Mindfulness and mental disorders

Summary
After a pleasurable or a painful experience, the brain builds up conditioned neuronal circuits (saṅkhāras) for repeating or avoiding the experience. Such circuits are triggered when similar circumstances, real or imaginary, reappear. The recall of such circumstances automatically induces desires and cravings, on one side, or fears and rejections, on the other.
Depending upon the frequency or the intensity of the initial experiences, the normal inhibitory mechanisms reduce their strength and may fail to block the conditioned neuronal circuits that urgently demand repetition or avoidance. Compulsions and aversions arise then and, as things get worse, they get totally out of control.

During mindfulness meditation, a significant number of inhibitory neurons are turned on and off continuous and indiscriminately; they get “exercised” in the routine, so to speak, and eventually the lazy ones—those “guards” that had gone on strike—go back to work, which is to say, go back to their regular blocking duty. As either a drugless or a complementary therapy, mindfulness meditation is showing a very promising potential in the prevention and treatment of some mental disorders.

Mind exercisingDuring physical and mental exercising routines, such as dancing or ball juggling, the neuronal work in the brain is mostly excitatory—it triggers action on other neurons—while in the peripheral nervous system, in a symphonic coordination of muscular tensions and releases, it is both excitatory and inhibitory. In purely mental exercising such as chess or Sudoku, on the other hand, the neuronal activity, which is now centered in the brain, is mostly of an excitatory nature. How do we then exercise our brain inhibitory neurons, roughly one fifth of the one-hundred-billion (or 1011) total neurons? How do you train such important cells the work of which—stopping other neurons’ doings—goes very much unnoticed? The answer is through the practice of any form of meditation and, for increased effectiveness, through the practice of mindfulness meditation, a mental discipline which was developed by Siddhattha Gautama, the Buddha, twenty five centuries ago.

Mindfulness is the permanent awareness of life as it unfolds; mindfulness meditation—the quiet and still sitting while focusing attention on some object, means or mental device—is the practice of “directed” mindfulness to make it a permanent habit. Geographically and historically, breath observation is by far the most common meditation tool; as meditators gain experience, they progressively might focus attention on other objects or means such as their bodies, sensations or mind states, or the actual meditation experience.
Neurology Basics

Simply stated, excitatory neurons are nerve cells that send increasing activity signals to their neighbors; inhibitory neurons, reciprocally, are those which order their neighbors to reduce or stop activity. Nervous signals are carried by some chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, which travel through interneuronal junctions or synapses; each neuron is connected to its neighbors by an average of 7,000 synapses (so our brain contains some 7 x 1014 synapses).
Brain functions result from excitatory and inhibitory neurons being connected together in different ways to form neural circuits—ensembles of neurons that process specific kinds of information. When first acquired or experienced, every learned or developed functional task—a piece of knowledge, a skill, an image, a memory, an emotional state, a preference, a dislike—becomes a neural circuit.

Synapses within a neural circuit weaken (or strengthen) with the reduced (or increased) activity of the circuit’s function. Every time a task is repeated or re-experienced, the corresponding neural circuit is “re-run”, strengthening the associated connections in the repetition. Seldom used circuits weaken and the associated function is eventually forgotten. Medical science knows today that the underuse of the brain does decrease both length and quality of life.

