Catherine Kerr is a scientist at Brown University who is interested in understanding the mechanisms of attention.
March 01, 2015—One of Buddhism’s core principles is that careful attention to the body can help the mind, especially in coping with difficult emotions and thoughts.
Until a few decades ago, it was a concept that lived solely in the domain of religion and spirituality. But Catherine Kerr, an assistant professor medicine at Brown University says, “it’s actually a really powerful scientific hypothesis.” And, she adds, it’s one that wouldn’t have occurred to anyone sitting in a Western scientific lab on their own.
For a long time, Western psychology focused on talk therapy as a way to work through unhappiness. But more recently, an eight week course called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has been bringing the mind-body connection to the attention of Western scientists like Kerr.
In MBSR, participants learn to pay attention to their breath, and to body sensations. It’s a secular version of Buddhist meditation. Popular in medical settings to help patients who suffer from pain and anxiety, the standardized course has made it possible to collect a lot of data on results. What interested Kerr is that many people report an increase in well being. They feel better about themselves and their lives. In addition, it helps prevent relapses in people prone to depression.
Kerr wanted to know: how did this work? How did meditating help people deal better with distress? And what exactly is going on in the brain?
The brain has a big job, Kerr explains. To keep us focused and sane, it must decide which signals are most important of the many that bombard us constantly. She compares the brain to a mixing board at a big rock concert where an engineer adjusts the knobs to turn sounds up or down. The brain has to decide, which signals should it pay attention to? Incoming visual stimuli, sounds, tastes, touch, smells, or feelings? Without discretion, we would likely be very confused.
Important for Kerr was also the question of what signals the brain should ignore. For people at risk for depression, disturbing thoughts or events can trigger a relapse. The brain is more easily overtaken by upset. Emotions such as sadness, guilt, shame — all the hard ones — can grab the mind’s attention, and it can be a struggle to let go.
Kerr knew MBSR training helped increase resilience. She wanted to understand the mechanism. How could tuning into the body help turn down the volume on negative thoughts?
She and her team enrolled participants in an eight-week MBSR course; another group who received no training acted as a controls. To measure brain activity, participants were put inside a special chamber called a magnetoencephalogram (MEG) that measures faint changes in the brain’s electrical activity.
Researchers first tapped the left middle finger to see where it registered in the cortex, the outermost part of the brain. Then, as they continued to watch this area, they asked participants to notice whether they were being touched on the finger or the foot. As participants prepared for the next signal, electrical activity in the area mapped to the finger got quieter. It’s as if the brain was gearing up to focus on whatever came next.
Significantly, this happened more quickly and stronger in people who had received the MBSR training. Kerr says the results suggest that MBSR’s tools increase the flexibility of the mind.
As far as depression goes, she believes as the brain becomes more nimble, the mind is less readily hijacked by depressive thoughts. Tuning into the body helps the brain to let go of, or pay less attention to, unwanted thoughts. In 2013, she and her team published a review article that appeared in the journal, Frontiers of Human Neuroscience.
For someone who’s depressed, hearing about the brain’s lack of flexibility could just be more depressing news. But if the research from Kerr’s laboratory holds up, meditation may be just the antidote to help.
-Judy Silber
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