The latest on wearable stress-relief

Over its 15 year history MindBlog has done several reviews of widgets currently on the market that are meant to monitor and relieve stress. Chiu has done a review of three current devices you might have a look at if you have $250-$350 to burn. It seems that most users find mild benefits when trying them, but don't feel a strong urge to continue using them. The online reviews offered by vendors are predictability ecstatic (placebo effects anyone?). There is no peer-reviewed research from large-scale clinical trials of their efficacy yet available. 

The Appolo Neuro is a slightly curved rectangular box on a band that can fit around wrist or ankle and issue "soothing vibrations that speak to your nervous system" to increase heart-rate variability during normal activity and sleep... Hmmmmm. The other widgets are used in sessions that are set aside from daily activities. The Sensate 2 looks like a smooth river rock that is placed on your chest during sessions and "combines vibrations, or “sonic frequencies,” synchronized with specially composed soundtracks to enhance relaxation." The Muse 2 is a meditation headband, which has built-in sensors monitor brain waves using “advanced signal processing” to translate brain waves into sounds of weather. 

I tried similar widgets 5-10 years ago. This time, I don't think I'm gonna go there....from Chin's article:  "most people don’t need wearables or technology to effectively manage stress,... Before investing in a device...why not try well-established, free approaches, such as spending time in nature, exercising, practicing mindfulness and cultivating social interactions.

Evidence for an influence of meditation on immune-related pathways?

I pass on the abstract, below, and also the entire text of a study by Chaix et al.:

Highlights

• We explored the methylome of trained meditators vs untrained controls in PBMCs. 

• No significant basal difference in methylation profiles was observed between groups. 

• Meditators showed 61 Differentially Methylated Sites after a meditation practice day. 

• These DMS were enriched in genes associated with immune cell processes and ageing. 

• Controls showed no significant DMS after a leisure-based control intervention. 

Abstract

The human methylome is dynamically influenced by psychological stress. However, its responsiveness to stress management remains underexplored. Meditation practice has been shown to significantly reduce stress level, among other beneficial neurophysiological outcomes. Here, we evaluated the impact of a day of intensive meditation practice (t2−t1 = 8 h) on the methylome of peripheral blood mononuclear cells in experienced meditators (n = 17). In parallel, we assessed the influence of a day of leisure activities in the same environment on the methylome of matched control subjects with no meditation experience (n = 17). DNA methylation profiles were analyzed using the Illumina 450 K beadchip array. We fitted for each methylation site a linear model for multi-level experiments which adjusts the variation between t1 and t2 for baseline differences. No significant baseline differences in methylation profiles was detected between groups. In the meditation group, we identified 61 differentially methylated sites (DMS) after the intervention. These DMS were enriched in genes mostly associated with immune cell metabolism and ageing and in binding sites for several transcription factors involved in immune response and inflammation, among other functions. In the control group, no significant change in methylation level was observed after the day of leisure activities. These results suggest that a short meditation intervention in trained subjects may rapidly influence the epigenome at sites of potential relevance for immune function and provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the human methylome over short time windows.

These are clearly very initial findings that need followup to determine the relationship between the fast epigenetic changes caused by the daylong meditative and previously reported long lasting effects of the practice. There need to be randomized controlled studies with larger sample sizes, active control groups, long-term follow-ups, etc.

Increasing acceptance of psychotropic drugs reflected by US Election results

Several landmark drug reform measures were passed in the recent election. Four states legalized recreational marijuana, one state decriminalizing natural psychedelics, and Oregon decriminalizing all drugs and legalizing psilocybin psychotherapy. Andrew Sullivan comments on The Psychedelic Election. New York is getting its first psychedelic-medicine center, with the help of a startup called MindMed, which develops hallucinogens to treat mental illness and addiction. Several studies are showing psilocybin to be effective for treatment-resistant depression.

MindBlog's 5,000th post - The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

This was going to be a post on oxytocin research...but I looked at the Blogger counter to see that it will be the 5,000th post done since the start of MindBlog in 2006.  Wow, that's a lot of words.  I've decided to note the occasion by repeating for the second time a post on material I find very fascinating. Here is the 2017 repeat of a 2014 post:

I'm finding, with increasing frequency, that an article about health or psychology in the New York Times that I find interesting has an attached note that it was first published several years earlier. While working on yesterday's MindBlog post I came across a 2014 post I wrote that I think makes some important points about our self-regulation that are worth repeating. So, I'm going to copy what the Times is doing and repeat it today. I'm tempted to edit it, but won't, beyond mentioning that I would considerably tone down my positive reference to brain training games (that I no longer indulge in). Here is the 2014 post:

