|
Q:
What do you consider to be significant with regard to the
latest discoveries about the brain?
For one, we know a
lot more about what happens when people are upset – how we
get emotionally hijacked by our upsets. A part of the brain
called the amygdala developed as an alarm bell; it’s looking
for negative information. That was very useful when we evolved
– paying attention to avoid lethal threats – but we now
know that the amygdala tends to overreact.
When people are stressed, the hormone cortisol is
released, which sensitizes the amygdala, and so it makes that
alarm bell even louder. This undermines another part of the
brain called the hippocampus, which both forms new memories
and puts the brakes on the amygdala. So chronic stress has
this really nasty one-two punch: one, it jacks up the alarm
bell, and two, it weakens the brakes on the alarm.
Q:
Okay, there’s a part of my brain that’s biased toward
negativity. So if I’m being paranoid for no reason, how can
I work with my brain to shift toward a more balanced view?
I’ll mention two
methods in summary. First, research has shown that when you
put words to your feelings, when you just label them, that
does two things. One, it stimulates activity in what’s
called the prefrontal cortex – the very front part of your
brain – and second, it lowers activity in the amygdala alarm
circuit. The simple act of naming to yourself what you’re
feeling as you’re feeling it helps to dampen this
overreaction.
The other method is based on science’s new
understanding of how memory is actually formed. The brain is
so fast and it has so many neurons that it can afford to
rebuild a memory from scratch each time it brings it up. We
can use this knowledge in a very practical way. When something
painful is in awareness, if you also bring to mind positive
information – especially positive feelings that are really
felt and intense – you gradually infuse that negative
experience with positive associations when it goes back into
storage. And so the next time it comes up, it’ll bring a
little bit of that positive tinge with it. It won’t change
overnight; you need to stick with it. But over time, you can
gradually help yourself from the inside out to shift your
interior landscape.
Q: What have we learned about the brains
of those who meditate?
Well, the studies are in their infancy, but basically
the more you meditate, the better the effect. One of the major
findings is that meditation thickens gray matter. You want
more gray matter because that means more connections between
neurons – which increases your functionality and performance
in that part of your brain. When you meditate you stimulate
and therefore strengthen the part of your brain that deals
with increasing positive emotions and regulating negative
emotions. This illustrates the general point that by using
your mind in a targeted way, you can build up the circuits
that you want to build up, and you can control the circuits
you want to control. Science is beginning to identify those
targets; it’s not perfect yet, but already there’s a lot
of promise here.
-- Sounds True interview with Rick Hanson, author of The Enlightened Brain
|
