[acb-hsp] Meditation and Rationality

[peter altschul]

ininHow Meditation Makes You More Rationalinin
  Michael Haederle, Miller-McCuneddcom
  August 14, 2011
  It's no secret that humans are not entirely rational when it 
comes to weighing rewards.  For example, we might be perfectly 
happy with how much money we're making -- until we find out how 
much more the guy in the next cubicle is being paid.
  But a new study suggests that people who regularly practice 
Buddhist meditation actually process these common social 
situations differently -- and the researchers have the brain 
scans to prove it.
  Ulrich Kirk and collaborators at Baylor Medical College in 
Houston had 40 control subjects and 26 longtime meditators 
participate in a well-known experiment called theUltimatum Game 
It goes like this:
  One person has a sum of money to split with another person.  If 
the other person accepts the offer, they both walk away with cash 
in their pocket, but if he or she rejects the offer as too 
chintzy -- which happens surprisingly often -- neither receives 
anything.
  The rational course is to accept any offer that is proposed, 
because getting something is better than nothing at all, but the 
Ultimatum Game suggests that for many people, emotion trumps 
reason.  Being treated fairly is more important than coming out 
ahead financially.
  Kirk's subjects had $20 to split among themselves.  When the 
offers were wildly asymmetrical (keeping $19 for oneself, while 
offering only $1), 72 percent of the controls refused the money, 
meaning both parties left empty-handed.  But when the meditators 
played, only 46 percent rejected such blatantly unfair offers.  
More than half were willing to take whatever they were offered.
  The test subjects played the game while lying inside a 
functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, enabling the 
researchers to see which areas of their brains became active as 
they responded to various monetary offers.  As in earlier 
experiments with the Ultimatum Game, the control subjects saw 
increased activity in a brain structure called the anterior 
insula when they were confronted with an unfair offer -- an area 
linked to the emotion of disgust.
  But the meditators' brains reacted quite differently, 
activating brain areas associated with interoception -- the 
representation of the body's internal state.  In fact, the 
researchers found very little overlap in the two groups' neural 
responses.
  Kirk, who recruited his meditators from the Houston Zen Center 
and other local Buddhist groups, wanted to explore a different 
mechanism for managing their emotions than the ones usually 
studied in cognitive neuroscience.
  "To us it seemed that a more ecological way of doing this would 
be to see the effects of mindfulness," he says.  "Mindfulness, as 
opposed to emotion regulation, is using an outside perspective on 
one's experiences, rather than changing their content (through 
distraction) or context (through reframing)."
  Kirk, now a research assistant professor with the Human 
Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, says that while the 
meditators' behavior seems generally more brationalb than that of 
most of the controls, they did not use the dorsolateral 
prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain usually associated with 
cold, calculated reasoning.  He also informally interviewed many 
of the meditators after they underwent the brain scans.  "They 
reported that the offers did not actually seem unfair, or rather, 
that `difference` doesn't equal unfairness," Kirk says.  "It was 
as if the perception of difference incites less reactivity in 
meditators."



stMichael Haederle lives in New Mexico.  He has written for the 
Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 
and many other publications./
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