Study on meditation's effect on battle stress

Below is an interesting article from the Milwaukee Sentinel about a study starting up on whether meditation can help post traumatic stress disorder in war veterans.

In the seven years since he finished his stint in the U.S. Navy, Todd Dennis has rarely slept well.

Though never diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, he's struggled with some of the symptoms, including insomnia and feelings of anger.

Dennis says those symptoms have eased since February, when he began practicing yoga and meditation techniques he learned through the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.

Beginning this fall, the center will apply the tools of neuroscience - including brain imaging - in studies to determine what if any effect such contemplative practices have on veterans with symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

"We'll be looking at whether they make an impact in their lives, their overall function, their sense of well-being," said Emma Seppala, a psychologist and research associate, who will oversee the research, some of the first of its kind.

Researchers hope to develop psychological profiles and a kind of tool kit that help them target contemplative practices in ways that are most effective.

The center's research and its vision will be on display this weekend when it hosts events, most of them private for researchers, collaborators, donors and other supporters.

The only public event, though all tickets have been claimed, will be an unscripted conversation between center founder and director Richard Davidson and the 14th Dalai Lama on the subject of "Investigating Healthy Minds."

It was a challenge by the Tibetan spiritual leader to Davidson during a 1992 meeting in India that gave rise to the center, according to Davidson. In that meeting, he says, the Buddhist monk called on him to apply the tools of science used to study such things as depression, anxiety and fear to instead study such traits as happiness, kindness and compassion.

"That was a very powerful meeting for me, and one that altered the course of my life and career," said Davidson, a psychologist and neuroscientist who also heads the university's Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, and Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience.

Some of the research got under way even before the center's founding in 2008. In 1999, Davidson brought advanced meditation practitioners, many of them monks from Asia, to Madison to study how the long-term practice of meditation affects the mind. Among the findings, he said, was the presence of unusually high amplitudes of gamma oscillations, brain rhythms associated with such things as focused attention, learning and memory.

The center's work has drawn significant support, including a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

In addition to its study on veterans, it is developing programs for school-age children and individuals transitioning from prison back into society. The student project launches in the fall with a pilot program for fifth-graders in Madison public schools.

"We're interested in determining if simple practices can be brought into the schools to improve students' concentration and skill in emotion regulation . . . both of which are necessary for kids to be successful," said Davidson.

Seppala will be posing the same questions in her work with veterans. The findings, she said, could be used to develop programs to treat thousands of vets who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

"Twenty percent of the 2 million veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD, and it's believed the high suicide rate among veterans may be attributed to that," she said.

The three-year study will involve 90 veterans in three groups, two of which will participate in either mindfulness meditation or yoga breathing exercises. Those in the third group will continue with their current courses of treatment.

There is, at least, anecdotal evidence that contemplative practices are beneficial for veterans. Both Navy veteran Dennis and Jennifer Kannel, who spent a year in Iraq with the Wisconsin Army National Guard, said the breathing exercises and meditation practices improved their sleep and sense of well-being.

"That's one of the big ones vets say, whether they have PTSD or not, that it helps promote sleep," said Andrew Hendrickson, who leads a yoga-based relaxation series for returning combat troops at the Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee.

"They say it helps them feel at ease, helps them deal with physical pain - all the things you would expect from a mind-body technique.

Hendrickson asks vets in his program to rate their level of distress, on a scale of zero to 100, before and after participating.

"I frequently get people who drop from 80 to 20 or 10," said Hendrickson, who used yoga to sleep at night while working at a combat hospital in Afghanistan. "One guy with severe depression went from 60 to zero."

For more information on the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds go to www.investigatinghealthyminds.org.

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Meditation improves brain function

This story appeared in the "Epoch Times." It reports on a scientific study that showed that a person who meditates for four days at 20 minutes per session had marked improvement in their understanding and ability to process information.

We have long believed that a cup of coffee every morning can make us more awake, yet a newly published study suggests that brief meditation can prepare us for the day just the same.

In past research, neuroimaging technology has shown that meditation techniques can promote significant changes in brain areas associated with concentration, but it was thought that the effect required extensive training to achieve.

However, according to the new research, the benefits may be achievable with much less effort. It suggests that the mind may be more easily trained to focus than we previously believed.

Psychologists found that participants who meditated for 20 minutes a day for four days showed an evident improvement in their critical cognition skills and performed significantly better in cognitive tests than a control group.

“In the behavioral test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training,” said Dr. Fadel Zeidan in a press release. Zeidan is a post-doctoral researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and a former doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where the research was conducted.

“Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising,” Zeidan noted. “It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation.”

The study is published in the April 2 issue of Consciousness and Cognition.

The experiment involved 63 student volunteers. Participants were divided into two groups, one of which received the meditation training while the other group listened to a book (J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit) being read aloud for equivalent periods of time.

Before and after the meditation and reading sessions, the participants were subjected to a broad battery of behavioral tests assessing mood, memory, visual attention, attention processing, and vigilance.

Both groups performed almost equally on all measures at the beginning of the experiment. Both groups also improved at the end of the experiment in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in cognitive measures. The meditation group scored as much as 10 times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus while holding other information in mind.

“The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed,” Zeidan said. “In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better.”

“Further study is warranted,” he stressed, noting that brain imaging studies would be helpful in confirming the brain changes that the behavioral tests seem to indicate. “But this seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing–most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance–within a week’s time,” he said.

Zeidan noted that brief meditation only prepares the mind for activity, but it’s not necessarily permanent. Therefore, in order to have long-lasting effect, regular meditations need to be performed.