How does Meditation Inspire Empathy, Compassion, Kindness and Positive Social Emotional Skills

When we conduct neuroscientific research on mindfulness meditation practices, we find that they have notable effects such as stress reduction, enhanced attention control, and improvements in motor, sensory, memory, and music skills. This is because the adult brain exhibits significant plasticity.

In today’s article, Structural Changes in Socio-Affective Networks: Multi-Modal MRI Findings in Long-Term Meditation Practitioners (Engen et al., 2018), the researchers highlight an aspect that was initially overlooked—the neural networks associated with socio-affective skills and their plasticity, particularly those related to positive emotions such as empathy and compassion. Through MRI studies, the researchers show that practices like loving-kindness meditation (metta meditation) or compassion meditation lead to plastic changes in brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and insula, increasing empathy and other positive emotions and enhancing prosocial behaviors.

The study recruited 17 long-term meditators (LTM), aged between 45 and 62, who belonged to the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. These participants had extensive meditation experience, with an average of 40,000 hours of practice over 30 years, engaging in daily altruistic, loving-kindness, and empathetic meditation. A control group of 15 healthy participants, matched for age, gender, and education level, was included, but none of them had any meditation experience.

Through structural MRI, the researchers observed changes in the cortical thickness of the meditators’ brains. Additionally, the study measured functional fluctuations during loving-kindness meditation to distinguish the effects of this specific meditation form from general meditation practices. The results showed that in the LTM group, regions such as the prefrontal cortex (the front of the brain), insula (related to emotions and awareness), and anterior cingulate cortex (involved in self-regulation) became more active during meditation. In contrast, some posterior brain regions (involved in bodily perception and visual processing) became less active. These areas of increased activity during meditation overlapped with regions of increased cortical thickness in the long-term meditators' brains, suggesting that long-term meditation might have lasting effects on both the structure and function of the brain. These regions play crucial roles in emotional generation, language processing, emotional regulation, and self-awareness, all of which are important for various aspects of social cognition and emotional processing.

This study provides compelling evidence that meditation, particularly practices related to empathy and compassion, can have enduring effects on both the brain’s structure and its ability to process emotions and engage in prosocial behaviors.

The researchers believe that these meditation practices may help individuals cultivate compassionate and loving emotional states by activating brain regions involved in socio-affective processing. Notably, these regions are also rich in opioid receptors, suggesting that meditation might stimulate these areas, leading to the release of endogenous opioids, which could explain the effects of pain relief and enhanced mood.

The researchers humbly acknowledged that due to the small sample size and the use of relatively lenient thresholds for data analysis, the results need to be replicated and validated in larger samples. However, this study has paved the way for further research in this area and has been frequently cited in subsequent studies related to the same theme.

©️Copyright: Please indicate the source 版权所有：转载请注明出处