Can a mouse meditate? A new study suggests the answer is … kind of.
Researchers from the University of Oregon in Eugene have replicated some of the same brain patterns exhibited by human meditators in the brains of mice — no tiny meditation cushions or squeaky “oms” required.
Still, experiments show that the “meditating mice” were more relaxed and less stressed than those with no rodent meditation training.
The authors say the work, published recently in PNAS, provides a proof of concept that will allow them to learn more about how meditation affects the brain.
Previous research has shown that just one month of mindful meditation can have a significant impact on humans both physically and psychologically.
It reduces self-reported anxiety and decrease the amount of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood.
Imaging studies of meditators’ brains also have detected increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. This area of the brain is involved in a wide variety of functions, including emotional regulation and cognitive control.
Scientists also have seen an increase in white matter around the ACC of meditators. That’s important because white matter serves as a kind of insulator, enabling electrical impulses to move more easily between neurons.
Although scientists have observed these positive physical effects of meditation on the human brain, they still don’t know what causes them.
“We think of meditation as a human thing, a high-level thing, but we want to examine the low level biology of it,” said Cris Niell, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon who co-led the study.
The team’s first step in this quest was to create a mouse model that could replicate a human meditator’s brain.
Training mice to focus on the breath, or spend 20 minutes on a body scan was obviously not an option, but the scientists had another plan.
They genetically engineered mice that have a special protein in their brains that causes neurons to fire when they are exposed to light. The researchers were able to put the genetic code for these proteins exclusively in the neurons of the ACC.
Next they connected a light source to the mice’s brains so they could expose these proteins to different patterns of light. By flashing the light, they were able to make the ACC neurons fire at the same pace that they saw in human meditators.
“We are not necessarily making the mice meditate, but we are changing the pattern of activity in the brain region,” Niell said.
Tests revealed that mice that were exposed to the same patterns exhibited by human meditators were more relaxed than those that did not get the “meditation” treatment.
Niell said the work is significant because it gives researchers a scientific tool to study how meditation works in the brain, and it suggests that periodic stimulation could be used to affect change in the brains of people who don’t want to meditate.
