Jose Drost-Lopez

Archive for 2011|Yearly archive page

Research on meditation, mindfulness and related psychotherapies

In Cognitive Sciences, Religions and spirituality on November 13, 2011 at 1:59 am

Buddhism involves not just a set beliefs but also a set of practices. Two of the most important and interrelated Buddhist practices are mindfulness and meditation. Both of these concepts have many formulations in different schools of Buddhist thought, but I’d like to zero in on a simplified definition of mindfulness that has guided Western psychologists and psychiatrists. In this definition, mindfulness has two components:

(1) Purposely keeping one’s attention on the flow of experiences in the present moment

(2) An attitude of nonjudgmental curiosity, openness, and acceptance toward these present experiences.

Having defined mindfulness, we can also take an initial stab at what counts as meditation. Meditation is a procedure for mindfully exploring and transforming one’s mind. Examples of traditional meditation styles include Transcendental Meditation, which involves concentrating on a mantra, and compassion meditation, which involves projecting one’s love and kindness to all sentient beings. Though attempts to adapt meditation have a long, global history, one recent trend in the West is to strip meditation down to a secular, easy to learn process intended to promote mental and bodily health.

Having defined mindfulness and mediation, we’re almost ready to talk about the research relating to them—but first a little history. Buddhism is like most disciplines that study the mind in that it existed long before experimental psychology. But when psychology did emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one particular psychologist stood out in welcoming influences from Buddhism. His name was William James, and he’s remembered as one of the greatest American psychologists. In his 1890 work The Principles of Psychology, he popularized a concept borrowed from Buddhist texts known as stream of consciousness. James borrowed that phrase to point out that our perceptions flow together seamlessly even though they integrate many distinct elements and discrete moments. In his later writings James promoted meditation as a useful introspective and therapeutic tool. Referring to Buddhism, he proclaimed: “This is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now.” It turns out he was basically wrong—the next big influences in psychology were the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, an Austrian, and the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner, an American. Even still, plenty of psychologists and writers over the decades tried to integrate Buddhist ideas into their thought. Then in the 1970s, psychologists and neuroscientists started collecting data from Buddhist practitioners.

One of the largest lines of research on meditation has involved a technique called electroencephalography, or EEG. In EEG, electrodes are placed along the scalp to detect voltage fluctuations due to the electrical activity of the brain. EEG has some limitations—for example, it only picks up on large bursts of activity, and it gives only a very rough sense of where in the brain neurons are firing. But the biggest limitations in these studies have related to their design: often they badly controlled, unclear in their definitions and sloppy in their data collection.

So these EEG studies are a work in progress and they’re difficult to interpret, but they do generally support two points. First, meditation and mindfulness exercises cause unique patterns of brain activity. These patterns seem to represent states of awareness that at are least partially separate from related states of relaxation, drowsiness, or concentration. The second main point is that practitioners’ brain activity depends on their experience level, intensity, and style of training, which suggests that meditation and mindfulness involve somewhat different experiences in different people.

The experience of meditation, like that of many spiritual practices, involves a diminished sense of self, space and time. These subjective feelings have been validated in various brain EEG studies. The studies show decreased activity in a part of parietal lobe that monitors location in space, as well as increased activity in parts of the frontal lobe involved in attention.

Beyond EEG there have been more recent studies that look meditating brains in a different way. One study that really made a media splash back in 2005 showed an association between meditation experience and thickness in the outer layer of the brain, or the cerebral cortex. Although there is a possibility that the 20 practitioners of insight mediation in this study had thicker cortices for reasons unrelated to meditation, the most plausible interpretation of the association is that in some parts of the cortex, meditation can slow down the thinning that occurs as people age. This might mean mediation can slow down cognitive decline at certain stages.

