Scientific American‘s Mind & Brain website has a discussion of a recent study of meditation, Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate. The original research article that this piece is discussing, ‘Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise’ by Antoine Lutz, Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Tom Johnstone, and Richard J. Davidson, is available on-line at the Public Library of Science (here).
The research team investigated the activity of the insula and anterior cingulate cortices, areas implicated in empathetic reactions to others’ suffering, when people voluntarily sought to feel compassion. In other words, the research team looked at whether a set of brain areas which are active when people see other people suffering and feel empathy might be intentionally activated in situations where subjects imagined compassion; could will or conscious thought be used to summon up brain activity that looks like a reaction to suffering that is almost automatic in most people? (Lots of caveats here, but you get the gist.)
In particular, the team was looking at whether compassion meditation might make people more likely to have strong reactions to hearing the signals of another person’s distress; from the abstract, ‘Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training.’ Specifically, the research team compared novice meditators to ’16 long-term Buddhist meditators, whom we classified as experts’: ‘Experts had previously completed from 10,000 to 50,000 hours of meditative training in a variety of practices, including compassion meditation, in similar Tibetan traditions (Nyingmapa and Kagyupa).’
