Maastricht: There were already indications that mindfulness
meditation and yoga have a positive effect on pain perception and the
preservation of mental faculties when ageing. With the help of brain
scanners, PhD student Tim Gard now explains the underlying mechanisms in
the brain. He found unique neural mechanisms in the area of pain
processing and more efficiently organised and sturdier brain networks in
older adults who were experienced yoga and meditation practitioners.
This could have future implications for the treatment of chronic pain
and for maintaining a healthy ageing population as long as possible.
For the pain study, research subjects received light pain stimuli in the form of mild electrical shocks to one of their forearms. The meditation group experienced the pain in both an everyday state of mind and in a state of meditation. They turned out to experience the pain not as less strong, but as less unpleasant. In their brains, the reduced pain perception went hand in hand with increased activation in the posterior insula (the area involved in the sensation of pain) and decreased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex (the area that regulates experiences). This pattern is the opposite of what happens in the brains of non-meditators. In other words, meditators were able to reduce their pain in a unique way by tolerating the pain sensations instead of exerting mental control over them.
For this innovative research into the effect of yoga and meditation on ageing, brain scans were made and mental faculties were measured in the form of fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason in new situations. Older practitioners of both yoga and meditation showed a smaller decrease in fluid intelligence than the control subjects with a similar healthy lifestyle. Functional MRI scans taken during rest showed that the global brain networks of meditators and yoga practitioners were organised more efficiently and more sturdily than those of the control subjects. The effect of yoga was found to be as great as that of meditation on fluid intelligence and global network efficiency.
‘It’s fascinating to see how yoga and meditation can positively influence our brains and our psyches, and thus can lead to increased well-being’, said Tim Gard. He defended his PhD dissertation, ‘The neural and psychological mechanisms of yoga and mindfulness meditation’, at Maastricht University on 20 March.