About 75 college students sat on yoga mats, taking deep breaths as they contoured their bodies in different positions.
Last week’s yoga class taught Emory University freshmen how to make their bodies stronger and more flexible. Students also learned how yoga could reduce their stress — a crucial lesson as they embarked on their first college midterms all while adjusting to living on their own.
This balance of physical, emotional and spiritual well-being is a cornerstone of Emory University’s new Health 100 course, a requirement for all freshmen.
Several colleges across the country have added programs and requirements in recent years to address students’ physical health and combat the obesity epidemic. But Emory officials have taken a more holistic approach and created a course based on the research they’ve conducted on predictive health, which stresses maintaining good health and preventing disease as opposed to just curing illnesses people already have.
The course abandoned the “do this, don’t do that” mentality found in most health lectures, said Michelle Lampl, director of the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health. “We are not here to admonish or preach to the students,” she said. “We are teaching them a healthier approach to life. They didn’t come here to fill their heads while destroying their bodies.”
Rather than professors lecturing to students, upperclassmen teach the class through small-group discussions. They help the freshmen come up with health goals and give advice on different aspects of college life. Read the whole article in the AJC.
“It calms my mind,” says a regular meditator named Sam. That statement wouldn’t be too surprising, except that Sam is in elementary school.
He was one of the children ages 5 to 8 at Atlanta’s Paideia School featured in a recent report on meditation by Dan Harris of ABC News. The students are part of an Emory study into the effects of compassion meditation, a secular form of meditation aimed at helping people reduce stress and think kindly of others.
As Harris points out, studies show that compassionate people tend to be happier, healthier and more successful at work.
And Sam finds a practical use for it while in an Atlanta traffic jam with his mother at the wheel. “My brother’s screaming, my mom’s cussing, and I’m meditating,” he says.
Watch the ABC News report.
A handful of U.S. prisons have opened their doors to an ancient form of meditation from India known as Vipassana, which means “to see things as they really are.”
Some of the prisoners who practice the technique for 10 to 13 hours a day “finally come to terms with some of the things that they have done,” says Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment for the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Meditating prisoners at the Donaldson Correction Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, have become more social, says Kathryn Allen, the prison psychologist. “They’re more honest, more open, more genuine, and they want to serve others,” she says, by volunteering in the prison hospice and teaching fellow inmates who are illiterate how to read and write.
Inmate meditation at a prison near Seattle "really changed the whole facility," says Ben Turner of the Vipassana Prison Trust. “Even officers who were earlier skeptical became really supportive because they saw such behavior changes in the inmates that it made it a more pleasant place for them to work.”
The Vipassana meditation technique is based on the teachings of the Buddha, but is purely secular and designed to relieve suffering through self-awareness, Turner says.
When Emory graduate student Brendan Ozawa-de Silva first walked into the classroom of five- to eight-year-olds at Atlanta’s Paideia School, he quickly despaired of ever achieving his goal: Getting the children to meditate.
Noisy and excitable, the kids could barely sit still, much less approach the state of utter calm and concentration that is central to the Buddhist tradition of compassion meditation. But Ozawa-de Silva captured their attention using an ancient technique: Telling them a story.
He told them about the sweater he was wearing, describing how his father gave it to him and explaining that it makes him happy because it is warm and makes him think of his father. Then he asked the children to consider the other reasons why he is able to enjoy the sweater—where it came from, who made it, and how it traveled to him. The kids rattled off answers: Wool, sheep, trucks, roads, stores, people.
“Finally, they shouted out, ‘It never ends. You need the whole world!’” recalls Ozawa-de Silva.
And just like that, the children understood, at least for a moment, the Buddhist concept of universal interconnectedness that undergirds compassion meditation.
The pilot program at Paideia, which Ozawa-de Silva codirected with graduate student Brooke Dodson-Lavelle, is part of a series of Emory initiatives studying the effects of meditation on physical and mental health. The protocol for the program was developed by Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership, using Cognitively Based Compassion Training, a technique drawn from Buddhism, but without the spiritual elements. Secular compassion meditation is based on a 1,000-year-old Tibetan Buddhist practice called lojong, which uses a cognitive, analytic approach to challenge a person’s unexamined thoughts and emotions toward other people.