This is actually a post about mindfulness, in reaction to Dan Hurley's article describing how contemporary applications of the ancient tradition of mindfulness meditation are being engaged in many more contexts than the initial emphasis on chilling out in the 1970s, and being employed for very practical purses such as mental resilience in a war zone. It seems like to me that we are approaching a well defined technology of brain control whose brain basis is understood in some detail. I've done numerous posts on behavioral and brain correlates of mindfulness meditation (enter 'meditation' or 'mindfulness' in MindBlog's search box in the left column). For example, only four weeks of a mindfulness meditation regime emphasizing relaxation of different body parts correlates with increases in white matter (nerve tract) efficiency. Improvements in cognitive performance, working memory, etc. have been claimed. A special issue of The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience discusses issues in the research.

Full time mindfulness might be a bad idea, suppressing the mind wandering that facilitates bursts of creative insight. (During my vision research career, my most original ideas popped up when I was spacing out, once when I was riding a bike along a lakeshore path.) Many physicists and writers reports their best ideas happen when they are disengaged. It also appears that mindfulness may inhibit implicit learning in which habits and skill are acquired without conscious awareness.

Obviously knowing whether we are in an attentional or mind wandering (default, narrative) modes is useful (see here, and here), and this is where the title of this posts comes in. To note and distinguish our mind state is most effectively accomplished with a particular style of alertness or awareness that is functioning very soon (less than 200 milliseconds) after a new thought or sensory perception appears to us. This is a moment of fragility that offers a narrow time window of choice over whether our new brain activity will be either enhanced or diminished in favor of a more desired activity. This is precisely what is happening in mindfulness meditation that instructs a central focus of some sort (breathing, body relaxation, or whatever) to which one returns as soon as one notes that any other thoughts or distractions have popped into awareness. The ability to rapidly notice and attend to thoughts and emotions of these short time scales is enhanced by brain training regimes of the sort offered by BrainHq of positscience.com and others. I have found the exercises on this site, originated by Michael Merznich, to be the most useful.  It offers summaries of changes in brain speed, attention, memory, intelligence, navigation, etc. that result from performing the exercises - changes that can persist for years.

A book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last 15 years is "The 200 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "Guide" section of some 2005 writing, and actually in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering - or at least inhibiting - self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed. Here we are talking mechanics during the time period is when all the limbic and other routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually can start-up. The suggestion is that you can short circuit some of this process if you bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a reaction or behavior is becoming resident, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so, I think I'll do something else instead.”

"The 200 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’ cycle several times, the actual execution  bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. Also, I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways.

Changes as MindBlog's autonomic nervous system ages 11 years

Actually, the original title of this MindBlog post on June 11, 2013 was "Changes as an autonomic nervous system ages 11 years - The "Wild Divine" is a bit less wild." - I'm reviewing old MindBlog posts (very slowly, as it turns out) and in most cases resisting the temptation to re-post even ones I thinks are quite interesting. This personal one really hit me, owever, so I pass it on, wondering how much further the noted decrease in my ability to regulate autonomic nervous system parameters has progressed by age 78:

Just after I retired from being a Univ. of Wisconsin department chair in 2001 I bought a set of finger sensors that fit on one's three middle fingers to report skin conductance and heartbeat to a PC or MAC via an A/D converter. These were part of a package with several CDs that installed a new age game on the computer that lead you through a rich environment of classical greek temples and waterfalls, attended by soothing music, that presented tasks in which you dinked with your own heart rate variability and sympathetic (arousing)/parasympathetic (calming) balance, going alternatively through periods of calm and arousal. I thought it was a hoot, and took the time to go through the "Journey to Wild Divine: passage" and "Journey to Wild Divine: Wisdom Quest."

Some of the current incarnations of these programs have moved to web browsers. Over the years a number of heavy weight new age gurus have signed on with their wares - Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, and Andrew Weil (Weil was in my Harvard graduating class...I'm tempted, but I won't burden you with my jaded opinion of this class of entrepreneurs, particularly Mr. Chopra.)

The main point of this post is note my experience on pulling out the finger sensors after 11 years trying the same exercises in their new presentation. What's the difference when this 71 year old tries the same manipulations of calm and arousal that the 60 year old played with with 11 years earlier? In a nutshell, I have less command over heart rate variability, which is lower, as the swings between calm and arousal have less amplitude.

