Lynne Malcolm: Today we're at Kodoji, or Temple of the Ancient Ground, the Sydney Zen Centre's retreat. It sits in a beautiful valley called Gorricks Run, surrounded by high sandstone cliffs and deep wilderness.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Meditation practitioners, psychologists and neuroscientists have come together for a weekend here to learn from each other about meditation, mindfulness and neuroscience.

Dr Britta Biedermann is a cognitive scientist and a long term meditator.

Britta Biedermann: The idea was to bring long term meditators together and people who are researching certain parts of cognition but also interested in meditation, and learn from each other's perspectives. So the scientific perspective but also the meditative perspective. And everyone who was interested in coming to this weekend shared the one aspect and that was curiosity, because you need both to pursue a committed meditation practice; curiosity and inquiry. And the same drives the scientist. So the idea was to come together and meditators could ask scientists what they would like to have researched, and scientists ask the meditators if they would find it interesting perhaps to study certain aspects because there is no theory of meditation, so we would need help there from long term meditators who have this introspection.

Lynne Malcolm: Britta Biedermann initiated this project as part of her research at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University.

Maggie Glick: It should feel really good to be earthed here, and it's amazing to sit still.

Lynne Malcolm: Here teacher Maggie Glick leads a breath meditation at the Zen Centre retreat.

Maggie Glick: So the fundamental practice in all Buddhist traditions and many other meditation traditions is a breath practice. And people usually begin with breath counting. They have different ways of doing this, but the simplest I think is to breathe in and then on the exhalation count one, breathe in and on the exhalation count two, breathe in and on the exhalation count three. This is not a sequence. It's counting because counting requires minimal thinking. So when I say there is no sequence, I mean that when you count one there's just one, that you invest yourself completely in that one. You let everything else go. And when you count two, there is just two, and so on. When you get to ten you start one again, just come back. So it is really, really simple.

Lynne Malcolm: Maggie Glick.

Professor Peter Sedlmeier, a neuroscientist from the University of Chemnitz in Germany was invited to this weekend. He practises meditation himself and is deeply interested in what the scientific research says about the effects of meditation and mindfulness. Nearly ten years ago he undertook a large meta-analysis of all the scientific research that's been done on meditation, a summary if you like.

First, he explains that the word 'meditation' has a number of different meanings

Peter Sedlmeier: If you look at the name you might think this is a misnomer because 'meditation' comes from Latin and there the word means thinking deeply in an analytical way, which you might say is more akin to contemplation, because in many types of meditation you do not think analytically, you try to avoid that. But if you look at the research literature there is a huge collection of different kinds of techniques.

Lynne Malcolm: Peter Seidlmeier.

One of the challenges of meditation research is that there are so many different styles. There are techniques where you simply observe your breath, your body and your mind, which are used in the Buddhist tradition. In yoga there's pranayama where you influence your breath and your body. From ancient India, in chakra meditation you focus on energy centres of your body. Mantra meditation involves repeating a selected word or mantra in your mind, and using it to minimise your concentration. This has been used in the Christian and Muslim contexts and also in the Transcendental Meditation movement. Peter Seidlmeier has looked at the effectiveness of the different styles.

Peter Sedlmeier: Basically all types of meditation are effective, and the status of research as yet is not sufficient is to make really valid statements about the differential effects. But it seems, for instance, that mantra meditation might be very useful to reduce anxiety. And I think there's a good reason for that because if you face anxiety, as you do in many kinds of what is called mindfulness meditation, it gets stronger in the beginning. So it would take longer to deal with being open to anxiety, whereas with mantra meditation you concentrate on this mantra and you still are open to anxiety but you have something to hold on to. It's like a handle, a handlebar, you can hold on to the mantra.

Lynne Malcolm: And you looked at the effect of meditation in two different populations, in healthy populations and in clinical settings. What was the difference between the effectiveness in those two areas?

Peter Sedlmeier: Our own meta-analysis dealt only with healthy populations but I looked up the literature, and what you can find there is there's also an effect with clinical populations, but overall this effect is smaller. And I think one reason for that is it's harder to learn meditation when you are sick or when you are anxious or when you are afraid or when you feel pain. And if you compare a meditation group with a group that gets traditional therapy, there is no difference in effect. So meditation does not do better than groups that get therapy or relaxation training, but if you look at healthy people, you still get a difference, which means that meditation does something more than relaxation training, for a healthy but not for patient groups.

