Science Vs - Meditation

Episode Date: May 25, 2017

Silicon Valley CEOs, Tibetan monks, and crunchy hippies alike describe meditation as blissful and life-changing, but what does the science say? Can it reduce stress, increase your attention, and improve mental health -- or is all this focus on breathing just a bunch of hot air? Sit back, get comfortable, and focus your mind as we talk to Tim Ferriss, Professor Gaelle Desbordes, Dr. Clifford Saron, and Dr. Britta Hölzel. Please note: we have updated this episode. We removed a reference to Peter Thiel, the founder of Paypal. He was a guest on Tim Ferriss' show, but didn't discuss whether he meditates.  Our SponsorsEveryday Bravery - Listen to Everyday Bravery, a podcast from Prudential, by going to everydaybravery.comWordpress - go to wordpress.com/science to get 15% off a new website Credits: This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, Ben Kuebrich, Heather Rogers and Wendy Zukerman. Kaitlyn Sawrey is our senior producer. We’re edited by Annie Rose Strasser. Fact checking by Ben Kuebrich. Music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. Extra thanks to Dr Jonathan Schooler, Dr Florian Kurth Aldis Wieble and Dr. Madhav Goyal. Selected References:CDC Report: Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Adults: United States, 2002–2012Review of Neuroimaging Studies on Meditators Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis - JAMA review of Clinical Trials with Active ControlsIntensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychological mediators - Dr. Cliff Saron’s study on telomerase activity after a meditation retreat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus from Gimlet Media. On today's show, we're pitting facts against fads, and we're exploring the powers of meditation. This is so pretty. What is this? That is... I think it's a parrot. So every once in a blue moon, you will spot a parrot in San Francisco. I'm walking with Tim Ferriss in this beautiful park in San Francisco. There's winding paths and it's dotted with hikers and dogs on leashes.

Tim is a best-selling author who writes books that tell you how to exponentially increase your income while working for only a few hours a week or how to get a buff body with barely any gym time. Ultimately, Tim describes himself as a... Professional dilettante, human guinea pig, self-experimenter. I've written a couple of books that sound like infomercial products, like The 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour This and That.

Now, as a self-experimenter, Tim is always trying to improve his life and his mind. And this is something he talks about on his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, where he interviews successful people about what makes them successful. I interview 200, 250 of what I consider to be the world's top performers across every possible discipline, from physics to mathematics, chess, military, entertainment. And one of the few common threads is that they almost all have a mindfulness practice. And one of the most popular is meditation. People like US Senator Cory Booker and even

Arnold Schwarzenegger told Tim how great meditation had been for them. Here's Arnie talking about it on Tim's show. I don't feel overwhelmed anymore. Even today, I still benefit from that. I take on one challenge at a time. So Tim kept hearing again and again about how useful meditation had been for some really successful people. And so he wanted to try it out.

I've always been very, very aggressive. And I think that it became a real handicap. And there was a huge personal toll. So the Tim of before meditation would have been much more reactive. That's the word. I would have been much more prone to knee-jerk reactivity. So I would feel someone had slapped me in the face, I'm going to slap them back with twice the power.

And now there is a space in between that stimulus and my response where I can pause and observe what my first impulse is, and I can choose maybe the second impulse. According to Tim, meditation's effects are so clear that he can put a number on it. He says that his anxiety and stress has dropped by 50%. Pre-meditation, you're in the washing machine. Post-meditation, you're outside the washing machine looking through the glass at what's going on inside. And so Tim took us to the place in this park where he

likes to get out of the washing machine in his mind. To get to it, we scrambled up some rocks and then got to this lovely spot overlooking downtown San Francisco. I just say think to myself, not out loud, thinking, thinking, and then go back to just trying to experience with my senses what is happening in front of me because it's gorgeous and I should be paying attention while I'm here. And Tim and his successful buddies are not alone in taking up meditation. About 18 million Americans have tried it,

that's according to the National Institutes of Health. And because the benefits of meditation are said to be so huge, some of the biggest tech companies are diving in. Google, Intel, Twitter and Facebook all have meditation programs for their employees. In fact, the term meditation is so big in tech land right now that around Silicon Valley, some refer to it as a 15-minute mind hack. Today on the show, we're looking into whether meditation really does all the things that people

claim it does. Can it reduce your stress? Does it increase your focus? And can it really help your mental health? When it comes to meditation, there are lots of mind hacks out there. But then there's science. Science vs Meditation is coming up just after the break. Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special.

Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11?

I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. So before we delve into the science of meditation, let's just do a little Meditation 101. Meditation is a spiritual practice that started in India more than 2,500 years ago.

And back then, people who did it often gave up everything they owned and spent their days meditating to reach a state of sublime peace. These days, meditation is less about giving up worldly possessions and more about getting into a Zen headspace. And so to get an idea of what this is like, we asked meditation instructor Britta Herzl to lead us through a quick meditation session. So sit quietly and relax and let's do it all together. First of all, bring your awareness to the body and become aware of how you're sitting in this moment.

So taking a moment to feel into the contact that your buttocks make with the chair, the contact that the soles of your feet make with the ground. Notice the position of your back, of your chest, and any sensations related to that. And then turning attention towards the sensations of breathing. And just notice what it feels like when the breath enters the body and when the breath leaves the body. Bringing your attention to this one breath that is happening right now, right here in this moment. And there is no need to change it in any way or make it any different. But we're just observing. We're just feeling what it feels like to be breathing.

Ah. Now, the meditation that we just did is called mindfulness meditation. And you can do it at home or with a group or even on what's called a Vipassana retreat, which is where people meditate for hours on end, day after day, and they do it in silence. And Britta told us that you don't necessarily have to meditate sitting cross-legged or even in a park on some rocks.

You can practise meditation anytime, like even when you wash the dishes or just take a shower. We can take a shower and not really know that we're doing it. We're not feeling the sensations of the water on our skin, or so to say. And that would be, mindful showering would be exactly that, to really be there, to be present as you're taking a shower, feeling the temperature of the water, feeling the water running down your body, just knowing what it feels like and know that you are there, know that you're alive and having that experience

rather than just being swept away by your thoughts, by your to-do lists and not in touch with the experience. And there's lots of different kinds of meditation. There's also transcendental meditation. That's where you have a word called a mantra and you repeat it over and over again as you meditate. So the story goes it became popular in the West after the Beatles discovered it in the 1960s. But Britta, she focuses on mindfulness meditation. And Britta, she isn't your average meditation teacher. She's actually Dr. Britta Herzl. She's a neuroscientist who researched meditation at Harvard Medical School and is now

at the Technical University of Munich. And Britta told us that despite meditation being practiced for millennia, mainstream science only really started studying its effects seriously since the late 1990s. I was really surprised to see that the Western psychology wasn't taking much notice about meditation and about these old cultural traditions that had been practiced for so many years. She's made it her career to study meditation, and she's going to guide us through our big question today, which is, does meditation actually work? Like, does it do all those things that people claim it does? Because according to thought leaders in the tech industry, this mind hack can reduce stress

and make you laser-focused on productivity and profit. I used to live in Silicon Valley. I was going through a ridiculous amount of stress, and I googled online, and I discovered this thing called meditation This is a superpower and is an incredibly scalable skill It sharpens the mind increases the quality of attention and it calms the mind in one week I doubled my sales quota. The funny thing is it doubled again a month later and doubled again two months later I end up getting three promotions in four months

and and doubled again two months later. I ended up getting three promotions in four months. And business schools around the country are pumping out reports touting the virtues of meditation. The claims go on and on that meditation can improve concentration, leadership skills, negotiation skills, memory, innovative thinking, communication skills, reactions to stress, and boost employee productivity. So how can we test if all of these claims are true? Well, one way we could do it is to look at how meditation affects the brain, and Britta is studying just this.

