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The revolution in our understanding of the brain's capacity to change well into adulthood does not end with the fact that the brain can and does change. Equally revolutionary is the discovery of how the brain changes. The actions we take can literally expand or contract different regions of the brain, pour more juice into quiet circuits and damp down activity in buzzing ones. The brain devotes more cortical real estate to functions that its owner uses more frequently and shrinks the space devoted to activities rarely performed. That's why the brains of violinists devote more space to the region that controls the digits of the fingering hand. In response to the actions and experiences of its owner, a brain forges stronger connections in circuits that underlie one behavior or thought and weakens the connections in others. Most of this happens because of what we do and what we experience of the outside world. In this sense, the very structure of our brain-the relative size of different regions, the strength of connections between one area and another-reflects the lives we have led. Like sand on a beach, the brain bears the footprints of the decisions we have made, the skills we have learned, the actions we have taken. But there are also hints that mind-sculpting can occur with no input from the outside world. That is, the brain can change as a result of the thoughts we have thought.

A few findings suggest that brain changes can be generated by pure mental activity: merely thinking about playing the piano leads to a measurable, physical change in the brain's motor cortex, and thinking about thoughts in certain ways can restore mental health. By willfully treating invasive urges and compulsions as errant neurochemistry-rather than as truthful messages that something is amiss-patients with OCD have altered the activity of the brain region that generates the OCD thoughts, for instance. By thinking differently about the thoughts that threaten to send them back into the abyss of despair, patients with depression have dialed up activity in one region of the brain and quieted it in another, reducing their risk of relapse. Something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought has the ability to act back on the very stuff of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can lead to recovery from mental illness and perhaps to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion.

It is this aspect of neuroplasticity-research showing that the answer to the question of whether we can change is an emphatic yes-that brought five scientists to Dharamsala this autumn week. Since 1987, the Dalai Lama had opened his home once a year to weeklong "dialogues" with a handpicked group of scientists, to discuss dreams or emotions, consciousness or genetics or quantum physics. The format is simple. Each morning, one of the five invited scientists sits in an armchair beside the Dalai Lama at the front of the room used for ordinations and describes his or her work to him and the assembled guests-in 2004, a couple of dozen monks and monastery students, as well as scientists who had participated in previous dialogues. It is nothing like the formal papers scientists are accustomed to presenting at research conferences, where they barrel through their findings to a rapt (they hope) audience. Instead, the Dalai Lama interrupts whenever he needs a clarification, whether for a point of translation (the scientists speak in English, which the Dalai Lama understands well, but a casually thrown-off scientific term such as hippocampus or BRDU will prompt a hurried tête-à-tête with one of his interpreters) or because one of the scientific findings reminds him of a point of Buddhist philosophy. The morning is punctuated by a tea break, during which the Dalai Lama either stays in the room for informal conversation with the scientists or takes a breather, and everyone else decamps to a huge adjacent room for tea and cookies. In the afternoon, the Dalai Lama and the Buddhist scholars he has invited respond to what the scientist has presented that morning, explaining what Buddhism teaches about the topic or suggesting further experiments to which Buddhist contemplatives might lend their minds and brains.

This time, the scientists were those working at the frontiers of neuroplasticity. Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, works with laboratory animals; he has made seminal discoveries in how the environment can change their brains, in ways applicable to people. He also led a study on human subjects, demolishing the dogma that the adult brain does not generate new neurons. Michael Meaney, from Montreal's McGill University, has toppled the idea of genetic determinism. Also working with lab animals, he showed that the way a mother rat treats her babies determines which genes in the baby's brain are turned on and which are turned off, with the result that the genes with which it is born become merely an opening gambit on nature's part: the animal's traits-fearful or shy, neurotic or well adjusted-are shaped by maternal behavior, something that also has relevance for people. Helen Neville, of the University of Oregon, has done as much as any scientist to show that brain diagrams depicting what region does what should be printed in erasable ink. In work with people who are blind or deaf, she discovered that even something as seemingly fundamental, as hardwired, as the functions of the visual cortex and the auditory cortex can be completely overturned by the life someone leads. Phillip Shaver, of the University of California-Davis, is one of the leaders in the field of psychology called attachment theory. He discovered that people's sense of emotional security, based on their childhood experiences, has a powerful effect not only on their adult relationships but also on seemingly unrelated behaviors and attitudes such as their feelings about people who come from different ethnic groups and their willingness to help a stranger. For these four scientists, it was their first trip to Dharamsala and their first meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Richard Davidson was the veteran of these dialogues. More than that, however, his research on the science of emotions had grown to include studies of Buddhist contemplatives, men who devote their days to meditation. The Dalai Lama had helped arrange for Buddhist monks and yogis to trek all the way to Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison so he could study their brains. His work was beginning to show the power of the mind to change the brain. He would orchestrate the meeting, introducing each of the scientists for their morning presentation and leading the discussion each afternoon.

"Of all the concepts in modern neuroscience, it is neuroplasticity that has the greatest potential for meaningful interaction with Buddhism," Davidson said.

Copyright © 2007 by Sharon Begley.

Tags: Neuropsychology

About the Author

Sharon Begley, science columnist for The Wall Street Journal, inaugurated the paper's "Science Journal" in 2002. She was previously the senior science writer at Newsweek, covering neuroscience, genetics, physics, astronomy, and anthropology. The co-author of The Mind and the Brain, she has won many awards for her articles She is a frequent guest on radio and television, including The Charlie Rose Show, Today Weekend, CBS's The Early Show, and Imus in the Morning. She lives in New Jersey.