How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [13]
Next, I described the meditation in detail and played him a video that demonstrated the technique. I asked him to practice it by following along with the person on the video, and then we took the second scan so we could see what was happening in his “untrained” brain during the meditation. We do this by injecting a radioactive tracer through an intravenous tube in his arm during the last few minutes of the meditation. The tracer marks the cerebral blood flow activity by leaving a temporary residue in the brain. Then, when the meditation is complete, we can casually walk down to the room where we take the scans. The cameras would pick up the activity that was deposited during the peak moment of the meditation.
I sent him home with the CD so that he could practice every day, and we called him every two weeks to monitor his progress and answer any questions he might have. Each time we called, he replied that he was doing it faithfully and that everything was going well. Eight weeks later he returned to our lab for further testing and brain scans.
“I really enjoyed it!” he said. “It was great, and I plan to keep doing it.” We got a similar response from our other subjects, who, like Gus, were complaining of memory problems. They too were everyday people who had never done any substantial meditation in their lives. Personally, I was amazed, yet pleased, at their willingness and eagerness to practice regularly. Obviously, they wanted to gain the maximum effect, and they knew we would be tracking them in order to assess the long-term improvements in cognition.
Of course, the big question was: Did it work? Would we find any significant changes in the brain, and would there be any improvement of memory? Our other studies had shown how the brain changes during intense meditation and prayer, but our prior subjects had at least ten years of intense daily practice lasting forty-five minutes or longer. Our memory patients would have only eight weeks of a twelve-minute practice. That's a big difference, and so our study would help identify how long it might actually take to make significant neurological changes. Such information might also help identify the degree of neuro-plasticity that remains when we enter the final decades of life.
We know that if you do cardiovascular exercise, you enhance your physical and emotional health, but there is only a small body of evidence supporting the notion that meditation can enhance your cognitive health. Then there's the problem of complexity. The brain has a hundred billion neurons that connect to others in trillions upon trillions of ways, and no two people have the exact same configuration of connections. As things currently stand in the field of neuroscience, we only have a vague map of a small percentage of the neural circuits that control our emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. Still, the slowly accumulating evidence points to the very real possibility that meditation is an excellent exercise for maintaining a healthy brain.
PROTECTING AND STRENGTHENING YOUR AGING BRAIN
Returning to Gus: Did he alter the normal function of his brain after eight weeks of practice? Yes, he did! I took our second resting scan, and we discovered that there was a significant increase of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area heavily involved in helping an individual maintain a clear, focused attention upon a task. The anterior cingulate was also activated, a structure that is involved with emotional regulation, learning, and memory,10 and is particularly vulnerable to the aging process.11 The anterior cingulate plays a major role in lowering anxiety and irritability, and also enhances social awareness, a feature that tends to deteriorate with age. Throughout this book, we will often return to the importance of this structure in the brain and the ways in which it is stimulated by a variety of meditative practices.
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