Protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government, monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death on 11th June, 1963.
Duc maintained silence and a calm composition as flames shrivelled his body and charred his head. 50 years of meditation had equipped his brain with structural-functional changes to tolerate acute pain.
The cortex of typical people who had practiced meditation for around 9 years, for at least 40 minutes every day, had several differences from those of non-meditators1.
A study analysed cortical thickness which is a ratio of gray matter to white matter, and found that meditators had more gray matter. The most significant difference between meditators and non-meditators was the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula2.
These areas are central to pain processing, attention, and internal perception. Meditators developed thicker gray matter the longer they meditated.
Counterintuitively, mindfulness practitioners reduce pain by increasing awareness to the unpleasant stimuli3. During the process of meditation, lower sensitivity to pain and the ability to modulate pain are correlated with slowing of the respiratory rate and experience with meditation4.
The Wim Hof Method (WHM) is a great example of how a short duration of training in meditation and breathing techniques5 can elicit profound sympathetic nervous and immune system modulation.
This breathing method consists of cyclic hyperventilation followed by breath retention, and ice-cold water immersion6. In a study, participants were trained in the WHM for 10 days and then injected with a bacterial endotoxin.
Trained individuals had an increased release of adrenaline and anti-inflammatory mediators leading to a more effective immune system response.
Years of practice, many hours a day, prepared Duc. Variations in expert meditator experience, such as those with 44,000 hours of practice had considerably different changes in the brain than in those with 19,000 hours of practice7.
A yoga master claimed that during meditation, he couldn’t feel the pain when shot with a laser on his foot. As he meditated, his brain was imaged with fMRI. The results revealed weak or absent levels of activation in primary pain areas such as the thalamus, secondary somatosenory cortex, and cingulate cortex8.
After 50 years of extensive meditation experience, Duc would have had a highly differentiated brain structure with a tremendous ability to modulate the structure’s functioning.
References:
1. Lazer et al., 2005
2. Hölzel et al., 2008
3. Gard et al., 2012
4. Grant & Rainville, 2009
5. Tange et al., 2007
6. Kox et al., 2014
7. Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007
8. Kakigi et al., 2005
Subscribe to my mailing list to be notified about my posts:
Quite insightful!!