But meditation cheerleading can be taken too far, as psychologist Mark Epstein learned  in a meditation session gone bad. The setting was a spiritual retreat led by an American teacher named Ram Dass. One of the students at this retreat, a young man, started showing signs of hallucinations and psychotic delusions. Epstein observed as this happened, and was intrigued at the opportunity to see a spiritual approach to dealing with a psychotic person. Ram Dass spent a few minutes chanting with the young man and trying to center him meditatively, but the man became agitated and violent. As the man began to lash out, Ram Dass restrained him, but in the process the man bit Ram Dass in the stomach. Soon afterward he was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. Commenting on this episode, Epstein points out that meditation is not an all-purpose panacea, and that Western approaches including medications can be assets in promoting well-being.

The power of meditation shows itself beyond the brain. Cardiologist Herbert Benson found that experienced practitioners can decrease their blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen consumption. Benson calls this physiological response the relaxation response. Benson helps his patients initiate this response by introducing his patients to a simple meditative relaxation exercise. This exercise is simple for you to try. It involves sitting in a comfortable position, breathing deeply, relaxing all the muscles from toe to face, closing your eyes, and focusing on a single word or phrase. Benson’s patients usually focus on a favorite prayer, which brings up an interesting point about the portability of meditation practices across religious divides. That prayer can just as easily be Christian or Muslim and make for an effective session. Picking up this thread, the psychology textbook writer David Myers points out that meditative techniques have a long history in many religious traditions, and he gives the example of Gregory of Sinai, who in the early 1300s wrote basic instructions for Christians to meditate on Jesus.

There will plenty more progress in understanding meditation in the brain, but beware of vague headlines. Here are two recent headlines from major news outlets: “Brain scans show meditation changes minds.” “Compassion meditation changes the brain.” These claims might have a ring of impressiveness at first, but they usually just echo the mundane fact that all our experiences change the brain.

Mindfulness and psychotherapy

There’s a tantalizing but sometimes inconclusive body of evidence related to mindfulness-inspired therapy programs. Two increasingly popular therapeutic practices using Buddhist mindfulness techniques are Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Marsha M. Linehan’s Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Other prominent therapies that use mindfulness include Steven C. HayesAcceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and, based on MBSR, Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

Studies on these therapies show a surprising twist—there are documented adverse effects of mindfulness training, although they are almost always minor enough to be outweighed by the benefits. In part-time programs, these adverse effects include the mental discomfort and guilt that people feel when they fail to live up to some of their resolutions and expectations. In intensive retreats, some people mention vivid perceptual alterations during meditation, and a small study at one retreat even suggested that more experienced practitioners had spontaneous hallucinations and unusual perceptions more often, although they didn’t dwell much on these disturbances.

Now to the positive findings. Across the board, mindfulness-based interventions decrease people’s self-reported feelings of stress. Mindfulness exercises also lower people’s focus on financial gain, which in turn boosts their self-reported happiness. There a lot of more specific benefits attributed to mindfulness, but in assessing these claims, we have to be careful about turning a blind eye to classic problems that confront psychology experiments. Usually the experimenter can’t avoid biasing results due to their expectations and assumptions. That’s why in clinical trials the gold standard is the double-blind trial, in which neither the patient nor doctor know which treatment is being administered. Of course it’s not feasible to blind people to what type of counseling they give or receive, so we have the accept the presence of self-fulfilling expectations, especially in participants in counseling programs, who are likely to initiate a strong placebo response to that has little to do with mindfulness or meditation per se. In addition, studies of mindfulness programs often have small sample sizes, roughly meaning groups under 30 people, in which chance anomalies are easy to mistake for positive or negative results.

So let’s shift back to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR. This is an eight-week part-time program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn over a ten year period with over four thousand patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Kabat-Zinn deserves a lot of credit for initiating serious clinical studies of mindfulness techniques. But what do the studies say?