And indeed, this fits with the literature on changes in the autonomic nervous system that occur on aging. If you simply do a google search for "autonomic nervous system and aging" numerous references appear that document how healthy aging is associated with lowered heart rate variability, elevated basal sympathetic nervous activity, and reduction of overall autonomic reactivity of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Here is a very recent review, from which I pass on one figure:

Schematic of proposed features associated with the imbalance in the autonomic nervous system during aging. During aging there is a shift in the balance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) towards the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). This may be influenced by circulating or local brain levels of angiotensin (Ang) II and leptin. The lower activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is proposed to result at least in part from an age-related decline in Angiotensin-(1–7). Lower Angiotensin-(1–7) and higher Ang II or leptin in the brain medulla would predispose to a decline in baroreceptor reflex sensitivity (BRS) for control of heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), both of which are associated with aging. Moreover, impairments in BRS and HRV can contribute to target organ damage, including metabolic dysfunction, with or without an increase in blood pressure. 

If you're inclined, like Mr. Dylan Thomas, to not "go gently into that good night" you can find numerous sources (example here) on slowing these aging changes, usually by some sort of physical movement or stimulation.

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

(Note: I have begun to slowly go though the posts on MindBlog, which began in Feb. of 2006, over 14 years ago.  Here I repeat the post that appeared on March 14, 2006.  I could have written it yesterday, without changing a word.)

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?)

This is a post like the one I offered on March 13 that passes on a bit of writing that I think might develop into a longer piece of work. I hope the following ideas and assertions make some sense to readers:

One ultimate cause of human behaviors is the endless cycling of a “Darwin machine,” operating at the level of cells, individuals, and groups of humans. As entities - from the most simple virus particles to complex human cultures - reproduce or renew themselves to persist through time, small errors or variations that end up enhancing reproductive fitness become dominant in the population. The grand master is multilevel selection, and there is a conflict between individual-level selection (individuals competing with other individuals in the same group) and group-level selection (competition between groups). Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. E.O. Wilson risks the oversimplification of suggesting that individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

The array of social emotions supporting tribal cultures that have occupied most of human history, as well as the more recent emergence of language, thought, and material culture, can be rationalized with this model. Taken together, they have enabled formation of large complex societies bonded together by laws, religions, and assumptions about purpose, meaning, and self that are unique to modern humans.

Nations and religions link language and meaning to more ancient evolved instinctive social emotional behaviors that bond groups of humans and other primates. This link is revealed when logic and language are turned inward (by both ancient meditative traditions as well as modern neuroscience) in a way that reveals that our common experiences of self or purpose are confabulations, or illusions - illusions nevertheless that have been necessary for forming complex human linguistic cultures, illusions which our emotional hormones and nerve circuitry have evolved to support.

Given the clear scientific evidence, why don’t we transcend these evolved linkages between our biology and our illusions? Why have those regarded as spiritually ‘enlightened’ throughout history remained a small minority of the population? Perhaps it is because those who become enlightened or awakened to the illusory nature of the self are granted a perspective on basic emotional drives that can divests them of much of their power. Enlightenment is subtle, not noisy, it doesn't engage the passions as well as blind devotion to nations and gods. This is why secular humanism, with its more muted versions of spirituality (‘I’m spiritual but not religious’) finds it difficult to compete with the ego-rich passions of nationalism and theism.

Because our evolved social brains incline us to cling to a complex array of nations, religions, and tribal identities that parse the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ we find it difficult to accept that we are a common humanity that would most effectively face our current pandemic and environmental crises by joining together.

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself.

I am going to start occasionally doing MindBlog posts on ideas that I think might have the potential of developing into longer pieces of work, but that usually remain as notes in my personal journal. This first one follows in the thread of Monday’s post on the work of Sam Harris. It came together when I woke during the middle of the night to find my mind clogged with a traffic jam of discursive thought. Then what appeared in my mind, in what felt like a mini-epiphany, was the words that I pass on below. They may make little sense to many readers, but please be assured that I have not gone wacko or nutter....

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

(I would add the note, as I did to Monday's post, that experiences of the sort I describe here can be very disorienting to some people, and should be approached with caution. A google search for the names Willoughby Britton and Jarred Lindahl will take you to their papers on this issue.)

Sam Harris' "Waking Up" wakes up Deric's MindBlog

Over the past few months I have gone back to school by doing the entire sequence of lectures and exercises presented by two mindfulness meditation apps. The first of these these, the HealthyMinds App, I have mentioned in a previous post. It derives from a collaborative effort at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, headed by my former colleague Richard Davidson. It is a friendly, approachable, lite version of material covered with greater intellectual depth by the second App, Waking Up, which is done by author Sam Harris and based on his book titled "Waking Up - A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." I became much more immersed in Harris' program, finishing all of the mini-lectures or 'lessons' and the 50 guided 10 minute exercises. Harris' presentation was a catalyst for me, allowing the material I have been writing about since my 2002 I-Illusion web/lecture to actually gel into place as lived daily experience.