Mindfulness meditation
The practice of mindfulness meditation is the “purposeful” stopping of as many common alert state functions as feasible. What happens to your neurons while you meditate? Though every meditator follows his or her personal routine, the steps below represent a typical sequence which, for the purpose of this note, contains enough information for the intended association between neuronal inhibition and mindfulness meditation. While beginners normally stay within the first four or five numerals of this progression, disciplined meditators regularly reach and experience the highest introspection levels. The sequence is as follows:
1. Just by sitting still, quiet, with eyes closed and in an isolated place, an important fraction of your excitatory neurons—the motors, the talkers, the observers, the listeners and, if you have not eaten anything during the previous hours, the digesters—go to rest. Thus far, except for the posture, meditating and sleeping are similar activities.
2. When you become aware of gross sensations—your clothes, the contact with your seat or the floor—the inhibitory neurons that ordinarily block such sensations are turned off (you perceive such sensations; sensations are on).
3. When you focus attention onto the flow of your breath, inhibitory neurons turn on to shut off distractions.
4. As distractions interfere, inhibitory neurons turn off to let distracting thoughts enter (involuntarily). When you notice you are distracted, you go back to Item 3 (inhibitory neurons on again.)
5. As, with practice and patience, you are able to maintain your awareness on your breath for longer and longer periods, subtle sensations appear in different parts of your body, which implies that inhibitory neurons, both at the central and peripheral systems, are turned off (sensations are “on”) wherever those sensations are perceived.
6. As you alternate attention between your breath and those subtle sensations throughout your body, you (a kind of) learn to turn off and on at will the inhibitory neurons that switch on and off these “subtle sensations.”
7. With continued and disciplined practice, you enter progressively deeper levels of joy, inner harmony, equanimity and pure consciousness (intense exaltation of mind and feelings.) At these stages, you always maintain awareness on your mind states and your actual meditation experience (going back to breath focusing whenever you get distracted).

What do you gain from the practice of mindfulness meditation? How do you benefit from the working out of inhibitory neurons, from continuously turning them on and off for a rather long period? The intuitive wisdom of the Buddha, who obviously knew nothing about neurons, answers these questions: With mindfulness meditation you develop the skill to be permanently mindful and reduce (and eventually eliminate) suffering (dukkha); the Buddha never spoke of mental disorders. How does this happen?

The role of inhibitory neurons is similar to that of building guards; when they are accurately and dutifully working (active, “on”), intruders do not cross the threshold (they are inactive, off), undesired people cannot enter and nothing seems to be happening. When guards do not show up to work, any person, intruders and disrupters included, can enter restricted premises. Similarly, when your inhibitory guards are off duty, intruding and disrupting thoughts—compulsive desires or intensive aversions—invade your mind.

Pleasure and pain
In our remote ancestors, pleasure and pain were survival mechanisms designed through natural selection. By generating the desiring emotions that call for the repetition of specific actions, the gratification of satisfying needs, both physiological and social, pleasure became a survival advantage for individuals and species. Similarly, the experience of pain led to the design of fear signals that set off automatic alarms when similar threatening dangers were encountered; the timely fight or flight conditioned response was instrumental for survival. Our desires and fears, therefore, are just simple natural reactions which our genetic code programs in our brain circuits; however, such responses are to be silenced by attentive inhibitory neuron once the demanding need or the threatening danger has been successfully managed.
Mental Disorders and Suffering

Unfortunately, reactions to demands and threats are sometimes mismanaged. If after the satisfaction of a particular need the neural patterns of desires are not shut off, the temporary wishes become permanent compulsions, addictions or obsessive demands. Similarly, if after the disappearance of a threat the neural patterns of fears are not shut off, the transitory worries become permanent aversions, panics or phobias. Minor cravings (the “controlled” daily drinking) and rejections (your “reasonable” hostility to someone “because you don’t have to like everybody”) are considered normal. The Buddha disagrees; according to him, the origin of suffering lies in these minor anomalies. It is only when the inhibitory mechanisms go wild and unruly that a variety of behavioral disorders arises and suffering becomes unbearable. Cognitive sciences are coming to the conclusion that many mental disorders, such as substance dependence, eating disorders, sexual addictions, obsessive compulsive disorders and post traumatic stress disorders, have roots in malfunctioning of inhibitory mechanisms.

Mindfulness meditation has already proven beneficial in dealing with such disarrays. As a therapy tool, it helps at both levels—the socially accepted and the psychologically unacceptable—but, as with any problem, prevention or early treatment is better than late correction. The Buddha properly addressed the elimination of the day-to-day suffering—the usual stress, the ordinary anxiety, the normal anguish of the common life—this is, the initial manifestation of the more complex problems. Mindfulness meditation, the exercise of large groups of inhibitory neurons which bring back inhibitory processes to order and harmony, was both the preventive and corrective prescription he recommended. What the Buddha knew intuitively since long time ago, cognitive sciences are learning the hard way today.

