Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?By STEPHEN S. HALL In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks — in particular, their meditative prowess — for scientific research. Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee, an invitation to study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as Davidson recently conceded, ''very flaky.'' But the Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself — he took leave from graduate school to travel through India and Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices — leapt at the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and embarked on an ambitious data-gathering expedition to northern India, lugging portable electrical generators, laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas. His goal was to measure a remarkable, if seemingly evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of the Buddhist mind at work. ''These are the Olympic athletes, the gold medalists, of meditation,'' Davidson says. The work began fitfully — the monks initially balked at being wired — but research into meditation has now attained a credibility unimaginable a decade ago. Over the past 10 years, a number of Buddhist monks, led by Matthieu Ricard, a French-born monk with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, have made a series of visits from northern India and other South Asian countries to Davidson's lab in Madison. Ricard and his peers have worn a Medusa-like tangle of 256-electrode EEG nets while sitting on the floor of a little booth and responding to visual stimuli. They have spent two to three hours at a time in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, trying to meditate amid the clatter and thrum of the brain-imaging machinery. No data from these experiments have been published formally yet, but in ''Visions of Compassion,'' a compilation of papers that came out last year, Davidson noted in passing that in one visiting monk, activation in several regions of his left prefrontal cortex — an area of the brain just behind the forehead that recent research has associated with positive emotion — was the most intense seen in about 175 experimental subjects. In the years since Davidson's fax from the Dalai Lama, the neuroscientific
study of Buddhist practices has crossed a threshold of acceptability as
a topic worthy of scientific attention. Part of the reason for this lies
in new, more powerful brain-scanning technologies that not only can reveal
a mind in the midst of meditation but also can detect enduring changes
in brain activity months after a prolonged course of meditation. And it
hasn't hurt that some well-known mainstream neuroscientists are now intrigued
by preliminary reports of exceptional Buddhist mental skills. Paul Ekman
of the University of California at San Francisco and Stephen Kosslyn of
Harvard have begun their own studies of the mental capabilities of monks.
In addition, a few rigorous, controlled studies have suggested that Buddhist-style
meditation in Western patients may cause physiological changes in the
brain and the immune system.
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