to me at least, was a certain kind of brain rhythm called the gamma rhythm, which is extremely fast and associated with alertness and attention. The monks’ brains were flooded with gamma waves, not in one area, but all over, and this synchronized or knit together disparate brain circuits. This produced a rare state: one writer describes it as an “ah-ha” moment10—when your brain brings together the sound, the look, the feel, the memory of an object, and then . . . Aha! (That voice, that face—Oh! That’s Hugh Grant on the television, or, The smell, the color—Oh! There are burgers on the grill. I’m hungry.) While ordinary mortals enjoy that moment of recognition (synchrony) for a few milliseconds, Davidson said these monks were able to sustain it for more than five minutes.
In other words, Davidson, like Newberg, found neurological fingerprints in his monks when they were meditating. And like Newberg, he also found a permanent neurological fingerprint among his spiritual virtuosos. When the monks were resting, their brains still resided in the hyperalert, synchronized, happy zone—just less intensely, as if the volume had been turned down. This strongly suggests that meditation had permanently altered their brains. In essence, Davidson’s gamma rhythm may be a fingerprint of the meditative experience, an indelible mark that something strange and wonderful has happened.
Little League Meditators
Davidson’s research indicated that well-trained “spiritual” brains operate differently from run-of-the-mill brains, but he also suspected that with enough exercise, any normal brain can scale unimagined spiritual and neurological heights. Fine. No doubt many people would like to climb Mount Everest, but who has a year to spend in preparation, acclimating to the altitude and developing the calf muscles to carry a hundred-pound pack? Who can afford to devote 10,000 hours to meditation just to alter the brain circuitry in their head?
But even as he put meditative Olympians through their paces, Davidson and others were looking toward mere mortals with jobs and kids. They suspected that with only a little training, ordinary people could also remold their brains and their outlook on life.
The employees at Promega Corporation, a biotechnology company outside of Madison, worked long hours under stressful conditions. They were typical people working in the high-tech world, and perfect subjects to test the hypothesis that a little mindfulness can change your life. And that is how twenty-five employees at Promega—scientists, laboratory technicians, marketers and managers—learned to meditate.
Every week, Jon Kabat-Zinn traveled from Boston to Madison, carrying a boom box, a set of meditation tapes, and his Tibetan chimes.11 Kabat-Zinn pioneered mindfulness training from his post at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Once a week, for two and a half hours, the employees sat on the floor, practicing “mindfulness.” They were also expected to practice the meditation technique on their own for forty-five minutes a day. They