On Intelligence

During the past half-millennium the history of anatomy documents the peculiar custom of using the most advanced technology of each era as the definite model of the human brain. The first match was with clockworks during the sixteenth century; then with the steam engine, in the nineteenth century; one hundred years later with telephone switchboards in the first half of the twentieth century, and in the recent decades, naturally and expectedly, with electronic computers. However sound they might have appeared at each time, all these comparisons proved inadequate after a while. All have fallen short when matching up manmade machines with the extraordinary prodigy of the human organ that designed them.
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Twenty years ago Jeff Hawkins, the architect of many technologies and a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, decided to turn the metaphor all the way around and walk it in the opposite direction. Instead of starting from already invented equipment to develop explanatory models, Hawkins decided to first understand the way the brain operates—more specifically, how the cerebral cortex works—and design from there on a new technology. With such a challenge in mind, after studying neurology on his own and co-working with many scientists, the ambitious businessman initiates a monumental (if not chimerical) project to design and build electronic equipment that is to operate similarly to the human brain. Numenta, a company founded by Hawkins in 2005, has the mission to make this initiative a reality. His book ON INTELLIGENCE, written with science journalist Sandra Blakeslee, describes the reasoning behind his adventure, the factors that support the idea, the obstacles that make it extremely complex and the scientific developments that will contribute to its realization.
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There is only one chapter in the book complex and difficult to read (the author warns about this) that presents his view of a detailed model of the functioning of the cerebral cortex, the thin layer of thirty billion neurons that surrounds the brain. Even with this exception, ON INTELLIGENCE is an entertaining and educational book. The description of the four attributes of the cerebral cortex that make it radically different from electronic computers is fascinating. The first attribute is the storage of sequences of patterns (instead of isolated data interrelated by data models and database software) that enables the recording and recalling of stories or sequences. The second is the ability to pick the full story or sequence from only a fraction of any part of whole without the need to access the complete pattern (we recognize a song by just listening a bit of it). The third is the conservation of the essence of every pattern although the rest of the information might be variable (this is why we recognize incomplete objects or identify people we have not seen in years despite changes of age, contexture or makeup). The fourth, the difficult-to read chapter of the book, is the storage of the patterns in a hierarchical structure.
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These attributes provide the cerebral cortex an intellectual capacity quite different from those put forward in previous interpretations. According to Hawkins the cortex is an organ of prediction; predicting is the main function of the human brain and this capability is the very foundation of intelligence. The neurons involved in any activity (or some associated neurons yet to be discovered) are activated prior to the arrival of the corresponding sensory signals, be they visual, auditory or tactile, anticipating the coming events from some sort of extrapolation of all the patterns that the cortex has already in its memory. For example, when someone enters a restaurant where he never has been, he can "predict" with a good degree of certainty in what direction are the bathrooms. When the event is completed, if the result matches expectations (this happens most of the time), the owner of the brain does not even realize that a verification transaction was performed. If, on the contrary, expectations do not coincide with reality, there is a surprising reaction, followed by corrections and learning lessons that eventually lead to the creation of new patterns.
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In Hawkins’s perspective, the human brain is an organ that builds models based on patterns and analogies and generates with them creative predictions. When it does not find correlations, the brain invents them anyway with minimum consideration on how preposterous they may turn out. Pseudoscience, prejudices, intolerance and religions are the result of these inventions.
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The concept of prediction that Hawkins developed in 1986—we should remember that he did not graduate in neurology—was later confirmed in independent scientific studies. For example, Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at the New York University School of Medicine establishes in 2001: "The capacity to predict the outcome of future events—critical to successful movement—is, most likely, the ultimate and most common of all global brain functions." I believe the development of truly intelligent machines is an unfeasible project. Its endeavor, nevertheless, will lead to many new scientific discoveries. The brilliant entrepreneur recognizes that his target is neither the invention of an electronic model of human consciousness nor the production of machines that arrogantly say "I." His main interests aim at the development of computers with vision, the design of thinking robots and the construction of machines with capacity to learn. The invitation to the greed of the young generations to join in some way the great idea is outside the context and beauty of the whole project. Contributing to human growth or making a difference—not plain utilitarianism—should be the driving forces of scientific research. Still, from my perspective of cognitive science enthusiast, I consider that the very description of the functioning cerebral cortex (I suppose that a few neuroscientists may disagree with it) and the concept of prediction as the fundament of human Intelligence far deserve the reading of this excellent book.