Inside the minds of monks and moms
IT MAY SEEM farfetched as you're schlepping groceries or dragging your screaming 4-year-old to the time-out chair, but dedicated moms, you may have something important in common with meditating Buddhist monks.
It's the neurology of love and compassion -- a little-understood aspect of parenting. Brain-scanning studies led by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson find that mothers gazing at pictures of their babies and Tibetan monks contemplating compassion both show marked activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area apparently tied to happiness.
Davidson's research on meditating monks (more extensive than his work on moms) suggests their brains also produce very strong gamma waves, which have been linked to concentration and memory. The findings were published in November in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The basic theory uniting nerve-wracked U.S. suburbs with Himalayan mountain monasteries is that love, compassion and equanimity can be thought of as "skills" that can be improved with practice and are capable of changing neural circuitry.
It's surely a heartening notion. But if you're skeptical, you've got company. Plans for the Dalai Lama, Tibet's revered spiritual leader, to speak about the meditation research at next month's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., have sparked a fierce debate.
Some critics imply that Davidson, a longtime student of meditation, is too close to the Dalai Lama (who is a co-founder of the nonprofit Mind and Life Institute that helped fund Davidson's studies). Others, charging research design flaws, say Davidson has failed to prove that meditation promotes compassion. The debate has even had political overtones because some of the opponents are of Chinese origin and may hope to squelch public attention to Chinese government repression in Tibet.
But the talk is still expected to take place, which is good news not just for science but for moms. (It's good for dads too, although a recent U.S. Department of Labor report shows moms still spend twice as much time on family work.) Easily lost in our daily grind of haggling with soccer coaches and worrying about whether our kids should be taking Ritalin is one of the sweetest aspects of parenting: that when we put our minds to it, caring for children often boils down to basic training in positive emotions.
