Mindfulness, Cognition, and Neurogenesis

If you haven’t yet, go check out the first piece of this month’s mindfulness series here.

Last week, we started to build a case for living a more present, resilient life by introducing the idea of mindfulness, offering up a potentially more direct meaningful definition, and ended with a brief mindful body scan to introduce what mindfulness feels like. This week, I’d love to dive right into the cognitive architectural changes that have been shown in research as a result of installing some form of mindfulness practice into one’s life.

If you’re anything like me, you probably need a little extra scientific incentive to add or subtract activities in your life – especially when it comes to things like sitting and doing almost nothing. Rest assured, these practices are very recognized within the scientific community, with mindfulness being a large component of many types of clinical therapy such as acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, and other kinds of transdiagnostic psychotherapeutic interventions.

Changing our Mind

Your brain is comprised of billions of small connected cells that are responsible for your psychological experience. Your ability to taste, smell, see, hear, speak, feel, think, and perhaps most importantly, to know you’re alive and a unique person, are all experiences that you can have all thanks to your brain. Your capacity to selectively attend to the way an apple tastes, or to pay attention to a friend telling a story while in a crowded room filled with other voices is another type of experience your brain gives you, selective attention or concentration. Concentration, or your ability to selectively attend to something in your environment is one of the few relatively new abilities gained within the past few hundred thousand years or so due to the development of the prefrontal lobes. Composed of many unique structures that give us an ability to decide what we pay attention to (at least for a few seconds), plan, reason and analyze, our prefrontal lobes are largely responsible for the types of lives we can live today. This is due to the fact that the prefrontal lobes are very “plastic” or malleable in response to the types of experiences we have from the moment we are born, and thus, are highly trainable and adaptive in many populations of people. Today, we will be looking at how mindfulness effects the brain in both how it appears in neuroimaging, and how our psychological experience is changed through our ability to regulate emotion, concentrate, and buffer physiological and psychological stress.

Part 1 of 2

Emotion Regulation

Believe it or not, some people are born with more of an innate ability to be mindful, what is called in the literature as “dispositional mindfulness”. These natural born mindful folk have been seen to portray some interesting abilities, like their heightened ability to regulate their emotions (e.g., they can recognize and mediate an “anger attack” earlier than those who score low on tests of mindfulness). And as the saying goes, “as above, so below”, it turns out there are neural correlates found in neuroimaging studies that point to three important structures found within and near the prefrontal cortex that may be responsible for this cognitive superpower.

The Anerior Cingulate Cortex being “lit up” in an emotion regulation task*

Structures like the Insular Cortex (IC) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) (which are both found in or near the prefrontal cortex and have connections to the “cognitive” frontal lobes and the “emotional” limbic system) appear larger and more connected in those people who display a high ability to notice and describe internal emotional sensations. Brain imaging studies have also shown “heightened activity”* in these areas during evaluation of emotional sensations. The “noticing” of the emotion is done by the ACC, while the IC helps us put words and meaning to the sensations of arising emotion. The third critical component of emotion regulation comes from an area you may have heard about before, the amygdala. The IC and the ACC could be thought of the messengers for the amygdala, who then either shouts “FIRE” or “ah, just a little smoke, nothing to worry about” to the rest of the body. The amygdala has connections to portions of your body’s endocrine, or hormonal system, which it uses to communicate threat signals to all sorts of tissues in your body. In those with high dispositional mindfulness, the ACC and IC can more easily downplay, or inhibit the message to the amygdala. The sensitivity of the amygdala to these messages is a result of many biological factors (such as but not limited to amounts of certain circulating molecules like cortisol, glucose, salt and even psychological stressors) and also plays a large role in emotional regulation. Picture a very sensitive smoke alarm, one that goes off at the slightest increase in temperature, vs a robust, hard-to-trigger smoke alarm that needs to be in the middle of a house fire to go off. A mindfulness practice will help regulate our smoke alarm to find a healthy medium - not too jumpy, but still appropriately responsive. To summarize, our ability to regulate our emotion stems from:

1)      The ACC and IC ability to inhibit the amygdala from sending panic signals to the rest of the body

2)      Amygdala sensitivity to uninhibited messages coming from the body and other cognitive inputs

So what do you do if you happen to be one of those individuals who has a less-than-ideal ability to efficiently regulate emotion? You begin to upgrade your own capacity to first recognize arising sensations, then you learn how to mediate your reaction to it. If you’ve read part 1 of this series, you know about the example I used where I made the analogy that cultivating mindfulness is much like building larger biceps by doing biceps curls. By training mindfulness, or your ability to selectively attend to a given piece of your conscious experience in a non-reactive way, you are training aspects of your cognition that will eventually lead to both positive neurophysiological, and psychological changes across many domains of life.

Later this week, I’ll be releasing part 2 of 2 of this Mindfulness, Cognition, and Neurogenesis article where we’ll take a deeper look into 2 other psychological skills that are improved with a mindfulness practice; concentration and perhaps most importantly, resilience for psychological and physiological stress. Until then, try to do 1 body scan before you go to bed each night. There are some great guided videos on YouTube if you feel as if you require some extra guidance.

*: There have been some notable points made surrounding brain imaging techniques that suggest the mere “lighting up” of certain brain regions during tasks may not be as indicative of local activity as we once thought. Some researchers suggest looking at the entire brain during these cognitive tasks; which is to say that the areas that are “off” are probably just as important as the areas that are “on”, like our case of the inhibition of the amygdala during emotion regulation.