Richard J. Davidson, "Speed Compassion"

Richard J. Davidson & Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live -- and How You Can Change Them, 2012, Section: "Speed Compassion," pages 220-224.

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Having established that long-term meditation might produce changes in the brain that support greater compassion ("might" reflects the possibility I mentioned at the start of this chapter that a study like this cannot determine whether the monks' brains were like this as a result of meditation, or whether their unusual brains caused them to devote themselves to the contemplative life). I wanted to see whether  short experience with meditation could do something similar.

In 2007, therefore, we recruited forty-one volunteers for a study that, we told them, would teach them a  technique to improve well-being. We randomly assigned everyone to either a meditation group or a group that would learn something called cognitive reappraisal. Derived from cognitive therapy, cognitive reappraisal is a technique in which -- to oversimplify -- you take a belief that is having harmful effects and ask yourself whether it is really true. For instance, someone who is suffering from depression and believes that she has no skills but that many people do not perform well in certain circumstances; it doesn't reflect poorly on her, she learns to tell herself, but may simply be a consequence of the situation. Moreover, the person would be encouraged not to avoid future situations like the one in which this feeling first arose; that way, she can experience feeling okay in that situation. In therapy, this is accomplished by pointing out errors in thinking that produced these [221] beliefs; the therapist and patient work together to challenge these errors and to minimize subsequent avoidance of the problematic situation. This helps the person differentiate between internal causes and external causes; by attributing fault to the latter rather than the former, studies have shown, cognitive reappraisal can significantly improve well-being among those suffering from depression. Although the technique might sound somewhat simplistic, cognitive reappraisal is one of the most well-validated psychological treatment for depression and anxiety disorders.

The meditation group learned a form of compassion medication. The basic idea is to visualize and contemplate different group of people. You start by visualizing a loved one -- specifically, a loved one at a time in her life when she was suffering. With this image clearly in mind, you next concentrate on the wish that her suffering and, silently repeating a phrase such as "May you be free from suffering; may you experience joy and ease" to help you focus on this task. You also try to notice any visceral sensations that arise during this contemplation,particularly around the heart -- a slowing heartbeat, perhaps, or stronger beating, or warm sensations in the chest area. Finally, you also try to feel the compassion emotionally and not simply think about it cognitively. After doing this for a loved one, you expand your circle of compassion little by little, to yourself, then to someone you recognize but do not really know (the letter carrier, police officer, bus driver ...), then perhaps a neighbor or a person who works in the same building as you but whose life you know little or nothing about, then to a difficult person (someone who pushes your buttons and makes you angry), and finally to all of humankind. Using an online instructional program, this group practiced compassion meditation thirty minutes a day for two weeks.

Participants in the cognitive reappraisal group also began by visualizing the suffering of someone they loved but were told to "reframe" the suffering. Reframing is a technique in which you adopt different beliefs about the causes of your behavior or the circumstances of your life. In this case, you see that the suffering might not be as extreme as other forms of suffering and that it could end up okay, or you focus on the fact that there are huge differences in the magnitude and severity of adversity. They were further taught to not attribute negative things to stable qualities in themselves but to see that suffering can occur as a result of external circumstances. For instance, the reason [222] someone might be unable to find a life partner is not because of anything inherent in himself, but because his work keeps him from getting out and meeting people -- the latter being something we can control and that can change. The cognitive reappraisal group also received their instruction online, also for thirty minutes a day for two weeks.

As usual, before the training began we performed brain scans of all the participants. While a volunteer was lying in the MRI tube, we represented pictures of human suffering, such as a child who had been badly burned or a family in a horrific car crash. We focused on the amygdala, which is known to be involved in feelings of distress. Perhaps counterintuitively, we predicted that after compassion training this region would not be as active in response to images of suffering. The reason is that activity in the amygdala is associated with distress. Feeling distress interferes with the desire to help -- the hallmark of compassion -- because if you are in pain yourself, you have little reserve for others' pain. In addition, we predicted that the prefrontal cortex would become more activated because, as the site of higher-order cognitive functions, it holds within its intricate circuitry the neuronal representation of the goals of compassion training -- to alleviate suffering in others.

At the end of the two weeks of training, we again recorded brain activity with fMRI while the volunteers looked at images of suffering. Those who had undergone training in compassion meditation showed striking changes in brain function, particularly in the amygdala: Participants in the compassion group tended to show less activation there in response to images of suffering after the compassion-meditation training than they did before the training. Might this be a habituation effect, a lab version of the "compassion fatigue" people feel when they see one human tragedy after another? Not according to our control group: In people who underwent training in cognitive appraisal, amygdala activity in response to images of suffering was just as before their training.

This decrease in amygdala activation after compassion training had real-world effects too. After their two weeks of training, we had each participant play an economic decision-making game with live opponents who were in a different building on campus. (In reality, there were no human opponents; they were [223] playing against a computer.We tried to convince them that there were humans on the other end of the Internet connection by pretending to phone a scientist who was supposedly with the opponents and who requested more time for them to read the instructions.) Once all the participants were ready,we explained that the game, we explained that the game has three players: a dictator, a victim (let's call her Jo), and you. Everyone but Jo gets thirty dollars to start. The dictator gives Jo a certain amount of his money. If he gives her very little, perhaps five dollars, the participant can spend some of his own money to make the transaction fairer, perhaps ten dollars. Whatever the participant gives is also taken away from the dictator and given to Jo, who in this example gets twenty dollars plus the original five. the participant has his original thirty dollars minus ten.

You might expect that someone who is not feeling much distress -- as shown by the amygdala activity -- in response to someone else's "suffering" (though, admittedly, Jo's suffering was at the low end of the scale) would not be moved to alleviate that suffering. But the opposite is the case. Participants who had undergone training in compassion meditation, and whose amygdala activity in response to images of suffering and decreased, were much more likely to give Joe some of their earnings. On average, they forked over 38 percent more money than those who had undergone cognitive reappraisal training.

From this, we concluded that compassion meditation produces a trio of changes. First, it decreases personal distress, as reflected in decreased activation of the amygdala. second, it increases activation in regions of the brain associated with goal-directed behavior, as reflected in regions of the brain associated with goal-directed behavior, as reflected in increased activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the goal in this case is to relieve the suffering of the player who gets taken advantage of by another player). Third,it increases the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, ine insula (where representations of the body occur),and the nucleus accumbens (where motivation and reward are processed). rather than becoming depressed by suffering, people who are trained in compassion meditation develop a strong disposition to alleviate suffering and to wish others be happy.

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