I think therefore I am warm

Guardian June 3^rd 1999

In the early part of this century, the explorer Alexandra David-Neel describes a scene she witnessed during her travels in her book, My journey to Lhasa, ‘I saw several of these masters practising the art of tummo, sitting in the snow night after night, completely naked and immobile, and deep in their meditation, while the terrible ravages of winter spun and screamed around them. I saw, in the brilliant clarity of the full moon, the fantastic examination that their disciples had to take: several young men were led, in the heart of winter, to the shore of a lake or a river where, stripped of all their clothes, they had to dry sheets soaked in the icy water on their own flesh. Hardly had one sheet been dried than it was replaced by another. Stiffened by ice as soon as it emerged from the water, it was soon steaming on the shoulders of the [monk] as if it had been placed on a burning stove.’

What David-Neel describes is one of the more rigorous practices connected with Buddhist meditation. The mind, when trained in a particular way, is capable of altering the body’s physiology. One man who has spend his life exploring the effect Zen Buddhism has on the brain is a neurologist, Professor James Austin, now retired from the University of Colorado. He’s recorded his own personal voyage of discovery as well as detailing the impact meditative practices can have in his book Zen and the Brain which won the 1998 book prize awarded by the Science and Medicine Network.

Zen, popularised by motor biking authors, and Western hippies, has traditionally remained outside the province of science. Indeed, science and Buddhism are dialectically in opposition. As the first master to instruct Austin, Nanrei Kobori-roshi, points out academics are driven by curiosity, they want to know, and define words and objects. In Zen one simply accepts all things, taking a broad, compassionate interest in them for themselves. Without words.

Zen is many things to many people, but the foundations of this faith are the four ‘noble’ truths which are that, firstly, life is full of suffering and dissatisfaction, secondly, our desires cause this suffering, thirdly, the way out of suffering is to relinquish our desires, and finally, it is possible to do this by changing one’s thoughts and behaviours through meditation.

The purpose of meditation is to heighten awareness and decrease self-awareness in some cases to such an extent that it is possible to dry sheets on one’s naked body at temperatures below freezing. Psychologist Professor John Crook, from Bristol University, also a convert to Buddhism, describes how American scientists obtained permission from the Dalai Lama to carry out tests on the meditating monks initially witnessed by David-Neel. “On the first night they had sat outside but the Americans, dressed in padded anoraks, found that without gloves their fingers became numb so quickly that they could not fix the electrodes to the body to obtain their readings. The tests had to be done indoors,” says Crook. “Apparently the were very happy with their findings. What amused the monks very much was that the Americans had never asked them how to do it!”

Even if the average Buddhist cannot dry damp sheets, most practitioners do experience certain physiological changes during meditation. One study by Dr. Ratree Sudsuang and his colleagues from the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, showed that serum cortisol levels, heart rate, blood pressure and lung volume all decreased. An increase in these levels is associated with stress leading the researchers to suggest that meditation reduces stress. Certainly all the participants claimed they were in a state of tranquillity.

EEG readings (which record the brain’s electrical activity) show that during meditation alpha brain waves tend to increase. These are the fastest brain waves which cycle up and down 8 to 12 times a second. Patients who can watch their own EEG and learn to increase their alpha brain waves report a feeling of well being. Apparently devout Protestants who pray for half an hour a day also increase their alpha frequency. The overall pattern of brain waves is remarkably like that produced during desynchronised sleep - the kind of sleep in which dreaming sometimes occurs. Most practitioners are not actually dozing, their brain is in a very similar state to an active, awake brain, says Austin. “The goal is to remain alert, aware, awake, and let thoughts drop out by themselves,” he adds.

Well-trained meditators can take as few as four to six breaths per minute. Most of us breath three times faster. A slower rate of breathing quietens the brain by reducing the amount of times nerve cells fire which contributes to a calming sensation. During Zen meditation it is important to sit in a cross-legged posture with a straight back and without moving; this cuts down external sensations and, in experienced meditators, has the effect of almost being in a state of sensory deprivation.

Austin claims meditation can induce a state of disinhibition: brain waves, and brain chemicals are not interacting as they normally would. “In a sense, [meditation] loosens some of the physiological bonds which hold each of our ordinary states together. Rigorous meditation dismantles the barriers that separate one state from another.” This emphasis on attentiveness and awareness for relatively long periods of time has reported beneficial effects for health, visual acuity, athletic prowess, academic ability, creativity and also decreases anxiety.

One of the main goals of meditation is to lose the ‘self’ and view the world without our own constantly commenting self-consciousness. Austin says, “Before I started Zen training, I could never have imagined how it would feel to lose the ‘self’. Only after I underwent two different kinds of alternate state experiences - one more superficial and one at a deeper level - would it become obvious: each event had peeled off different layers of my egocentric self. A term, internal absorption, describes the first, shallower category of such experiences. It briefly dissolves the sense of the physical self. In contrast, the later variety reflects a deeper penetration, an ‘awakening’ to insight-wisdom. It is also known as kensho-satori in the Zen tradition. In this category of experiences, the sense of one's psychic self dissolves. “

After years of meditation, some Zen Buddhists experience ‘enlightenment’ where physical and mental self-awareness disappear and the practitioner feels at one with the universe. Austin attempts to describe it: “It is a singular state, this sensate loss, combined with an awareness amplified to brilliant intensity. No such mixture is possible to imagine. A person must have been there and returned.” Enlightenment is characterised by a lack of spontaneous thoughts, an intensified, internal awareness, an expansion of awareness into space, the disappearance of self, sight and sound and a feeling of deep serenity.

What causes a person to have these sudden flashes of insight is usually a sudden event from the caw of a crow to the crash of a china tea-cup. Austin thinks that what happens is that the meditating brain is in a quiet, but active state. A noise or sensation creates an ‘overshoot’ - a massive surge of chemicals is released in the brain: acetylcholine and glutamate, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. These chemicals have a cascade effect on the rest of the brain: first they inhibit gabba nerve cells. Gabba nerve cells normally inhibit networks in the front and inner part of the brain that deal with attention and association formation. If the gabba nerve cells are knocked out, these networks are no longer inhibited and are capable of responding in an unusual way, creating the sensation of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘kensho-satori’.

Buddhism (despite the Dalai Lama’s warning to stick to your own religion) is becoming increasingly popular. Austin explains why: “We are living in an artificial age of Information Overload. Our Cro-Magnon-era brains were not truly designed to process all this unwanted junk, nor to be stimulated into the possibilities of so many trivial pursuits. Accordingly, human beings have come to discover a deep, instinctual yearning for extended moments and hours of information un-load. This leads many persons to reach out toward more meaningful paths - call them spiritual if you wish - which seem to help them appreciate this present moment: things as they really are.“ Cro-Magnon they might be, but as Scandinavian scientist Gosta Ehrensvard wrote, "Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility."

Zen and the brain: Towards an understanding of meditation and consciousness by James Austin, published by MIT Press