Below I pass on an idiosyncratic sampling of clips or paraphrases of material from Harris' exercises, lectures, and book. For some readers there might be a flash of recognition, for others the following might make no sense at all.

The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience...this feeling is not a necessary property of the mind...the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with...people can report losing their sense of self to one or another degree

...the present centered expanded awareness that is seeing or feeling fear, anger suffering or pain  is not fear, anger suffering or pain. The same is true for happiness, joy, contentment. It is not these things but the calm presence that surrounds them. 

What do you take yourself to be in this moment? Is it the sensation of your face? Or your head?  Resolve that these too are appearances in consciousness, consciousness is prior to them, a mere witness of them.  Fall back into that position, being the screen on which the movie of your life is being played...This introduces a new capacity to respond differently to experiences. To notice first what it is you are experiencing, and then to introduce an option beyond merely reacting, being captured by the next thought that rises in consciousness.

...rest as that condition in which everything is just appearing...Feel the energy of your body, notice how sounds appear and disappear.  And let your mind be like a mirror. It doesn’t move to reflect what is in it. Everything simply appears on its surface... Now, periodically, gently, don’t make a struggle, look for the one who is noticing. And in that first moment of turning, see if you can observe what noticing is like. What is hearing like in the first instance of looking for the one who is hearing? What is sensing of breath like if you look for the seat of attention?

..There is no state that you are producing that by definition excludes any other experience. A goal is to make features of consciousness obvious, so that they can be obvious in other moments of your life.Your mind is always with you, practice develops a range of insights into what it’s like before it becomes cluttered by concepts, and judgements, and reactions, and other contractions in consciousness.

Kindle a negative feeling, bore into it with your attention, feel it as closely as possible, its energy. This kind of attention robs it of meaning.  It is simply an appearance in consciousness at this moment. How could this arising in feeling be what you are? You are simply noticing it. And it passes away on its own...the half life of any negative mental space is remarkably short.  And just noticing that, apart from any insight you might have into the nature of consciousness, can be freeing.  

It’s almost like you’re watching a film, and consciousness is both the screen and the light projected, the entire substance of experience. The sense that there is a self, a seat of attention, a subject in the middle of experience, that is yet another appearance on the screen, that’s part of the movie. That is part of what is being experienced and what may yet be witnessed from the point of view of open awareness. 

...consciousness is different. It appears to have no form at all, because anything that would give it form must arise within the field of consciousness. Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known. It is that which is aware of feelings such as joy, regret, amusement, and despair. It can seem to take their shape for a time, but it is possible to recognize that it never quite does. Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it. The goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what is already the case.…we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.

Everything we take ourselves to be at the level of our subjectivity—our memories and emotions, our capacity for language, the very thoughts and impulses that give rise to our behavior—depends upon distinct processes that are spread out over the whole of the brain. Many of these can be independently interrupted or extinguished. The sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects—the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience—is an illusion. The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for. We need not await any data from the lab to say that self-transcendence is possible. And we need not become masters of meditation to realize its benefits. It is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves and, in this way, to become better able to contribute to the well-being of others.

Harris notes a motivation for his writing on spirituality and self transcendence:

Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith. People on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within the context of science—apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. Until we can talk about spirituality in rational terms—acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence—our world will remain shattered by dogmatism. This book has been my attempt to begin such a conversation.

  (I should mention that a few users of the Waking Up App have found the exercises to be disorienting and stressful, and the App contains a fascinating two hour discussion between Harris and Willoughby Britton and Jarred Lindahl, who have done research on 'The Dark Side of Meditation.' A google search on their names will take you to their publications on this issue.)

For the holiday season - the gift of self care

To acknowledge that today is a special one for a large fraction of humanity, I want to pass on Parker-Pope's description of suggestions by Korean Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim - five simple steps to quiet the mind and soothe stress at any time of the year, all in the spirit of "be good to yourself first - then to others."

Breathe

Start by just taking a deep breath. Become mindful of your breathing. You’ll notice that when you begin, your breathing is shorter and more shallow, but as you continue, your breathing becomes deeper. Take just a few minutes each day to focus on your breathing. “As my breathing becomes much deeper and I’m paying attention to it, I feel much more centered and calm,” Haemin Sunim said. “I feel I can manage whatever is happening right now.”

Accept

Acceptance — of ourselves, our feelings and of life’s imperfections — is a common theme in “Love for Imperfect Things.” The path to self-care starts with acceptance, especially of our struggles. “If we accept the struggling self, our state of mind will soon undergo a change,” Haemin Sunim writes. “When we regard our difficult emotions as a problem and try to overcome them, we only struggle more. In contrast, when we accept them, strangely enough our mind stops struggling and suddenly grows quiet. Rather than trying to change or control difficult emotions from the inside, allow them to be there, and your mind will rest.”