When psychologist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin assigned volunteers either to a control group or two an eight-week MBSR course, the trained volunteers showed more left-hemisphere activity, which is associated with positive emotions, and improved immune functioning. These benefits may help explain a 1989 study of 73 residents of homes for the elderly that randomly assigned them to Transcendental Meditation, mindfulness training, relaxation training, or no intervention. After three years, it was clear that the meditation training group was healthiest, followed by the mindfulness group. Whereas no one in the meditation group had died, a fourth of the control group had died. Meditators also performed best on a battery of tests and ratings for associative learning; cognitive flexibility; word fluency; mental health; systolic blood pressure; behavioral flexibility and aging,

Then there was a 2004 meta-analysis in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research that reviewed 64 research reports and aggregated the results of the 20 studies that met quality criteria. They found that MBSR can help a broad range of individuals cope with clinical and nonclinical problems. Most studies showed similar statistical effect sizes of about 0.5, which means that the average MBSR participant had better mental health than 69% of people in the general population. Note that this modest effect size is comparable with the effectiveness of established Western psychotherapy techniques.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is another Western-style approach to therapy that draws on Buddhism. It encourages neutral acceptance of unpleasant facts and includes mindfulness training as a core skill to enact change. DBT was designed help people with mood disorders and personality disorders, so studies of its effectiveness haved focus on these disorders. Controlled clinical studies have demonstrated DBT’s effectiveness for people with borderline personality disorder. Research indicates that DBT is also effective in treating patients who present varied symptoms and behaviors associated with spectrum mood disorders, including self-injury. Recent work suggests its effectiveness with sexual abuse survivors and chemical dependency.

Our whirlwind tour is coming to a close. You can learn much more from Chris Mace of the University of Warwick. Through the interplay of meditation and mindfulness with Western science and therapy, Buddhism has made a profound contribution to science with its mindfulness and meditation techniques and  many aspects of Buddhist beliefs complement the latest orthodoxy in neuropsychology. Science still has plenty to learn from and about Buddhism, and conversely, Buddhist teachings are still assimilating modern research findings. In the coming years it will be fun to watch that cross-pollination on a larger and larger scale.


This is the last in a series  on Buddhism and neuropsychology. Read more:

The origin story of Buddhism

Contrasting views of the self

Preventing depression and boosting well-being with mindfulness (videos)

The Self: Buddhism vs Neuropsychology

In Cognitive Sciences, Religions and spirituality on November 13, 2011 at 12:54 am

The Buddhist view of the self has fascinating overlaps with the orthodox view among today’s neuroscientists. To Buddhists, the sense of self is an harmful illusion in the mind,  a fiction foisted onto perception. The pros and cons of selfhood are subtle, but let’s start with the point of agreement: our sense of self is deceptive. The key deception is the notion unity and consistency in our personalities.

False unity

In his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker describes the mind as a collection of specialized modules and submodules with different functions. For the most part these modules crunch information outside our awareness much the way computers do, which allows us to perceive, navigate, and survive in the world. But then there are more general modules that weigh in directly on our decisions. Think for a moment about the disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner, who sent lewd pictures of himself to women he didn’t know. We can imagine a conflict in his mind between modules craving sex and dominance and very separate modules that regulate his behavior according to social norms. We’d have to assume that his modules for forecasting future consequences were mostly inactive or simply overpowered by urges from elsewhere in the brain.

The picture that results from this line of thinking is one of many processes in the brain bickering with each other, struggling to overpower the others like vote-hungry politicians or rival states in a confederacy. This is sort of bickering that Freud hypothesized between the Ego, the Superego, and the Id, but it’s more fragmented than that.  All our choices are the final acts of arguments in the brain that can take place on the order of milliseconds or days. And our sense of self is something like a CEO telling a post-hoc story about his corporation. We are only aware of a tiny sliver of what is happening throughout our minds. And this isn’t just idle speculation—there’s a large body of research documenting that unconscious social, physical, and language cues affect people’s behaviors, and documenting that people easily make up false stories to explain their disparate thought processes (David Eagleman’s new book drives this home).