In one experiment, she put people through an eight-week meditation course and found that it did change certain parts of their brain. I found it very fascinating and very cool to see that our brain can actually change its structure within just a few weeks. And there are other studies out there that show that it can actually happen even quicker within just a couple of days. In particular, she saw changes in the hippocampus, a little seahorse-shaped part of the brain that plays a role in regulating stress and forming new memories. And actually, a recent review of 21 studies involving around 300 meditators

found eight regions of the brain, including that little seahorse, that were, quote, consistently altered in meditators, end quote. Now, these types of papers that show these changes to the brain get a flurry of attention, and they inspire headlines that scream, meditation changes the brain. But Britta says this doesn't necessarily mean that meditation is some life-altering thing, because whenever you learn something new, the brain changes. So we still don't understand how specific the effects on the hippocampus are for meditation. The brain is just so complex, and the picture is extremely complex,

so we really need more studies to bring these findings together. Because these brain scans can be so ambiguous, to actually know if meditation works, we need to look at a very different kind of study, one where you actually test people's abilities before and after they meditate to see if they improve. And so what does this work find? Well, let's start with focus and memory. So some studies do suggest that meditation can sharpen your focus or attention and maybe even improve your memory during an experiment. But whether those improvements that you get are actually big enough

to notice in your day-to-day life. At the moment, that's hard to tell. We have to also say critically that a lot of these areas are not that well proven at this point. For example, regarding attention, we believe there might be a medium effect on it, but probably not a great effect of meditation practice. And then there's this claim that meditation is a really effective way to reduce stress. Is it? Well, here it all depends on how you slice up the data, which studies you look at, and even how you define effective. One review paper found that meditation has large effects on our ability to reduce stress,

while another review paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that the quality of the studies on this are just too bad, too few people in them, not good controls, things like that, to really know how helpful meditation is. So while they did say that there is some evidence that meditation can reduce stress, they also said that so far the strength of that evidence is low. Conclusion.

When it comes to knowing if meditation will reduce your stress or improve your memory and focus, there are a lot of big claims and some small studies. Ultimately, the science just isn't there yet to support the hype. Now, there is an area where there's more research and the results here are pretty intriguing. And this is in the area of mental health, like anxiety and depression. So remember what Tim Ferriss said about meditation lowering his anxiety by 50%? Pre-meditation, you're in the washing machine.

Post-meditation, you're outside the washing machine looking through the glass at what's going on inside. Well, what are the chances that meditation can help reduce your anxiety? To find this out, we spoke to Gael Debord, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. And she's in the middle of a study looking at the effects of meditation to help people with depression. And just personally speaking, Gael is also a fan of meditation. I think it's just that I became more like friends with my own mind.

And so it's like that. It's just befriending this wild animal and then slowly getting it to work with you and not just against you. In fact, meditation had such a strong effect on Gael that she said she just had to know what it was doing to her brain. Well, you know, I mean, I have a scientific mindset. So here was this kind of mind technology and I was interested in the brain and hence in the mind. And so I had to know what science had to say about this. It was like I couldn't possibly continue practicing meditation and be a neuroscientist and not know what neuroscience had to say about it. And now, almost 10 years later,

she's still reading and researching what the science has to say about meditation. Gael told us that she thinks there is evidence that meditation can help with anxiety and depression. And here's how she thinks it works. People with depression and anxiety often have these recurring negative thoughts. Some feeling that something's wrong, which may be, you know, something like, oh, why don't things ever work out for me? Or I'm such a failure.

Like these types of automatic thoughts that people with depression tend to have. And meditation might help because it gives you these tools to deal with your thoughts. People learn to just take a step back, you know, take a breath, focus their attention on the body, and just not follow these trains of thoughts and feelings that would usually get them to feel depressed again. And clinical trials do find that on average,

meditation can help people with depression and anxiety. But the big question is, by how much? Like, is this some kind of cure for people with moderate to mild depression? How much can they expect to benefit from meditation? So in the most recent meta-analysis, it was found to be as good as antidepressant treatment. That's right. A review paper which analysed some 47 studies found that meditation programs showed consistent but small improvements in anxiety and depression, on par with the

effectiveness of antidepressants. Now, if you listen to our episode on antidepressants, you'll know that on average, these drugs actually aren't that effective, but they do work well for some people. Still, the fact that breathing and focusing might work as well as drugs is still pretty promising, right? I mean, particularly when you think of the side effects of some antidepressants. But Gael says that actually it's possible that some people will get side effects from meditating, particularly if you've got depression or anxiety. Maybe people who had a history of trauma.

