MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 25

new insights into the brain

Meditation Can Improve Emotional Learning
Diffusion tensor imaging reveals the associated structural changes in the brain
Sara Lazar and colleagues at the
MGH Martinos Center had shown
that training in mindfulness meditation produces measurable, lasting
changes in areas of the brain associated with memory, compassion
and stress—that is, changes in the
amygdala and in hippocampal gray
matter density. And in doing so they
had offered evidence for the neurological benefits of mindfulness.
But they still weren’t certain of the
exact behavioral significance of
these changes. So in a more recent
set of experiments, they set out to
learn more.
One of the ways in which mindfulness is thought to promote mental health is through changes in
‘emotional learning’: the process by
which highly emotional stimuli can
influence learning new information. Psychologists can assess this in
subjects using a classical fear conditioning paradigm. To dive deeper
into the changes they had observed,
Lazar and her team applied this
paradigm to study the impact of
an eight-week Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction (MBSR) course on
emotional learning.
Fear conditioning was particularly
relevant to a study of mindfulness.
“We specifically chose fear conditioning because an important aspect of meditation practice is to not
turn away from unpleasantness, but
rather to allow yourself to experience it without reactivity,” said La-

© Can Stock Photo / paulprescott72

zar, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School
and an affiliated faculty member in
the Martinos Center. “Therefore we
reasoned that meditation practice
might influence classical fear conditioning. Furthermore, this is both an
emotional task and a learning task,
and thus engages both the amygdala
and hippocampus.”

emotion regulation. They found that
changes in uncinate fasciculus correlated with change in conditioning,
which suggests that mindfulness
does in fact contribute to the maintenance of the sensitivity of emotional responses, and furthermore
points to an underlying neural plasticity with respect to this.

Other authors of the study include
The investigators reported some of the Center’s Britta Holzel, Tim
their findings in June 2016 in the Gard, Douglas Greve and Mohamjournal Frontiers in Behavioral Neu- med Milad.
roscience. As part of the study, they
looked at the plasticity of white matter during the paradigms—in particular, of white matter in the uncinate fasciculus, one of the primary
white matter tracts associated with