The main takeaway is that Buddhists have been right to doubt our feeling of consistent control over our minds. The way things feel isn’t the way things are. The mind does not take a static stance, but is instead in constant flux, and this resonates with the Buddhist concept of impermance, or anicca. At some point, however, neuroscience becomes a bit more counterintuitive than Buddhism. Whereas  most Buddhist writings assert some sort of free will that allows people to be morally accountable, hard determinism is the dominant assumption in science. Here is a long quote from Joshua Green and colleagues elaborating on this assumption:

Neuroscience holds the promise of turning the black box of the mind into a transparent bottleneck. There are many causes that impinge on behaviour, but all of them—from the genes you inherited, to the pain in your lower back, to the advice your grandmother gave you when you were six—must exert their influence through the brain. Thus, your brain serves as a bottleneck for all the forces spread throughout the universe of your past that affect who you are and what you do. every decision is a thoroughly mechanical process, the outcome of which is completely determined by the results of prior mechanical processes. we have little reason to doubt that (i) the state of the universe 10 000 years ago, (ii) the laws of physics, and (iii) the outcomes of random quantum mechanical events are together sufficient to determine everything that happens nowadays, including our own actions. These things are all clearly beyond our control.”

Effects of selfhood

Buddhism and science are not nearly as aligned in their views on how harmful the self is. There’s no doubt that, as taught in Buddhism, anxieties and insecurities are tied up with self-conscious, judgmental thinking. And there’s also little doubt that decreasing self-conscious thought will generally boost people’s well-being. One famous psychologist, Mikhail Csíkszentmihályi, has found that happy people tend to seek interesting and challenging experiences that fully immerse their attention and channel their motivation. The resulting state is called flow, colloquially known as being “in the zone” or “on the ball,” and as in mindfulness, flow involves loosing the grip of self-consciousness and focusing attention on the moment. But beyond this initial agreement, psychology can help deconstruct the vague idea of the self into specific dimensions. These include an awareness of our body, an awareness of certain types of thoughts, a feeling of ownership and control over the mind, memories of events in our life, an interpretation of our social identity, a concept of our physical and mental traits, and a sense of consistent goals and values. It’s worth looking at some of these dimensions separately to check if some of them are useful, or maybe just plain unavoidable.

One crucial aspect of the self is called agency, which is the personal experience of creating our thoughts and actions. Never mind that agency can be a misleading feeling—there are many documented psychiatric and neurological disorders that remind us how agency can be desirable. Take schizophrenia, for example, which often involves an impaired sense of agency. Many schizophrenics experience their thoughts and actions as foreign. Here are some real examples from schizophrenic patients of the broken boundary between self and other:

  • Auditory hallucinations: A woman hears a voice she attributes to God saying things like “Shut up and get out of here.
  • Thought insertion: A man feels that another man named Chris is shutting down is mind to plant thoughts about killing people.
  • Thought withdrawal: A man feels a mysterious force blocking him from thinking what he wants to think about.
  • Passivity experiences: “They inserted a computer into my brain. It makes me move to the left or right”
  • Made emotions: “It puts feelings into me…”
  • Somatic passivity: “I have tingling feelings in my legs caused by electrical currents from an alternator.”

All these experiences of impaired agency tend to be disturbing and provoke paranoia. For Jared Loughner, the schizophrenic who shot representative Gabrielle Gifford’s, this paranoia fuels his belief that the government exerts mind control on everyone by controlling grammar. So in schizophrenia, the loss of agency, which we might call an involuntary breakdown in the illusion of self-control, causes more suffering than it prevents.

Of course for most people there’s no reason to legitimately worry about losing basic aspects of agency and self-concept. My point is that our sense of self has multiple components and that only some of them are worth diminishing.

