Rev. Danny Fisher

In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a splendid little piece in the “Notes from Academe” section about Cambodia’s “Pagoda Boys”–young men from the country who live in the pagodas while they pursue higher education in the cities.

They arrive in [Phnom Penh] carrying little more than a suitcase and a bag of rice. Most have no money, only a letter from a senior monk, attesting that they are poor but deserving students.

They come here, to the ornately carved pagodas of Phnom Penh, seeking places to stay. The monks have a long tradition of allowing young men from the countryside to live in the pagodas while they go to university. Even the prime minister, when he was young, was once a Pagoda Boy.

The article and the magnificent photographs that accompany it stay with the reader long after the pages have been turned.

The accommodations are simple, almost grim. The beds, 4-by-10-foot wooden platforms raised up on bricks, are where students eat, sleep, and study. The practically windowless rooms heave with teetering bamboo bookshelves and piles of papers. Electric wires hang like streamers. Dishes, books, and bicycle parts spill out from under the beds.

What doesn’t fit underneath dangles from the ceiling.

[...]

Occasionally there are tensions: A transistor radio is playing too loudly, or a student comes back after curfew and finds the gates locked. But students have a deep reverence for the monks and Buddhist traditions. Rules are not really necessary. Just below the sign that says “Lights out at 11,” another says, “Respect each other–take care of each other.”

For a tiny profile piece, it also never loses sight of the harsh realities.

Everyone living here has a story. The Khmer Rouge claimed grandparents; poverty has taken parents. Some find work so they can send money back to their families to help younger brothers and sisters stay in school. The students living here, who made it into college, know they are the lucky ones.

The Buddhist Channel picked up an item today about two recent and particularly exciting studies produced by researchers at U.C.L.A. In one study, a group of psychologists noticed a change in the brain when subjects attached a word to an emotion: their work suggests that labelling the thought “anger” when you see a picture that inspires anger, for example, actually brings about physiological changes in the amygdala (the part of the brain that “serves as an alarm to activate a cascade of biological systems to protect the body in times of danger”).

“When you attach [a word to the emotion], you see a decreased response in the amygdala,” said [Matthew D. Lieberman, U.C.L.A. associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience], lead author of the study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The study showed that while the amygdala was less active when an individual labeled the feeling, another region of the brain was more active: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is located behind the forehead and eyes and has been associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences.

It has also been implicated in inhibiting behavior and processing emotions, but exactly what it contributes has not been known.

“What we’re suggesting is when you start thinking in words about your emotions–labeling emotions–that might be part of what the right ventrolateral region is responsible for,” Lieberman said.

Seeing the implications of Lierberman’s work for those of us interested in the intersection of Buddhism and psychology, David Creswell, a research scientist with the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at U.C.L.A., began another study on the role of mindfulness meditation in this sort of brain activity.

“One way to practice mindfulness meditation and pay attention to present-moment experiences is to label your emotions by saying, for example, ‘I’m feeling angry right now’ or ‘I’m feeling a lot of stress right now’ or ‘this is joy’ or whatever the emotion is,” said Creswell, lead author of [another] study, which will be featured in an upcoming issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, a leading international medical journal for health psychology research.

[...]

Previous studies have shown that mindfulness meditation is effective in reducing a variety of chronic pain conditions, skin disease, stress-related health conditions and a variety of other ailments, he said. Creswell and his UCLA colleagues–Lieberman, Eisenberger and Way–found that during the labeling of emotions, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was activated, which seems to turn down activity in the amygdala.

They then compared participants’ responses on the mindfulness questionnaire with the results of the labeling study.

“We found the more mindful you are, the more activation you have in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the less activation you have in the amygdala,” Creswell said.

“We also saw activation in widespread centers of the prefrontal cortex for people who are high in mindfulness. This suggests people who are more mindful bring all sorts of prefrontal resources to turn down the amygdala.”

This is all big news for a number of reasons. First and foremost, as the author of the article pithily articulates it:

These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health.

“The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex can turn down the emotional response you get when you feel angry,” [Creswell] said. “This moves us forward in beginning to understand the benefits of mindfulness meditation. For the first time, we’re now applying scientific principles to try to understand how mindfulness works.

Another neat aspect of all this work is that it scientifically validates core teachings of the Buddha. This is not especially important per se, but it’s…well, neat.

“This is such an exciting study because it brings together the Buddha’s teachings–more than 2,500 years ago, he talked about the benefits of labeling your experience–with modern neuroscience,” Creswell said.

“Now, for the first time since those teachings, we have shown there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness meditation. Our findings are consistent with what mindfulness meditation teachers have taught for thousands of years.”

For some of my own teachings about mindfulness meditation, please click here and here.