The practice is designed to help participants recognize the interdependence of all creatures and cultivate compassion towards others, whether family, friends, or far-flung strangers. The comprehension of shared suffering is thought to reduce negative emotions, like anger and resentment, and help nurture positive ones, like kindness and gratitude.
“I really think it helps the kids to center,” says Jonathan Petrash, who teaches a class of five- to seven-year-olds at Paideia. “We have tried to make it part of our daily routine. There is a real calm, settled feeling in our classroom, with deeper and richer conversations. The kids are better able to show empathy, better able to show compassion.”
Research is showing that compassion meditation -- focused, warm thoughts about yourself and others -- may have positive effects on both your mental and physical well-being.
By Carol Clark
Basic empathy is a biological given. “If you talk with a sad person, you are going to adopt a sad posture, and if you talk to a happy person, by the end you will probably be laughing,” said Emory primatologist Frans de Waal. He explained that evolution has programmed us to mirror both the physical and emotional states of others.
De Waal gave the opening remarks at a conference bringing together the Dalai Lama and scientists studying effects of compassion meditation on the brain, physical health and behavior.
“Empathy is biased – it’s stronger for those that are close to you than those that are distant,” De Waal said. “Nature has built in rewards for the things that we need to do, and being pro-social is something that we need when we live in groups.”
In order to get from empathy to compassion and altruism, you need to identify others as distinct from you. While it used to be assumed that altruistic tendencies were only possible in humans, de Waal said that targeted helping of others has recently been observed among apes and elephants.
Photo by Frans de Waal shows a young chimpanzee consoling an adult male that just lost a fight.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin, recalled when he first began studying the effects of compassion meditation in 1992. He traveled to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and attached electrodes to the head of an expert practitioner. The other monks began laughing.
“I thought it was because he looked so funny with the electrodes,” Davidson said. But it turned out the monks were amused that he was trying to study the effects of compassion by attaching electrodes to the practitioner’s head, rather than to his heart.
Years later, Davidson is finding that the monks’ view may be on target. New research shows that the heart rates of expert practitioners beat more quickly while they are meditating than the hearts of novices. “We believe that compassion meditation is facilitating communication between the heart and the mind,” Davidson said.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill cited her research into the effects of “love and kindness meditation,” or LKM, on the vagus nerve. The nerve, which extends from the brain stem to the heart, helps regulate emotions and bodily systems. The effectiveness of the vagus nerve is measured by its tone, or fitness. The higher the vagal tone, the better the vagus nerve performs as a regulatory pathway.
“With just six weeks of LKM training in novices, we see improvements in resting vagal tone,” Fredrickson said. “Just like physical exercise improves muscle tone, emotion training improves vagal tone.”
High vagal tone is related to both a person’s physical health and their ability to feel loving connections with others, Fredrickson said. “In a way, our bodies are designed for love, because the more we love, the more healthy we become.”
Emory researchers Charles Raison and Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi described their ongoing research into the effects of compassion meditation and depression. Negi developed a secular form of meditation for the research, based on the Tibetan Buddhist practice called “lojong.” Lojong uses an analytical approach to challenge a person’s thoughts and emotions toward other people, with the long-term goal of developing altruistic behavior.
The pair collaborated on a 2005 study that showed that college students who regularly practice compassion meditation had a significant reduction in stress and physical responses to stress. They recently launched the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation Study (CALM), to explore the physical effects of different forms of meditation.
“We’re trying to zero in on what is it about meditation that is useful for people’s health,” Raison said.
Emory researchers are also getting positive preliminary results in compassion meditation studies involving schoolchildren ages six to eight and adolescents in the foster care system.
“This seems like the dawning of a new day,” the Dalai Lama said. “We’ve heard about the benefits, and now we need to act to cultivate compassion from kindergarten to universities.”
Depression is the most common mental disorder in the world. In addition to emotional suffering, it takes a terrible physical toll. “Over time, depression damages the heart and sets people up to get diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease,” says Charles Raison, clinical director of the Emory Mind-Body Program.
Emory researchers are looking for ways to treat depression without medication – including the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of compassion meditation. An initial study found that Emory students who regularly practiced compassion meditation had a significant reduction in stress and physical responses to stress. The research is now expanding, to explore whether a range of meditative practices have effects on the body and the brain that would be protective not just for depression, but other illnesses as well.