Lynne Malcolm: Are there particular areas that meditation is better for than others? So, for example, for memory or attention or, as you say, anxiety, depression? Are there particular areas that it's very good at?

Peter Sedlmeier: Yes, if you look at the effect sizes, how strong the effects are, you usually find that the most pronounced effects are for emotional variables. And then you also find effects for attentional variables, medium-sized, and a bit less so for cognitive variables or personality variables. So it seems that the strongest impact of meditation is on emotion.

Lynne Malcolm: And so that's usually something that can be relatively easily changed, whereas a personality style, for example, is not so easy to change.

Peter Sedlmeier: Yes, that's true.

Lynne Malcolm: So what implications do you think that has for potential clinical treatment?

Peter Sedlmeier: Yes, I think one can use meditation or should use meditation in psychotherapy, but it is already part of many programs in psychotherapy, so therapists they are aware of this, that it is helpful. But I think there is a certain danger that because meditation is cheap, if you do a MBSR program it's not as costly as if you have eight weeks of psychotherapy.

Lynne Malcolm: MBSR meaning mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Peter Sedlmeier: So a governmental agency might be tempted to say now we've switched to meditation instead of paying those therapist lots and lots of money to do the therapy. I think this will be totally wrong because meditation was originally not meant as a therapy but as a way to enlarge your consciousness. Basically all the Indian schools, they deal about liberation or enlightenment or a spiritual development and not about therapy. But it does not mean that if meditation is effective as a therapy you should not use it. I think one should just try out what helps and what does not help, for which kind of problems. So I think it is all open to empirical scrutiny.

Lynne Malcolm: Peter Seidlmeier.

Emily White: My name is Emily White and I'm working as a psychologist as well as trying to finish a PhD. I'd had some experience in meditation before but not in Zen meditation, so I was interested in this weekend because it seems to bring together all three of those areas. So the type of work I do as a clinician is in a type of therapy called dialectical behaviour therapy or DBT, and that's working with patients who have difficulty regulating their emotions. And the core skill underlying that is mindfulness, teaching people to bring themselves back to the present moment in many different ways.

The therapy was originally developed for people with chronic suicidality and self-harm difficulties, but also there is evidence showing it works for people who have drug and alcohol problems as well as some kinds of eating disorders. So we are teaching people a set of skills that I use every day as well. So mindfulness being at the core that underlies everything, but we also teach people emotion regulation skills and how to manage distress and how to interact interpersonally in an effective way.

Kerry Stewart: So you were talking about mindfulness before, how would you define it?

Emily White: It's very simple. There's the 'what' skills and the 'how' skills. So the 'what' skills are observe with your senses, describe, so putting words on your experience, both internal and external, and participate, so throwing yourself into the moment. The 'how' skills are non-judgemental, so trying to remove assumptions and evaluation of what you are experiencing. One mindfully, so doing one thing in the moment. And effectively, which just means doing whatever works for this particular moment.

Kerry Stewart: And you must be finding that this therapy that you use, that uses mindfulness, is effective. Can you tell me about that?

Emily White: Yes, definitely. So there's a lot of research that shows it is effective in the populations it is intended to treat. And on a personal experience I definitely see improvements. So when clients start using the skills that we teach them you can see their lives begin to slowly stabilise and head in a direction that they are hoping to head in.

Kerry Stewart: And what has been helpful for you here at this mindfulness and neuroscience weekend?

Emily White: It has just been a really interesting mix of people and knowledge. So to learn little bit about Zen meditation for me personally has been really interesting, but also to learn about the research into meditation, how to measure meditation, and some of the complexities in doing that.

Lynne Malcolm: Emily White speaking to Kerry Stewart.

Professor Peter Seidlmeier found in his meta-analysis of the scientific research of meditation that an increasing number of the studies have used brain scanning technologies, such as FMRIs to determine the effects of meditation.

Peter Sedlmeier: It's useful, I think it's useful, but then the question is, for instance, if some parts of the brain are thicker for meditators than they are for non-meditators, or if you have certain activations if you see a stimulus, what does it really mean? It's not really clear. These connections, sometimes they are there, sometimes they are not there, so it's lots of subjective room to do your interpretation or to come up with another interpretation. But there is some convergence that some parts of the brain, like the so-called insula, they seem to be very much involved when we look at the results of meditation.

Actually a colleague of mine who was involved in this study that was done in a German city called Marburg, he reanalysed the brains using a certain machine learning technique, and with this technique this algorithm learns the age of brains, and this algorithm extracts the commonalities for people with 30-year-old brains. And what they did is they also gave that algorithms brains of meditators, and they found that the brains of meditators were younger than the brains of the normal people. And there are some other indications that the brains of meditators age less quickly than the brains of normal people.