Write

Begin to practice acceptance through a simple writing exercise. Write down the situation you must accept and all that you are feeling. Write down the things in your life that are weighing on you'''the goal is to leave it all on the paper. Now go to bed and when you wake up, choose the easiest task on the list to complete. “In the morning, rather than resisting, I will simply do the easiest thing I can do from the list,” Haemin Sunim said. “Once I finish the easiest task, it’s much easier to work on the second.”

Talk

Never underestimate the value of meaningful conversation for your well-being. Make time on a regular basis for a close, nonjudgmental friend...Choose someone who will listen without any kind of judgment...Once the story is released, you can see it more objectively, and you will know what it is you need to do.”

Walk

One of the easiest ways to care for yourself is to take a walk. Just walking...can distract your mind and create space between you and whatever is causing stress in your life... If you start walking, our physical energy changes and rather than dwelling on that story, you can pay attention to nature — a tree trunk, a rock. You begin to see things more objectively, and oftentimes that stress within your body will be released simply by walking.”

MindBlog reviews the HealthyMinds App

The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, established by my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson, is trying to export the results of its basic research into practical forms - workplace programs, school programs, and now an App for tablets or cell phones.

I've put the App on my iPhone, and want to report my experience of going through its sequence of mini-lectures and exercises, organized under five categories: Foundations, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. The basic science presented and the exercises were familiar to me, and I was struck by how effectively the essence of each was presented in its most simple and accessible form. (I would have liked to have been able to see the brief voice lectures also offered in text form.) For example, the instruction most often seen for the exercise of paying attention to breathing suggest counting each breath, from one to nine or ten, then repeating, and returning to this practice when one notices having been distracted by other thoughts.  Why not just count to three, as instructed by the App.  It is more simple, and equally effective.  For each of the exercises, one can choose a sitting or active version (active meaning doing routine, but not novel, activities),  a male or female narrator, and varying duration from 5 to 30 min.  It was not until I had finished the available series of lectures and exercises and tried to go back to earlier stages and examine them in more detail that I encountered a requirement that a subscription be purchased (~$5/month, but see below).   If the ideas and exercises presented were less familiar to me, and I was not already fairly settled in my various practices, I'm sure I would purchase a subscription to the App.

(added note: Please see the comment below.  A subscription is not required to repeat the Foundations section I was describing. It is  offered for further engagement of the Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose modules.) 

More critique of work linking loving kindness meditation and cellular again

In my Sept. 23 post, "Loving kindness meditation slows cellular aging?", I gave a few of the reasons that the article triggered my bullshit detector. A email from Harris Friedman, Univ. of Florida, has pointed me to their more extended critique in a letter to the editor of Psychoneuroendocrinology, which I pass on in a slightly truncated version:

Extraordinary claims require compelling evidence: Concerns about “loving-kindness meditation slows biological aging in novices”

The recent paper by Le Nguyen et al. (2019) makes the extra- ordinary claim that loving-kindness meditation (LKM) slows biological aging. Unfortunately, its headline-grabbing title lacks compelling evidence. This paper shows telomere length (TL) decreased considerably in a control group over a very short time period, as compared to a LKM group, while a mindfulness meditation (MM) group was somewhere in between. From this difference, the paper argues that LKM slows biological aging, which is quite a logical leap. Clearly LKM had nothing to do with the extent of TL shrinkage in the control group, and why the control group’s TL decreased so much is ignored in the paper. More generally, there are many problems with using TL as a proxy for biological aging. Even if this paper’s basic logic is accepted, there are many problems with how the paper’s data are handled.1 The most important problem is the absence of any analyses that provides a direct and straightforward examination of pre-post TL as a function of experimental condition. Consequently, we ran a 2×3 mixed factorial ANOVA using TL measured across two times (pre and post) compared across three conditions (control, MM, and LKM) with the paper’s data. Although a significant repeated measures main effect was found, the interaction with experimental condition was non-sig- nificant. One-way ANOVAs examining pre-, post-, and change/differ- ence TL variables as a function of condition also produced non-sig nificant results. Looking at the data using other statistical approaches, however, did show some pattern of mixed results that trend, although most are non-significant, in the direction of the LKM group having less TL shortening compared to the other groups. Regardless of analysis, effect sizes were consistently meager.

