How I Rescued My Brain (33 page)

I see that he's right.

I'm exhausted, and after this I go to bed and sleep for a long time. It amazes me how tired I am — I've slept a lot over the first three days already.

In my second private interview with Ajahn Brahm, I tell him how I've been through some terrible times in recent years and had to find a way out or I wouldn't have survived. ‘I've learnt that pain is a strong motivator,' I say.

‘Yes,' he says, ‘but you need joy to stay on the path, to keep going.'

I recognise the truth in this immediately. The painful experiences motivated me, out of desperation, to find a way through the pain: to find calm, nurturance, and a way to insure myself from the outside attacks. I've experienced joy through singing, making music, swimming, movies, yoga, friends, family holidays, and, increasingly, meditation. Often, I can experience contentment despite outside events. Choeying's words, that suffering can be a ‘blessing or gift', make sense now: pain is a great motivator to be a different person, to see things differently; either that, or you roast inside.

On the last day of the retreat, I take a tour through the monastery with some of the other participants. It is run in the Thai Forest Tradition, so monks live in their own small huts in the forest, with walking paths leading to the common areas, including the kitchen and the dining area.

Ajahn Brahm has mentioned that he sleeps in a cave; I wasn't sure if he was joking. We are guided by one of the resident monks, who speaks with an Irish accent. The cave is real, but human-made, and has been carved into the side of a small hill. A few toy plastic bats hang from the rocky ceiling. With the door closed, it is completely dark inside, unless the lights are on. The monk points out the thin mats that Ajahn Brahm lays upon the floor to sleep on.

We are shown into the small office space at the other end of the hut, where Ajahn Brahm writes his books and correspondence. On the shelf above his narrow desk are his publications and volumes of the Buddha's teachings. There is little else in the room, apart from a chair and a low bench seat. As we step out, I remark, ‘There's not much in here, is there?'

‘It's important to note what's
not
in here,' the monk replies.

This comment stays with me on the flight home. I feel a sudden keenness to simplify my life, to get rid of ