Are hugs the new drugs?

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.”

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Dalai Lama: Make inner peace, not war

“It seems clear that it’s important to synthesize ideas” and move towards an integrated understanding of the world, and of our selves, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said during his recent visit to Emory.

His visit began with an update on the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). The initiative aims to combine insights from centuries of Tibetan-Buddhist compassion meditation with the knowledge of modern science.

During the past 100 years, science and technology have advanced tremendously, “but at the same time, the 20th century was a century of bloodshed. More than 200 million people were killed through violence,” he said.

“Nuclear physics was one of the great achievements for science, but that great achievement brought fear and destruction,” the Dalai Lama said, referring to the use of nuclear weapons by the United States during World War II.

“Scientific achievement, in order to be constructive, to bring more happiness, more peace and a healthier world, ultimately depends on our minds and our emotions,” he said, adding that special efforts are needed to try to cultivate inner peace. “What’s important is the sense of well-being for others, in other words a compassionate attitude.”

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Morals without God?

Emory psychologist Frans de Waal writes an opinion piece in the New York Times:

I was born in Den Bosch, the city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself. This obviously does not make me an expert on the Dutch painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe. This remains relevant today since Bosch depicts a society under a waning influence of God. His famous triptych with naked figures frolicking around, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” seems a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It represents humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all.
Detail from "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting combines references from religion, nature and science. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

For a primatologist, like myself, the nudity, references to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar and hardly require a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes — not the frolickers from the middle panel — but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards.

Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the role of religion in society. As in Bosch’s days, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good? Don’t think for one moment that the current battle lines between biology and fundamentalist Christianity turn around evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss.

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

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The quest for inner peace and happiness

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.

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Monks + scientists = a new body of thought

Monks + scientists = A new body of thought

When you’re talking about cells, are you referring to their minds or their bodies?

The question from a Tibetan translator temporarily stumped Emory biologist Arri Eisen. In Tibetan, every organism has a mind and a body, and you have to be speaking about one or the other, explained Geshe Dadul Namgyal, a member of the team translating Western scientific concepts into the Tibetan language.

“I told him that Westerners don’t usually think of cells as having a mind,” Eisen recalls.

These are the sorts of conversations sparked by a groundbreaking program to bring the best of Western science to Tibetan monastics, and the insights of Buddhist meditative practices to Western scientists.

Launched in 2006, the program recently became officially known as the Robert A. Paul Emory Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). It was the vision of Paul, the former dean of Emory College, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama that led to the formation of the Emory Tibet Partnership and the ETSI.

“It’s the way globalization should happen – taking the best of different traditions and creating something new,” says Eisen, one of many Emory science faculty who are involved with developing the ETSI.
Geshe Lhakdor, director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, looks at one of the early textbooks created for the program. Photo by Kay Hinton.

“The enthusiasm and the commitment of the science faculty has been a huge gift,” says Geshe Lobsang Negi, co-director of the ETSI.

“It’s amazing how smoothly the program has developed,” Negi says. “The pieces keep coming together as we need them.”

Emory faculty are developing special science curricula for the monastics, and teaching it every summer at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan community in exile. The faculty are working in conjunction with three Tibetan translators based at Emory, and five more at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala.

Prototype materials were created in English covering three areas: physics, neuroscience and biology and the life sciences. Work is under way to refine the curricula, based on feedback from faculty and the monastics as the program progresses. The long-term goal is to develop and translate five primers for each of these three areas, and eventually integrate the five-year science education program into Tibetan monasteries and nunneries throughout India. (The completed texts for the first-year primers for neuroscience and for biology and the life sciences were recently sent to the printers.)

Instruction of the first cohort of 30 monastics began in 2008. Six monks from this cohort are on the Emory campus this fall, to sharpen their English skills while gaining more exposure to Western-style science.

“We want to train monastics and other science educators in India to teach the curriculum themselves, so that the program becomes rooted in the community and doesn’t disappear,” Eisen says.

Each year, ETSI keeps expanding its reach. Its student body now includes 90 monks and nuns from 19 different monastic institutions.

“When ETSI first began, there was quite a bit of skepticism in the monastic community about the idea,” Negi says. “Now we’re seeing a 180 degree shift in that attitude. There is huge interest and enthusiasm among the major monasteries for making Western science part of their education.”

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