On Monday, Oct. 18, the Dalai Lama will lead a “Compassion Meditation Conference” at Emory, bringing together meditation experts and neuroscientists for a public discussion on the latest research into empathy, compassion and meditation.
So if you are not depressed, are you happy? What exactly is happiness? One way to explore the meaning of this elusive state of being is through the ancient traditions of the world’s major religions.
Happiness is something that people tend to take for granted, says Scott Kugle, an Emory expert on Islam. “But very often,” he adds, “you lose sight of the deeper psychological or devotional insights that are required to get to a point of deep happiness.”
On Sunday, October 17, the Dalai Lama will head an “Interfaith Summit on Happiness.” Broadcast journalist Krista Tippett will moderate the discussion, also including representatives of Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths.
The journal Ecology Letters just published findings by Emory biologists that monarch butterflies use medication to cure themselves and their offspring of disease.
So what’s in a monarch’s medicine kit? Milkweed – but only a particular species. Experiments show that egg-laying monarchs that are infected with a parasite choose plants that have a medicinal benefit for their caterpillars.
“We believe that our experiments provide the best evidence to date that animals use medication,” says evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, who led the research.
Watch the video to learn more, and get a tour of one of the few labs in the world studying monarch butterflies. Photo at left of a monarch laying her eggs by Jaap de Roode.
Pea aphids, expert survivors of the insect world, appear to lack major biological defenses, according to the first genetic analysis of their immune system.
Pea aphids are major agricultural pests and also important biological models for studies of insect-plant interactions, symbiosis, virus vectoring and genetic plasticity. These resilient insects thrive despite a host of enemies, including parasitic wasps, lady bugs, fungal pathogens and frustrated farmers and gardeners the world over.
"This is the first look at the genome of a whole group of insects we know little about," says Gerardo, an evolutionary biologist who focuses on host-parasite interactions.
All insects previously sequenced belong to a group that undergoes metamorphosis. Pea aphids, however, belong to an insect group known as basel hemimetablous – meaning they are born looking like tiny adults.
"We went into this expecting to find the same set of immune-system genes that we've seen in the genomes of flies, mosquitoes and bees," Gerardo says. “Given these missing genes, it seems that aphids have a weak immune system. Our next step is to figure out how they protect themselves.” One hypothesis is that aphids may compensate for their lack of immune defenses by focusing on reproduction. From birth, a female aphid contains embryos that also contain embryos.
“She is born carrying her granddaughters,” Gerardo says. “In a lab, a female aphid can produce up to 20 copies of herself per day. About 10 days later, those babies will start producing their own offspring.” Over 50 million years, aphids have evolved complex relationships with beneficial bacteria that supply them with nutrients or protect them from predators and pathogens. It’s possible that the weak immune response in aphids developed as a way to keep from killing off these beneficial microbes, Gerardo says. “A key question is whether these microbes could have changed the aphid genome, or changed how the aphid uses its genes.”
Further study of how the aphid immune system interacts with microbes could yield better methods for controlling them in agriculture.
Aphids are not just pests, Gerardo says. They are also potential resources for questions related to human health.
"Humans need beneficial bacteria for proper digestion in the gut and to protect against cavities in the teeth," she says. "Some people feel sick when they take antibiotics because the drug kills off all the beneficial bacteria. If we can study the process of how to keep beneficial bacteria while clearing out harmful bacteria across several organisms, including aphids, we might be able to understand it better."
"The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.
"Shared laughter is just one example of our primate sensitivity to others. We aren’t Robinson Crusoes, sitting on separate islands; we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individualism and liberty, but members of the species Homo sapiens are easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by their fellows.
"That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s 'shoes.' And yet empathy is often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role taking, higher cognition, and even language. Accordingly, most scholarly literature on empathy is completely human centered, never mentioning other animals. As if a capacity so visceral and pervasive could be anything other than biological! To counter such widespread views, I decided to investigate how chimpanzees relate to and learn from one another."
Read the full excerpt in Natural History. You can also read reviews of "The Age of Empathy" in the Economist and New Scientist.
