Happiness Through Meditative Mind Control

This article follows my earlier articles: Can Happiness Be Synthesized? and Push-button Happiness.

Matthieu Ricard, the biochemist-turned-Buddhist monk has authored several books, including the recent “Happiness: A Guide To Developing Life’s Most Important Skill”.

Source: Wikimedia

Matthieu Ricard has participated both as a research collaborator and as a subject. On happiness tests performed on him, he scored -0.45 on a scale where +0.3 indicated depression and -0.3 denoted great happiness. This marks him as “The Happiest Man in the World”.

You can hear Ricard speak about happiness.

When a person meditates, the breathing is suspended for 10-60 seconds, comes to a stage where it is neither active nor passive, and there is a subtle and slow breathing called apneustic breathing. This type of breathing is different from normal breathing and stimulates different respiratory drive centers in the brain stem. The mind is in a state of self- aware consciousness that is distinct from waking, sleeping, or dreaming.

Meditation involves looking inward and identifying with the inner sentient being that is a witness to all the emotions and thoughts occurring inside. The meditators observe the mental processes as a third person, but don’t react to it. In addition to practicing emotional control through mindfulness meditation, Tibetan meditators calm the mind by envisioning complex mental images, including Buddhist deities and symbolic geometric designs.

The physiological reaction in a meditator is mediated by the autonomic nervous system. The “parasympathetic response” induced by meditation is different from the “fight or flight” reaction that we are all familiar with. Here, the heart rate slows down, the muscles relax, the level of stress hormones go down and the brain displays alpha brain wave activity. Meditation rejuvenates the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the pineal and other endocrine glands. Experienced meditators have thicker parts of cortex that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

Richard Davidson, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found in experiments similar to Matthieu Ricard that some meditators are able to control their emotional response to startling events like a sudden explosive burst. They could control the normal instinctive response and remain totally immobile.

In a scientific study, the researchers at the University of Wisconsin told experienced Tibetan monks to meditate and focus on compassion. The functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) on the meditating monks found increased brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with happiness, positive thoughts and emotions. The monks’ brains radiated high frequency activity waves called gamma waves the leading indicator of higher brain function and activity.

For twenty years, neuroscience believed that the brain contains all the neurons at birth and their number is not altered by experiences. Now, researchers believe that the brain is continually evolving based on our experience and can make new neurons throughout life, a process referred to as neuroplasticity. This implies that attention, compassion and even happiness are a skill that can be cultivated; obsession can be changed into contentment, agitation into peace and hatred into compassion.

The following is a video on Mindful meditation:

Reference:

Tibetan Buddhism and research psychology