It's really unclear for now. So there's not a lot of research on this, but one review paper found that some people reported feeling panicked, angry or confused when they meditated. But Gael says we don't want to overstate this. There's just a lot we don't want to overstate this. There's just a lot we don't know. There's just not enough data to say that it's definitely safe for everyone.

And there are other limitations here. Gael told us that lots of studies only look at people with mild or moderate depression, not those struggling at the severe end. And some of the best evidence that we have that meditation can help people with anxiety and depression comes from work that doesn't just look at the effects of meditation, but they actually combined meditation with therapies and it all happens in a group session under professional guidance. So this isn't about going it alone.

Conclusion. Meditation might help some people with their anxiety or depression, and research shows it can even be as good as antidepressants. But there is a lot we don't know here. And by the way, if you are someone who is struggling with your mental health and you're having dark thoughts about suicide and just want to talk to someone about how you're feeling, get in touch with crisischat.org.

After the break, we're going to tell you some exciting new research that might add a whole new dimension to the powers of meditation. This is the beginning of this research. It's very provocative. Chiara, it means smart in Italian. It's very provocative. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca Welcome back.

So, we've looked at how meditation might help your mind and your mood. Now let's look at whether meditation might actually be changing your DNA and possibly helping to slow down the ageing process. This is a remarkable idea and it's probably why Science vs Producer Shruti Ravindran and I were a bit too excited to meet one of the scientists looking into this. My name is Cliff. Hi. I'm Wendy.

Hi, Wendy. Hi, Shruti. Hi. How are you doing? Look at this, right up the front, photos with the Dalai Lama. Clifford Saron is an experimental neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and he's kind of a guru of meditation studies.

Cliff has been meditating for 43 years and studying it for decades. And from the way he talks, you can really tell he's spent a long time being meditative. It's part of every aspect of his life. Shifting my weight, lifting my heel, that feeling of the toe leaving the floor, the intention to move the leg forward, the intention to put the heel down,

the pleasure of distributing the pressure across the bottom of the foot. Yeah, he's talking about walking across a room. Mindfully, of course. Recently, Cliff has embarked on an ambitious experiment which would see if meditation can perhaps slow down the ageing process. He studies people who are on a three-month retreat where they meditate for around six hours a day, and it's up in the Rocky Mountains. It's very beautiful. And there are hills in

the distance and pine forests, yes, and aspen. And after all that meditating, he takes their blood. No, no, it's not what you think. Cliff and his team are testing, among other things, the effect that meditation is having on the telomeres in their white blood cells. So a telomere is the sequence of DNA at the end of your chromosomes. It can be likened to the plastic at the end of a shoelace. It helps the chromosome from not unwinding.

So here's what you need to know about telomeres. As we get older, our telomeres tend to get shorter and shorter. And the danger here is that if the telomeres become too short, the chromosome can unwind, and this can destabilise the cell. Now, it's believed that shortening telomeres play an important role in why we age. Shorter telomeres have also been linked to cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, diabetes and obesity. So, short telomeres aren't good. But luckily, our body has this amazing tool to restore the plastic caps onto our DNA shoelaces.

It's something that lengthens telomeres and so protects our cells. And it's an enzyme called telomerase. So more telomerase activity is often linked to being healthier. It gets more complicated, but that's the basic idea. And this is where we get back to Cliff's experiment at the meditation retreat. Because he wondered, mindfully, if meditation could boost the activity of telomerase in people who were stressed out. And he thought that if it did, it could mean that maybe, just maybe, meditation might help people live healthier, longer lives. And we found that at the end of three months, people in the retreat group had about 30% higher telomerase, the enzyme that can help repair the shortening of telomeres.

