Study of Buddhist monks finds that meditation changes brain activity

If you’ve ever thought about it Practice meditationYou may think that you should relax, breathe, and empty your mind of distracting thoughts. Beginners tend to think of meditation as the brain at rest, but a new international study finds that this ancient practice is quite the opposite: meditation is a state of heightened brain activity that profoundly changes brain dynamics.

Researchers from the University of Montreal and the Italian National Research Council recruited 12 monks from the Thai forest tradition at Santachitarama, a Buddhist monastery outside Rome. In a laboratory in Chieti Pescara, scientists have analyzed the brain activity of meditation practitioners using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology capable of recording the brain’s electrical signals with great precision.

The study focused on two classic forms of meditation: Samatha, a technique that focuses on sustained attention to a specific goal, often steady breathing, with the goal of steadying the mind and reaching a deep state of calm and concentration, and Vipassana, which relies on balanced observation of sensations, thoughts and emotions as they arise in order to develop mental clarity and a deeper understanding of experience.

“With Samatha, you can narrow your field of attention, somewhat like narrowing the beam of a lamp; with Vipassana, on the contrary, you can broaden the beam,” explains Karim Gerbi, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and one of the study’s co-authors. “Both practices activate attentional mechanisms. While Vipassana is more challenging for beginners, in mindfulness programs, the two techniques are often practiced alternately.”

The researchers recorded multiple indicators of brain dynamics, including neural oscillations, measures of signal complexity, and parameters related to so-called “criticality,” a concept borrowed from statistical physics that has been applied to neuroscience for 20 years. Criticality describes systems that operate efficiently on the border between order and chaos, and in neuroscience it is the ideal state for information processing in a healthy brain.

“A brain that lacks plasticity adapts poorly, while too much chaos can lead to dysfunction, as in epilepsy,” Gerbe explained in his article. press release. “At the critical point, neural networks are stable enough to transmit information reliably, but flexible enough to quickly adapt to new situations. This balance optimizes the brain’s ability to process, learn, and respond.”

During the experiment, the monks’ brain activity was recorded by a high-resolution MEG system as they alternated from one type of meditation to another with short periods of rest in between. The data was then processed using advanced signal analysis and machine learning tools to extract various indices of neural complexity and dynamics.

Achieve balance

results published In the Journal of the Neuroscience of Consciousness it was shown that both forms of meditation increase the complexity of brain signals compared to the brain in a resting state. This result indicates that during meditation the brain not only calms down, but enters a dynamic, information-rich state. At the same time, researchers observed widespread decreases in some parameters associated with the global organization of neural activity.

One of the most striking results in the criticality deviation factor analysis showed a clear distinction between Samatha and Vipassana. This suggests that although both practices increase brain complexity, they do so through different dynamic configurations, consistent with their subjective experiences. In other words, vipassana brings the practitioner closer to the balance between stability and flexibility, while samatha produces a somewhat more stable and focused state. According to researchers, the closer the brain is to this critical state of balance, the more responsive and efficient its work is. This is reflected, for example, in an increased ability to switch tasks or store information.