Lynne Malcolm: Peter Seidlmeier.

It's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today we're at the Sydney Zen Centre weekend retreat. Long term meditators and scientists are sharing their experience and knowledge about the effects of meditation.

Vince Polito: Okay, so I'm Vince Polito, I am a post doc at the Centre for Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University as well, and my main research interests are cognitive control, so the feeling that people have of controlling their actions, and altered states of consciousness. And I've looked a lot at how people's feelings of control change in different contexts, such as hypnosis, flow states, and also in clinical conditions such as schizophrenia.

So as well as a personal interest, my research interest in meditation has been more along the lines of what happens to someone during meditation, what is that experience like. We haven't directly looked very much yet at cognitive control and meditation but that is sort of in the back of my mind as to where I think my main research interests can tie into this lovely shared project that we've been working on here and we are by to tell you a bit about today. So what I'd like to talk about a few minutes…

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Vince Polito, one of the researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University.

Britta Biedermann explains another aspect of the study they're undertaking.

Britta Biedermann: What we are looking at is how sensitive are people who have meditated for over a long period of time, let's say for 10 years, in perceiving sounds compared to people who have no meditation practice. So we used a very simple technique which is called the auditory oddball task in the scientific world, which in simple words it's a technique that uses standard sounds and odd sounds, like an odd sound out. These sounds are presented to participants who are either meditators or not meditators. And we look at their brain responses while they are listening to sounds. We've done that in two conditions. We ask people to meditate while they were listening to these sounds, to these two qualities of sounds, and we ask people to listen to these sounds while they are actually not meditating. So we had to give them a comparable task, which was similar to a meditation task from the outside, so closing the eyes and sitting straight in a calm posture. And in this non-meditative technique we ask them to build a treehouse in their mind. So it was like an imaginary task.

Lynne Malcolm: And what's the meditation technique that you are asking them to use?

Britta Biedermann: So the meditation technique we asked them to use was more of a watching technique, so we ask them to count their breath. With every exhalation count one, up until 10, and if a thought arises start from one again. And we also told them after you start to count your breath, in the background there will be some sounds arising, please just note these sounds and let them go but just follow them. So it's quite a complex task in a way. What we found, interestingly, is that it did not matter if long term meditators were meditating or not meditating, their brain responded to these sounds in a very similar way, and overall the brain responses to the sounds were also larger, so there was a higher sensitivity it seemed to these sounds. But interestingly in the comparison with the non-meditators we found that the non-meditators in the meditation task showed a reduction in the sensitivity to sounds. So it's quite a puzzling effect because you would think that should actually enlarge the awareness to sounds or to the breath.

This weekend was very fruitful and also in the research we talked a lot about this puzzling effect, and at the moment we had arrived at an interpretation that perhaps the novice meditators are either habituating to these sounds, so it could even be that the experts…because Zen meditators or any type of meditation that concentrates on sounds or counts the breath, you should try to have this beginner's mind. So even though you hear the sounds over and over again you try to be aware and alert as if you would listen to it for the first time. But it seems that novices perhaps lose sensitivity to these sounds because they have no beginner's mind. We call that habituation. Or the second explanation is, and we think this is a little bit more likely, something like a cognitive overload was going on. So by asking them to count their breath while they were also noticing the sounds and letting them go, it's something really difficult to do for novices. And so therefore the brain response reduced, so that sensitivity to these sounds reduced because they might have just been overwhelmed with the task.

Lynne Malcolm: Britta Biedermann is keen to apply what she's learning about the brains of meditators to her field of interest, which is language impairment as a result of stroke.

Britta Biedermann: What I would be particularly interested in is to use…if we can establish these results that we are finding, the next step would first be can we train a novice meditator to be more sensitive to sounds in a healthy population? If that is possible I would find these results very interesting because in people who suffered a stroke and they lead into language impairments, a small group of people with language impairment, the language impairment results from actually a weakness in attention.

So this debate has just arisen that perhaps the language impairment is originating from an impairment before linguistic tasks kick in. So, for example, if you have word-finding difficulties it could be that you can't access a word because you can't get to the form, like on the tip of the tongue for example. Or it could also be it's just because your attention can't perhaps access the dictionary in our minds which we have available and it's just not focused enough in order to get there.

