Here’s a blurb I read in a newsletter from the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe:

Zen and Pain

The world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.
—Helen Keller

Zen meditation helps lower sensitivity to pain by thickening a part of the brain that regulates emotion and painful sensations, according to a study published recently.

University of Montreal researchers compared the grey matter thickness of 17 Zen meditators and 18 non-meditators and found evidence that practising the centuries-old discipline can reinforce a central part of the brain called the anterior cingulate. “Through training, Zen meditators appear to thicken certain areas of their cortex and this appears to underlie their lower sensitivity to pain,” lead author Joshua Grant said in a statement.

Building on an earlier study, the researchers measured thermal pain sensitivity by applying a heated plate to the calf of participants. This was followed by scanning the brains of subjects with structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The MRI results showed central brain regions that regulate emotion and pain were significantly thicker in meditators compared to non-meditators. “The often painful posture associated with Zen meditation may lead to thicker cortex and lower pain sensitivity,” Grant opined.

The study was published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion.

In the previous study, the researchers recruited Zen meditators with more than 1,000 hours of practice and non-meditators and measured their respective tolerance to pain.

Several of the meditators tolerated a maximum 53°C produced by a heating plate. They appeared to further reduce their pain partly through slower breathing: 12 breaths per minute versus an average of 15 breaths for non-meditators.

“Slower breathing certainly coincided with reduced pain and may influence pain by keeping the body in a relaxed state,” Grant said in the earlier study.

Ultimately, Zen meditators experience an 18% reduction in pain sensitivity, according to the original study.

I like learning about scientific discoveries, especially those that have to do with health and well-being and the brain. Sometimes the findings are surprising to me, and often I feel happy for scientists to be learning something that I already “know” is true! Because scientists learn using a painstaking method. I am not often painstaking, not a scientist.

But then, I could be wrong. It’s all a hypothesis to me–if a belief works, use it. If not, discard it. My Museum of Old Beliefs is vast!

Often these reports on scientific discoveries add to my knowledge about how the body-mind works because they contain details about areas like anatomy that I am finding more and more interesting. I have been buying picture books about anatomy. I don’t know where if anywhere this is leading, but I’m finding it more and more interesting.

I will post links on this blog to articles I come across that are interesting to me. Here’s the first one:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/02/11/damage-to-particular-brain-region-can-boost-transcendent-feelings/