In addition, there are several serious confounds compromising any valid comparison among the groups. For example, the data show that six in the control group engaged in some meditation, and one even reported meditating 16 days during the study’s short time-span. This hardly constitutes an adequate control group for a meditation study. Also, the LKM group spent considerably more time meditating than the MM group, so these did not differ only in meditation type. We are unable to address many other problems with this paper due to this journal’s length restrictions in a letter to the editor. We simply conclude that this paper’s extraordinary claim does not have the compelling evidence to back it up, and we urge not making extraordinary claims without such evidence. 

Harris L. Friedman - University of Florida, United States
Douglas A. MacDonald - University of Detroit Mercy, United States
Nicholas J.L. Brown-  University of Groningen, the Netherlands
James C. Coyne University of Pennsylvania, United States

Psilocybin + Mindfulness Meditation change brain connectivity - lasting positive effects

Dolan points to work by Smigielski et al.:

Both psychedelics and meditation exert profound modulatory effects on consciousness, perception and cognition, but their combined, possibly synergistic effects on neurobiology are unknown. Accordingly, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 38 participants following a single administration of the psychedelic psilocybin (315 μg/kg p.o.) during a 5-day mindfulness retreat. Brain dynamics were quantified directly pre- and post-intervention by functional magnetic resonance imaging during the resting state and two meditation forms. The analysis of functional connectivity identified psilocybin-related and mental state–dependent alterations in self-referential processing regions of the default mode network (DMN). Notably, decoupling of medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, which is thought to mediate sense of self, was associated with the subjective ego dissolution effect during the psilocybin-assisted mindfulness session. The extent of ego dissolution and brain connectivity predicted positive changes in psycho-social functioning of participants 4 months later. Psilocybin, combined with meditation, facilitated neurodynamic modulations in self-referential networks, subserving the process of meditation by acting along the anterior–posterior DMN connection. The study highlights the link between altered self-experience and subsequent behavioral changes. Understanding how interventions facilitate transformative experiences may open novel therapeutic perspectives. Insights into the biology of discrete mental states foster our understanding of non-ordinary forms of human self-consciousness and their concomitant brain substrate.

Mindfulness doesn't reduce impulsive behavior.

Korponay, Davidson and colleagues present results of a study that were contrary to their expectation that the practice of mindfulness meditation would correlate with a reduction in impulsive behaviors (like having that second dish of ice cream). What they found is that neither short-term nor long-term meditation appears to be effective for reducing impulsivity that is not related to attentional difficulties, but rather is a function of motor control and planning capacities. Here is their detailed abstract:

Interest has grown in using mindfulness meditation to treat conditions featuring excessive impulsivity. However, while prior studies find that mindfulness practice can improve attention, it remains unclear whether it improves other cognitive faculties whose deficiency can contribute to impulsivity. Here, an eight-week mindfulness intervention did not reduce impulsivity on the go/no-go task or Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11), nor produce changes in neural correlates of impulsivity (i.e. frontostriatal gray matter, functional connectivity, and dopamine levels) compared to active or wait-list control groups. Separately, long-term meditators (LTMs) did not perform differently than meditation-naïve participants (MNPs) on the go/no-go task. However, LTMs self-reported lower attentional impulsivity, but higher motor and non-planning impulsivity on the BIS-11 than MNPs. LTMs had less striatal gray matter, greater cortico-striatal-thalamic functional connectivity, and lower spontaneous eye-blink rate (a physiological dopamine indicator) than MNPs. LTM total lifetime practice hours (TLPH) did not signifcantly relate to impulsivity or neurobiological metrics. Findings suggest that neither short nor long-term mindfulness practice may be efective for redressing impulsive behavior derived from inhibitory motor control or planning capacity defcits in healthy adults. Given the absence of TLPH relationships to impulsivity or neurobiological metrics, diferences between LTMs and MNPs may be attributable to pre-existing diferences.

Mindfulness training and attentional control of mind-wandering

Several studies have suggested that mindfulness training can strengthen the connections between the networks in our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [DLPFC] attentional executive control network and those supporting the posterior cingulate cortex [PCC] default mode network active in mind-wandering. Davidson and his colleagues have expanded on this to see whether a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course can increase DLPFC-PCC connectivity:

Mindfulness meditation training has been shown to increase resting state functional connectivity between nodes of the frontoparietal executive control network (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [DLPFC]) and the default mode network (posterior cingulate cortex [PCC]). We investigated whether these effects generalized to a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, and tested for structural and behaviorally relevant consequences of change in connectivity. Healthy, meditationnaïve adults were randomized to either MBSR (N=48), an active (N=47) or waitlist (N=45) control group. Participants completed behavioral testing, resting state fMRI scans, and diffusion tensor scans at pre-randomization (T1), post-intervention (T2) and approximately 5.5 months later (T3). We found increased T2-T1 PCC–DLPFC resting connectivity for MBSR relative to control groups. Although these effects did not persist through long-term follow-up (T3-T1), MBSR participants showed a significantly stronger relationship between days of practice (T1 to T3) and increased PCC–DLPFC resting connectivity than participants in the active control group. Increased PCC–DLPFC resting connectivity in MBSR participants was associated with increased microstructural connectivity of a white matter tract connecting these regions, and increased self reported attention. These data show that MBSR increases PCC–DLPFC resting connectivity, which is related to increased practice time, attention, and structural connectivity.