Dementia in elderly people also features certain impairments of self. In Alzheimer’s disease, harmful plaques first develop in the hippocampus and precuneus, two areas key to recalling our past and imagining our future. As a result Alzheimer’s patients gradually lose their internal life story. Then there’s frontotemporal dementia, which more dramatically challenges our intuitions about self. In frontotemporal dementia, large swaths the frontal and temporal lobes degenerate, often leading to surprising personality changes. Science writer Carl Zimmer gives some examples: “One patient… had collected jewelry and fine crystal for much of her life before abruptly starting to gather stuffed animals at age 62. A lifelong conservative, she began to berate people in stores who were buying conservative books. Other patients have suddenly converted to new religions or become obsessed with painting or photography when they previously had no interest.”

Based on these glimpses of self-related dysfunction, I hope you can develop a more refined sense of what’s worth holding onto or letting go of. Personally, I cannot avoid my sense of agency, but I’m glad for the coherency it gives to my daily life. And I’m definitely grateful to have a reliable store of autobiographical memories that help me tell a story about my past and future. Then there are aspects of myself I think should be more open to negotiation, such as my beliefs about my strengths and weaknesses. Untangling the self is a subtle challenge, and neuroscience suggests some of those self-bits are welcome to stay.

The Story of Buddhism

In Religions and spirituality, Stories on November 12, 2011 at 11:56 pm

This is the first of a series of posts on Buddhism and psychology, based on my PsychTalk interview on the same topic. Without further ado, let’s start off with a story:

Buddhism began with a prince born in a small kingdom in the Northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent. This prince was named Siddhārtha Gautama. In the traditional account, he grew up with little knowledge of religions or of the suffering in the world. His marriage was arranged at 16 and he had a son, named Rahul. At the age of 29 he finally ventured away from palace, and he was surprised to meet a very old man. His charioteer explained to him that everyone ages until death. Siddharta made more trips into town, leading him to face a diseased man, a corpse, and a begging holy man. Dissatisfied with his wealthy lifestyle and searching for meaning, he left his life as a prince to live the simple, stoic life of an ascetic. He studied under two hermits, and then joined five companions to practice extreme self-deprivation. After a period of eating only a leaf or a nut a day, he collapsed in a river while washing himself. He almost drowned. This spurred him to reconsider his path. He decided to continue meditating but to reject extremes of deprivation or indulgence. His companions disagreed, viewing him as undisciplined, so they left him. Siddharta, now 35 years old, sat alone under a fig tree, vowing not to leave until he found truth. On his 49th day in this meditative journey, he is said to have attained the highest state of enlightenment, known as Nirvana. Soon he embarked on a journey to share his teachings, which collectively came to be known as the Dharma. After his death at the age of 80, his followers passed down his teachings by oral tradition for four centuries until they were gradually written down in the first century before Christ. The first set of Buddhist scriptures was composed in northern India and is known as the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon underlies the oldest school of Buddhism known as Theravada. A separate array of texts developed in southern India became the focus of a second school known as Mahayana. Mahayana Buddhism had more mystical and devotional aspects but the same basic goals of enlightened awareness and of liberation from suffering. It became more popular than Theravada and spread East across the vast Asian continent, where it split into Tibetan Buddhism and East Asian forms. Skipping forward to today, Buddhism in all its forms is the fourth largest religion in the world after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. One of the most public Buddhist figures is the 14thDalai Lama, who leads the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama takes a deep interest in science, especially neuroscience. And for that reason he’s a great segue for my main topic: the intersections of neuropsychology and Buddhism

Dilemma after death: when the truth is harmful

In Movies on September 24, 2011 at 1:34 am

Some philosophers have a great excuse to watch movies: stories help explore moral dilemmas. Here’s a dilemma from the trailer for the movie Margaret (my summary below):

A bus driver flirts with you for a few seconds while driving, causing him/her to hit and kill a pedestrian at the crosswalk. On a guilty and sympathetic impulse, you tell investigators that the traffic light was green, but it was actually red. You find out the bus driver takes care of a family and is a decent person. Do you correct your testimony, even though the driver will lose his/her job and be charged with a crime? Or do you let your lie stand and try to forget the whole thing?


