How Meditation Training Transforms the Brain, the Individual, and Society at Large

Tania Singer is director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She serves on the board of directors of the Mind & Life Institute and published the book Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama in 2015.

Singer was invited to share the latest insights from the ReSource Project, a large-scale longitudinal study in which she is the principal investigator. The research aims to assess the effects of mental training on subjective well-being, health, brain plasticity, cognitive and emotional functioning, the autonomic nervous system, and behavior.

The study includes more than 300 participants and nine months of mental training composed of three distinct modules. Throughout the project, participants were repeatedly assessed using more than 90 measurements, including behavioral experiments, blood tests for stress hormones, and magnetic resonance imaging of the brain.

The scale and rigor of the ReSource Project are impressive, but what is even more striking are its aims.

Singer's integrative approach seeks to address broad societal questions through the tools of psychology and neuroscience. Can changes in the brain contribute to a more peaceful and democratic world? Could meditation practice help combat economic and environmental crises? If individuals are able to increase their capacity for altruism, could social systems also be transformed for the better?

To begin answering these questions, the ReSource Project tested three distinct training modules based on meditation practices, each focused on developing a particular mental or emotional capacity. Or, as Singer describes it during the conversation, "the cultivation of mind and heart."

One module, called Presence, focuses on the practice of attention and introspective awareness. Anyone familiar with meditation will recognize these exercises: paying attention to one's own breath and engaging in a careful scan of the body.

Another module, called Affect, focused on building compassion and working with difficult emotions. The training included loving-kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition.

The third module, Perspective, focused on metacognitive skills, or "thinking about thinking," and on theory of mind, the capacity to understand that other people may hold beliefs and perspectives different from our own.

Participants trained in all three modules, each lasting three months, but in different sequences. This elegant structure allowed researchers to examine the effects of each training specifically in the same individuals while observing changes over time.

Singer and her team measured cortical thickening, areas in the brain where there were greater amounts of gray matter than before. One of the most intriguing findings came from the Affect module. After three months of meditation-based compassion training, brain images of participants revealed changes in a network associated with socioemotional processing. The pattern of cortical thickening suggested a possible increase in social and emotional capacities.

To observe how these brain changes related to participants' emotional experience, tests were conducted measuring their reactions while watching emotionally disturbing videos. This experiment showed an increase in participants' compassion from pre-training levels, suggesting that not only their brains changed but also how they felt in response to suffering. Tests also showed an increase in altruism, the expression of compassion in real-life situations.

During training, participants learned new skills, and this learning left physical evidence in the structure of their brains. In this case, the skills learned were not about improving memory or responding more quickly to physical stimuli, but about a more open and vulnerable heart.

Moreover, blood tests revealed that these participants had lower levels of cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone, in response to a socially stressful experience. Singer suggested that learning to have compassion and connect with others may have created a kind of "processing time" for social stress in these participants.

This work challenges old ideas about whether people are capable of change. "Classical economic theory has long assumed that human characteristics, called preferences, are fixed and independent of context. The idea was that we are each born a certain way: some are more altruistic, others more selfish," Singer explained. "The belief was that such preferences do not change in an individual."

Singer's pioneering research suggests that not only do these characteristics change, both biologically and behaviorally, but they can be intentionally and specifically cultivated through meditation.

For example, Singer found that the three training modules affected cortical thickness in different brain networks. Presence training led to increased cortical thickness in prefrontal regions, areas related to attention. Affect training led to changes in fronto-insular regions related to socioemotional processing. And Perspective training caused alterations in the inferior frontal and lateral temporal cortices, brain structures related to theory of mind.

These findings align with other research suggesting that compassion is associated with a brain network that does not overlap with those dedicated to metacognition and theory of mind. Similarly, in the ReSource Project, attention training did not alter neural networks related to compassion or compassionate behavior. The underlying brain structures are different and can be cultivated separately.

During the discussion, Michael Sheehy, director of programs at the Mind & Life Institute, noted that meditation does not necessarily have a moral dimension unless it is intentionally applied to moral questions. Inner calm does not always correspond to compassion.

Singer agreed and pointed out that in the ReSource study, training introspective awareness before training emotional or metacognitive capacities seemed to help in the development of those capacities when the time came to train them. Inner calm may make compassion come more easily.

The findings of the ReSource Project, along with its training protocols, could have far-reaching impacts and applications. Singer and the Mind & Life Institute team discussed the powerful effects of the training methodology used in the study. They discussed how mental training protocols could be used to cultivate compassion and appreciation for different perspectives among people in companies, schools, and other institutions.

One of the most effective and innovative practices in the study of compassion and metacognition training was dyadic meditation: two people sitting face to face or connected via a specially developed app. In these meditations, one person shares specific aspects of an experience from their day while the other practices listening deeply. "After this practice, participants felt more connected not only to each other but to other people within the group," Singer said. "Some people, after doing this dynamic for the first time, felt quite moved when they realized that 'I have never really listened to another person. I was just waiting for my turn to speak.'" The dyadic practice seemed particularly related to improvements in stress resilience, which could have implications across a wide range of settings.

During a public conversation and question-and-answer session at the Mind & Life office, Stephen Nachmanovitch commented, "Living within the context of a large society, where someone has deliberately turned the dial of empathy down to an extraordinary degree... providing training for the individual may be helpful, but wouldn't that be putting a band-aid on a truly enormous problem that is systemic and institutional throughout our society? How can we address that?"

Singer replied that she had been thinking about this question for years. "Psychologists are experts in the realm of individual change... but over the last 10 years I have cooperated and dialogued with economists, behavioral economists, and macroeconomists, and they speak largely about agents of change, such as altering the institutional design of a business or institution, the laws, or the entire system," she said. "We have these two worlds: one in which people believe that social change can happen only through changing laws, rules, and institutions, and another in which psychologists think similarly to Gandhi, 'you need to be the change you want to see in the world.' That is, they believe change can happen only by changing yourself as an individual. And I think it is neither one nor the other, but rather that both worlds need to work together in creating this transformation through which internal and external agents of change are combined in a congruent way."

Singer's work also investigates how social cognition and motivation can explain human social interactions and economic decision-making. This research, funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, explores new models of economic decision-making and applies them to global economic problems.

Change, according to Singer, needs to come from the top and the bottom. The best version of social change is a congruence of individual flourishing and institutional transformation. Those who study the mind need to work hand in hand with those who study political and economic organization so that individual changes can have global repercussions.

You can watch the full conversation in this video, though without subtitles, or you can also watch this talk by Tania Singer where she also discusses the project, with subtitles.

Originally published at mindandlife.org