Maybe we're not so hard-headed after all

Conventional wisdom has held that the adult human brain is "hard-wired" and "set" in its ways and that no changes can be made to it. However, new research on neuroplasticiy shows that it's possible to change the brain's structure and function through mental techniques. Foremost among them is meditation, which, according to the Dalai Lama could use thought to change the actual material composition of the brain. The following articles from the Alliance for Human Research Protection website detail what these new discoveries are and what they can lead to - including world peace.

Neuroscientists are venturing into new areas positing that through attentive thinking (meditating) we can reshape the hard drive of our brains.

Below are excerpts selected by Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal science columnist, from her own book, "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain."

The subject--mind over matter--would have been off-limits just a few years ago when biological psychiatry held an iron grip on scientific discourse about the brain, having banished even the concept of mind.

Neuroscience was revolutionized in 2004 when it was discovered contrary to previous dogma, that brain neurotransmitters are plastic rather than rigid. Adult brains, it was discovered, were plastic and changeable. The brain's neuroplasticity means that the brain has the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience.

Begley writes that the Dalai Lama added another dimension: namely, the theory that the mind has the ability--through directed meditation (rigorous thinking) to change the brain as well.

This, I believe, may be a scientific turning point away from the dogma of biological psychiatry and its reductionist approach to mental functions. That mechanistic simplification of the human dimension is likely to be relegated to the dust heap of history's long trail of failed theories.

The challenge posed by Canadian neuroscientist, Helen Mayberg, who in 2002 discovered that placebos - sugar pills - work the same way on the brains of depressed people as antidepressants do, has never been addressed by psychiatry's leadership. She reported that in both groups: "Activity in the frontal cortex, the seat of higher thought, increased; activity in limbic regions, which specialize in emotions, fell."

However, when using brain imaging to measure activity in the brains of depressed adults comparing brain responses of patients prescribed an antidepressant (Paxil) compared to patients receiving cognitive behavioral therapy, Dr. Mayberg and colleagues at the University of Toronto were surprised by their findings. They reported that all the patients' depression lifted, regardless of whether their brains were infused with a powerful drug or with a different way of thinking. Yet the only "drugs" that the cognitive-therapy group received were their own thoughts.

The scientists scanned their patients' brains again, expecting that the changes would be the same no matter which treatment they received, as Dr. Mayberg had found in her placebo study. But no. "We were totally dead wrong," she says.

"Cognitive-behavior therapy muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic, analysis and higher thought. The antidepressant raised activity there. Cognitive-behavior therapy raised activity in the limbic system, the brain's emotion center. The drug lowered activity there. With cognitive therapy, says Dr. Mayberg, the brain is rewired "to adopt different thinking circuits." Thus, those patients who received cognitive therapy learned not to catastrophize. They were taught to break their habit of interpreting every little setback as a calamity, as when they conclude from a lousy date that no one will ever love them."

The possibility of reshaping one's emotions by redirecting one's own thought process--opens the way toward changing people's perceptions about themselves and others--violence (and wars) could be rendered as obsolete, unacceptable solutions to resolving disputes.

In that case, there may be real hope for the human race to survive the current era of bloodshed.

Continuation of this article including a Wall Street Journal article with further excerpts and commentary by Begley.