World-renowned scientist delves into happiness
Published: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 7:37 PM CDT
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Out Loud lecture Thursday, 7 p.m., at the Palm
By Susan Viebrock
A perfect bump run on Mammoth? For many locals, that’s a piece of cake.
Serves like Roger Federer’s, the best tennis player in the world? Maybe not. But hitting aces on occasion is well within in the realm of possibility for athletes who practice regularly.
Being able to play violin like Maria Bachman of Trio Solisti is rare. But many learn to play the violin and other musical instruments quite well for their personal pleasure.
Now imagine happiness as a trainable skill that can be practiced like skiing, tennis or playing a violin, and that learning to practice happiness can have a huge impact on general health.
Think the idea sounds like New Age hooey?
On Thursday, professor Richard Davidson of the Brain Imaging Laboratory, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, is speaking Out Loud on the subject “Be Happy like A Monk.”
Davidson specializes in rigorous understanding of the brain science of happiness to better understand the mind/body relationship. And he has discovered that happiness may not just just plop into the laps of people.
“We have learned that happiness can be conceptualized as a skill, not fundamentally different from learning to play the violin or learning to play golf,” said Davidson. “The big point of my talk is that the brain can be reprogrammed for attributes like happiness, kindness and compassion, a fact which has far-reaching consequences.”
Time magazine recently named Davidson as one of the world’s 100 most influential thinkers. For years Davidson has been searching for the source of happiness, on occasion using Buddhist monks in his lab as a model group.
Findings from Davidson’s lab clearly suggest that a sense of well-being should not be considered as the simple absence of disease or depression, but rather as the presence of a distinct profile of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation characterized by a pattern of unique neurobiological substrates. Moreover, these patterns of brain function appear to influence peripheral biology in ways that may be consequential for health.
Cortisol is a stress hormone produced by the adrenal cortex. It is triggered whenever we feel threatened, but prolonged exposure can increase blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and suppress the immune system.
“We have found that individuals who show very effective regulation of negative emotions also show a more adaptive pattern of cortisol release,” explained Davidson.
Cortisol is naturally higher in the morning and reaches a low point just before bedtime. According to Davidson’s findings, individuals who show the highest levels of well-being and most effective emotion regulation are those who also show the lowest levels of cortisol at night. The ability to automatically regulate this stress hormone may play a critical role in mediating the health consequences associated with high degrees of happiness.
Davidson’s research also shows that positive and negative emotions produce activity in very different paths of the brains. It turns out that one place the blue bird of happiness likes to roost is the left prefrontal cortex.
Research reveals that people experiencing anxiety, anger or depression show the most brain activity in the right prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead. Those experiencing positive outward-reaching emotions show more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. What’s more, people seem to be predisposed genetically and through their experiences towards being either more left-brained or right-brained, that is, more cheerful or sad.
After the Dalai Lama’s visit to his lab in 2001, Davidson ratcheted up his studies on the impact of meditation on the brain and body.
Mindfulness meditation is based on the practices of the Tibetan lamas, but stripped of religious content. The discipline involves learning to monitor sensations and thoughts while sitting quietly or during activities like yoga, and to drop any thoughts that could lead to a negative mood.
“We discovered that when expert practitioners meditated — and our subjects had between 12,000 — 62,000 hours of meditation each over the course of their lives — there were major, observable changes in the brain, some quite unusual. We saw the production of certain rhythms over extended periods of time, minutes, even hours. In normal individuals, these patterns occur very episodically and last only seconds. What we observed is the brain getting reorganized. We are using these findings to identify long-term end points achievable through intense practice.”
Recent findings at Davidson’s lab indicate that even among individuals just learning meditation, the immune response to a flu shot for example is significantly enhanced after just eight weeks of training.
Is meditation the only tool or just the best tool in the box for altering emotions that lead to a better understanding of how our brain works?
“There are many other ways to change the brain, but we know that meditation is a family of procedures that yields virtuous change: we now know that we can learn to cultivate compassion, kindness, altruism, and cooperation, largely through meditation, which produces change in specific brain surfaces,” Davidson said.
In a related study at the University of California, Davis, a researcher observed that monks use a larger portion of their brains when meditating in the same way practiced pianists exhibit greater brain activity than individuals who have been taught only to play scales.
Today there are special programs that teach meditation to corporate CEOs.
“I think we will see penetration of these and related practices in all levels of society as the science continues to validate our premises. As larger and larger swaths of humanity engage in disciplines like meditation, the ramifications for our culture and the world are staggering,” said Davidson.
Could sitting in lotus position and chanting “om” lead to world peace? What about those of us who don’t bend easily?
Related studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina suggest that if you’re feeling unhappy, simply acting as if you are happy and extroverted can make it so.
So, don’t worry, be happy - and attend Dr. Davidson’s free talk.
The program runs from 7-8:30 p.m.
For more information, call the Ah Haa School, 728-3886.