Gladiator 5k pits young against old, men against women


Gladiator 5k Race Times (secs)


Race Time By Age


Age Distribution (n = 771)



Female Times (N = 372, 1 outlier excluded)



Race Time By Sex

Race Time By Age Block



Chasing perfection: a tale of sequential decision-making


Now *that's* my kind of piano teacher.


Sequential decisions



The experiment




Murky math and puppy paradoxes



It's easiest to have the puppy pick you.



Die Hard in Spanish (The fun and mystery of translation discrepancies)

In Movies on May 17, 2011 at 12:51 pm

Or...Hasta la vista, bebe?

I recently popped Live Free or Die Hard from Netflix into my DVD player only to realize that I had already watched it. Undeterred by my memory mishap, I made the movie more interesting by adding Spanish dubbing and subtitles. I was in for a surprise. As amusing as it was to watch Bruce Willis destroy a helicopter with a kamikaze car and defeat seasoned martial artists with sloppy brawling, the oddities of the Spanish translations took me in.

In general, the dubbing and subtitles are drastically different in word choice and phrasing even though the meaning tends to feel similar enough. The subtitles look more like a transliteration, giving the impression that they were made directly from the English script with less eye to context. One telling example is the subtitled translation of “fire sale” coming out to “liquidación de incendio,” in contrast to “invasión general” in the dubbing. In context, “fire sale” is security jargon for the systematic takeover and shutdown of a country’s infrastructure, so the dubbing gets closer to the take-over-the-world gist.

Yet the extra layer of interpretation in the voice-over also felt less true to the film at times. A couple speechless or inaudible moments are “filled in” with dubbed Spanish, such as when an FBI character speaks inaudibly to generic staffers, and when Bruce Willis closes a car door on his hacker companion. I was also surprised by one scene toward the end in which Willis ties up a henchman he has seriously injured:

English: Time to take a nap, pal. [spoken with gruff, ominous tone]

Spanish voice: Don’t move, I’ll send you a doctor. [spoken apologetically]

Subtitles: Time to take a nap, pal.

Apparently the voiceover team, which might not have felt as supportive of the beat-down as Americans, saw the need to soften the tone.

There’s a mystery here I’ve only partially cracked: who created the two translations, and where? I have a faint guess that the dubbing happened in Mexico, because (1) dubbing is big there, (2) I heard the Mexicanism “güey” used (along with an inserted reference to diabetes, which is a huge problem in Mexico), and (3) the language was mostly familiar to me (I lived in Mexico for two years). Still, I would love more certainty and behind-the-scenes (hah) details.  Both translations seem to strive for Neutral Spanish, which obscures their origins. Can someone help me? Below are transcriptions I made from arbitrary parts of the movie; let me know if you notice anything!

Dubbed Subtitled
es lógico claro que sí
? bocadillos
entrando en pánico cundir el pánico
se calló el sistema falla el sistema
A trabajar! Vamos!
rastro digital huella digital
no lo creo, amigo hoy no, estatua de cera
subir (el video) cargar (el video)
soy de presión baja mi azucar en la sangre está baja
no dudaremos no flaquearemos
tenebroso escalofriante
invasión general liquidación de incendio
me importa un carajo no me importa
asesinar matar
despejar abrir
el muro la pared
hackers piratas
payasadas tonterías, linda
tarado imbécil

‘Proofiness’: The Wrong Kind of Math








Calculating Sample Variance in Python

In Personal on April 23, 2011 at 5:21 am

I am taking a break from my usual psychology antics to share some statistics-related code with the world. I wrote this Python program using standard libraries (no stats libraries) to verify that using (n-1) instead of (n) to calculate sample variance is a better long-run estimator of population variance. I’m quite sure both the code and the math is sloppy: let me know so I can refine it!

(Originally, I tried pasting the code in, but I got ugly extra line breaks, so I’ve linked to the text file above).

Simplifying English Spelling? Not So Simple.