Yeah. Meditation retreaters had 30% more telomerase than a group who never got to go on the retreat. And since that paper was published a few years ago, it's become a touchstone for meditation advocates arguing that meditation definitely makes you live longer. But Cliff says... This is the beginning of this research. It's really important to understand the limitations of what we found. Ah yes, the limitations. Cliff's results are far from certain.

Several studies have now measured how meditation affects our telomeres. And they are very inconsistent. One paper found, like Cliff, that meditation boosted telomerase activity. But other studies have found no clear effect of meditation on the length of telomeres. And Cliff has an idea about why he might have found something where others haven't. Because in Cliff's study, his meditators weren't just meditating. They were in the Rockies looking at beautiful hills and pine trees. You have to understand you're in a situation

where you are not interacting with individuals. Very little is happening in the external world. You're in a very protected container. You're being silent. You're not consuming media. You're not getting upset by the news. Bottom line, even if meditating on mountains might increase your telomeres and perhaps the length of your life,

Cliff says that we don't know whether it's the meditation that's doing all this good or just hanging out on a mountain, which we all know is a lot of fun. Conclusion. There's some evidence that maybe a meditation retreat can slow the ageing process, but this research is new and very far from conclusive. And there's one more issue here.

It's a problem that the entire field of meditation research struggles with. And that is this. Scientists can't actually know what people in their studies are really thinking about when they're supposedly meditating. So while some people might be zenning out, others might just be sitting there cross-legged and wondering whether it's time for lunch. Shruti asked Cliff about this.

What are we really studying when we're studying meditation? At some fundamental level, we do not know what people do when they meditate. We can observe them. People are sitting as still as they can sit, and they're attempting as best they can to follow an instruction. But we don't know what they're doing. You know, imagine putting a violin in a violinist's hands, but there are no strings on the violin. It's a terrible analogy, but it's... It's your analogy, Cliff. I'm just playing along. So, when it comes to science versus meditation, does it stack up?

Well, there are lots of claims out there about how meditation can improve your concentration and memory and reduce your stress, but the evidence is pretty thin. Studies using brain scans do suggest that meditation can change your brain in specific ways, but exactly what that means for you and me, it's really hard to know. The best evidence we have shows that for people with depression and some anxiety, meditation may help out,

but it's definitely no cure-all for everyone. And while meditating on a mountaintop retreat might increase your telomeres, whether that's the mountaintop, the retreat, or the meditation that's giving you that benefit, and whether it will even increase your longevity, only time and more research will tell. So, the science is pretty uncertain here.

There is lots of hype and not a lot of conclusive research. And yet, our scientists, Britta, Gael and Cliff, they all love meditating. And for themselves, they say it has these huge benefits. And they don't need the scientific proof. Here's Britta. After a meditation session, I felt so quiet. I felt at peace and my body would feel so different. And it was just an extremely and surprisingly good feeling

that I discovered there. Cliff ultimately told us that science has limitations and when it comes to meditation, we don't know how beneficial it will be for you, or if it will be beneficial at all. It's helped Cliff, and so for him, these limitations are fine. You do not need a world mediated by empirical data. What?

But I... You've got to go into, you've got to tell me when you're saying what, why you're saying what. How do you feel about the fact that you have spent your career on this area of research that feels so intangible and yet you're trying to unravel it. The question you're asking is actually a much deeper question about what does it feel like to fall face first

into a level of contact with human ignorance. And that is wonderful. How do I come up with this s***? That's science versus meditation. This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, Ben Kebrick, Heather Rogers and me. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sori. We're edited by Annie Rose Strasser,

fact-checking by Ben Kebrick, music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. An extra thanks to Dr Jonathan Schooler, Dr Florian Kurth, Aldous Weeble and Dr Madhav Goyal. Next week, we look at nuclear power. Should we be worried? To find out, we visit a nuclear reactor core and ask an executive at America's biggest nuclear power station

our burning questions. So are you the Mr Burns of Palo Verde? Mr Burns? Who's the Mr Burns? Like in The Simpsons. Oh, my God. You know, yes, I guess I would be the Mr Burns. That's right. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Fact you next time. Excellent.