Loving kindness meditation slows cellular aging?

I like to be generous, loving, kind and nice, but a recent PsyPost article on the slowing of cellular aging by loving-kindness meditation triggered my bullshit detector. I first pass on the summary and abstract of the work referenced in the article by Le Nguyen et al., and then get a bit into the details available only to those who have journal access (motivated readers can request a PDF of the article from me). It is a noble and complicated effort, with proper double blind controls, but with statistics compromised by a small sample size and measured changes in DNA telomere length (a proxy for aging) over a short period of time much larger than would be expected from longer terms studies. While I would like to believe the conclusions drawn by the authors, I have to remain wary of accepting them.

Highlights

•Over 12 weeks, loving-kindness meditation buffered telomere attrition.

•Telomere length decreased in the mindfulness group and the control group.

•The loving-kindness group showed less telomere attrition than the control group.

Abstract

Combinations of multiple meditation practices have been shown to reduce the attrition of telomeres, the protective caps of chromosomes (Carlson et al., Cancer, 121 (2015), pp. 476-484). Here, we probed the distinct effects on telomere length (TL) of mindfulness meditation (MM) and loving-kindness meditation (LKM). Midlife adults (N = 142) were randomized to be in a waitlist control condition or to learn either MM or LKM in a 6-week workshop. Telomere length was assessed 2 weeks before the start of the workshops and 3 weeks after their termination. After controlling for appropriate demographic covariates and baseline TL, we found TL decreased significantly in the MM group and the control group, but not in the LKM group. There was also significantly less TL attrition in the LKM group than the control group. The MM group showed changes in TL that were intermediate between the LKM and control groups yet not significantly different from either. Self-reported emotions and practice intensity (duration and frequency) did not mediate these observed group differences. This study is the first to disentangle the effects of LKM and MM on TL and suggests that LKM may buffer telomere attrition.

Fig. 1. Descriptive Mean and Standard Errors of Changes in TL per Experimental Conditions. (TL is expressed as the ratio (T/S) of telomeric (T) to single copy (S) gene product for a particular blood sample)

Apart from picking apart their statistics and the "controls for demographic covariates," the discussion paragraph that troubles me most is:

The difference in telomere length between the Control and LKM groups was .048 T/S ratio after demographic covariates were considered. Based on comparison of T/S ratios and telomere length measured by Southern blot in a series of quality control samples from the same lab, we estimated this difference of .048 T/S ratio to be 115 basepairs. This TL decrease over the 12-week period appears to be large compared to studies of TL change with much longer time periods (Müezzinler et al., Obes. Rev., 15 (2014), pp. 192-201). It is possible that this reflects short term dynamic change, or potential systematic differences in the collection and/or assay of baseline and follow-up samples. The fact that DNA extraction and assay were done as one batch (all samples from Time 1 and Time 2) argues against the latter concern, although we cannot completely rule out other potential unaccounted for systematic differences. Although it is unknown whether this effect remains longer than 3 weeks post-intervention, the current study demonstrated proof of concept for the malleability of TL changes, and that certain forms of meditation, in this case loving-kindness meditation, may buffer against telomere erosion.

After several paragraphs of other reservations and cautions on the data, the authors state:

...one should interpret the differences in TL changes here with caution, treating them as evidence for “apparent” rather than true alterations in TL.

In balance, the PsyPost article title: "Study provides evidence that loving-kindness meditation slows cellular aging" is wrong.

Correlating our our physical and mental experiences of stress linked to psychological and physical well-being

Davidson and colleagues at the Univ. of Wisconsin show that individual differences in the ability to associate subjective stress and heart rate are related to psychological and physical well being. Here is a description of the work from a newsletter, followed by the abstract from Psychological Sciences. They:

...analyzed data from 1,065 participants in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, a longitudinal effort looking at well-being as adults age. Participants completed a series of stressful computer tasks, including a mental math task and a color identification task.

Before, during and after the tasks, researchers measured participants’ heart rate and asked them to rate their stress on a scale of one to 10 throughout the study.

After the participants completed the stress tests, researchers compared each person’s heart rate to the stress levels they reported — a measure called “stress-heart rate coherence”— and found that some people’s stress levels aligned with their heart rate better than others.