So if we could show that meditation can increase auditory attention we could perhaps use it in order to dissolve some word finding difficulties in a small amount of people. I can't extend that because it's just not all people with stroke also suffer from attention deficits, it would be a subgroup.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Britta Biedermann leads the cross-disciplinary project investigating meditation and auditory attention at Macquarie University. She's now at the school of psychology at Curtin University

Many of the participants at this weekend retreat are followers of the Zen Buddhism tradition and they're discussing the way mindfulness is now being taken up more broadly.

Zen teacher Subhana Barzaghi:

Subhana Barzaghi: Because what are we meditating for? It's not just for our own health and well-being and relaxation and salvation, it is intimately connected with liberation for all beings. So it's really important that it's not just seen as an individualist kind of pursuit in that way. I think meditation needs to be put in that context of a wider ethical base and framework, and even Zen has had to struggle with this. When it is taken out of that ethical base or framework…I mean, you can be mindful of shooting a gun, but that's not the kind of mindfulness that the Buddha taught and not the mindfulness that we are proposing in the Zen tradition either. So it's not mindfulness…you can be mindful doing all manner of things, but what is the mindfulness really cultivating here? What qualities of the heart and mind do we want to cultivate with mindfulness? And if there is not an ethical basis, if there's not compassion equally sitting side by side, that can lead to all kinds of problems down the path. It seems to me that that doesn't lead necessarily to wisdom or love.

Lynne Malcolm: The term 'mindfulness' has just showed up everywhere, everybody is talking about mindfulness. What do you think the difference is between the sort of mindfulness that has become a secular discipline, if you like, compared to the type of meditation that's embedded in a spiritual or religious framework?

Peter Sedlmeier: Yes, first the term 'mindfulness' is not clearly defined nowadays. What is different from the original definition of mindfulness that has been given, for instance, in well-known Sutta, the Satipatthana Sutta, is this aspect of acceptance is not there, it's only watching the body, the feelings, the mind and the objects of mind. But I would say if it's helpful to draw on this concept, then it's good, but one should be clear about what one really means. So nowadays it's often used as an umbrella term, 'mindfulness', and I think it has been shown to be quite useful for marketing purposes. So I guess that is why people like to use it.

Lynne Malcolm: Is there any research that shows that meditation within a spiritual or religious context is more effective than the new mindfulness?

Peter Sedlmeier: That's an interesting question, and unfortunately I have not found any research of that kind. I would think that there must have been a reason for those Maharishis in India 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, why they put that into that context, be it Buddhist or Hindu, you always have some ethical concerns, rules of life. It's basically a way of living that is embedded also in some spiritual context. But here it seems that this does not matter so much, but the ethical part might matter a lot, and this has also been discussed in the literature, especially by Buddhist scholars. They raise the question whether it's legitimate to use that mindfulness concept without being aware of the ethical aspects. That might also have an effect of how satisfied you are with your life. So I think it should have an effect, but I am not aware of any studies that compare all the eight steps of the Buddhist noble path against using only some aspects that can be called meditation.

Lynne Malcolm: So overall, having drawn together all these studies, what's your conclusion about the effect of meditation and the potential effect of it?

Peter Sedlmeier: Yes, one cannot but say that meditation is effective, so there is convincing evidence for that. But for me there are many more questions now than before I began to do this research. I am also interested in the spiritual side because this is a big promise if you follow the Buddhist or Hindu path or a Christian or Muslim or even Jewish path, they all have this idea of meditation in some way incorporated, then you get at some state or some experience which is not part of everyday life. And this is also promise for psychology because the concept of consciousness has been abandoned. Nowadays if you look at papers that write about consciousness, they deal with quite different issues, but none deals with the issue of consciousness as postulated in these Indian approaches to what you can achieve when you follow a Buddhist path. So whether this is possible or not, I think this is a very exciting question.

For future research I think the common way of doing research is not very adequate in meditation research. We do not yet have a good theory of meditation. But to arrive at such a theory it would be good to talk to each other. So if experienced meditators talk to each other in a systematic way, you call that qualitative methods in science, and come up with some commonalities, chances are that we have found some specific parts of a good theory of meditation.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor Peter Seidlmeier, neuroscientist from the University of Chemnitz in Germany. Thanks to everyone at the Sydney Zen Centre and special thanks to Kerry Stewart for her recordings at Kodoji. Head to the All in the Mind website for more information and some lovely photos from the retreat. You can leave a comment on the site while you're there.

Production is by Diane Dean, and the sound engineer is Judy Rapley, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Great to have your company, bye for now.