To examine the link between stress-heart rate coherence and people’s emotional well-being, researchers used psychological questionnaires focused on well-being, depression, anxiety and coping as well as blood samples measuring inflammation markers. Researchers found that people with greater stress-heart rate coherence had fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, greater overall psychological well-being and lower levels of inflammation.

Here is the journal article's abstract:

The physiological response to stress is intertwined with, but distinct from, the subjective feeling of stress, although both systems must work in concert to enable adaptive responses. We investigated 1,065 participants from the Midlife in the United States 2 study who completed a self-report battery and a stress-induction procedure while physiological and self-report measures of stress were recorded. Individual differences in the association between heart rate and self-reported stress were analyzed in relation to measures that reflect psychological well-being (self-report measures of well-being, anxiety, depression), denial coping, and physical well-being (proinflammatory biomarkers interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein). The within-participants association between heart rate and self-reported stress was significantly related to higher psychological well-being, fewer depressive symptoms, lower trait anxiety, less use of denial coping, and lower levels of proinflammatory biomarkers. Our results highlight the importance of studying individual differences in coherence between physiological measures and subjective mental states in relation to well-being.

And here is a PDF of the article.

The Case for Doing Nothing

An article by Olga Mecking fits so well with my increasing allergic reaction to making myself busy all the time that I have to pass on a few edited and rearranged clips:

Perhaps it’s time to stop all this busyness. Being busy...is rarely the status indicator we’ve come to believe it is...There’s a way out...and it’s not more mindfulness, exercise or a healthy diet... What we’re talking about is … doing nothing. Or, as the Dutch call it, niksen...being like a car whose engine is running but isn’t going anywhere...coming to a moment with no plan other than just to be.

...the idea of niksen is to take conscious, considered time and energy to do activities like gazing out of a window or sitting motionless...permission granted to spend the afternoon just hanging out...daydreaming and idleness let the mind search for its own stimulation...counterintuitively, idleness can be a great productivity tool..it takes you out of your mind, and then you see things clearly after a while...it makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas......For that to happen, though, total idleness is required.

...don’t get discouraged if you don’t catch on immediately to the benefits of idleness...like beginning a new workout routine: At first, you might get sore, but after a while, you’ll find yourself in this moment of "Oh, this feels fantastic.” Keep your devices out of reach so that they’ll be more difficult to access, and turn your home into a niksen-friendly area. Add a soft couch, a comfy armchair, a few cushions or just a blanket. Orient furniture around a window or fireplace rather than a TV.

McMindfulness - how capitalism captured the mindfulness industry

A great piece in The Guardian by David Forbes, an extract from his forthcoming book "Mindfulness and its Discontents" from which I further extract a few chunks:

On the internet is an image of Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s hamburger icon, seated in a lotus position. Some Thai Buddhists see this in literal terms as disrespectful to the Buddha...The technical, neutral definition of mindfulness and its relativist lack of a moral foundation has opened up secular mindfulness to a host of dubious uses, now called out by its critics as McMindfulness...Instead of letting go of the ego, McMindfulness promotes self-aggrandizement; its therapeutic function is to comfort, numb, adjust and accommodate the self within a neoliberal, corporatized, militarized, individualistic society based on private gain...McMindfulness aims to reduce the stress of the private individual and does not admit to any interest in the social causes of stress...it does not grasp that an individualistic therapized and commodified society is itself a major generator of social suffering and distress. Instead, the best it can then do, ironically, is to offer to sell us back an individualistic, commodified “cure” – mindfulness – to reduce that distress...Meditation apps monetize mindfulness; Headspace’s revenue is estimated at $50m a year and the company is valued at $250m.

Neural signal diversity is increased by psychedelics

From Carhart-Harris and collaborators:

What is the level of consciousness of the psychedelic state? Empirically, measures of neural signal diversity such as entropy and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity score higher for wakeful rest than for states with lower conscious level like propofol-induced anesthesia. Here we compute these measures for spontaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals from humans during altered states of consciousness induced by three psychedelic substances: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD. For all three, we find reliably higher spontaneous signal diversity, even when controlling for spectral changes. This increase is most pronounced for the single-channel LZ complexity measure, and hence for temporal, as opposed to spatial, signal diversity. We also uncover selective correlations between changes in signal diversity and phenomenological reports of the intensity of psychedelic experience. This is the first time that these measures have been applied to the psychedelic state and, crucially, that they have yielded values exceeding those of normal waking consciousness. These findings suggest that the sustained occurrence of psychedelic phenomenology constitutes an elevated level of consciousness - as measured by neural signal diversity.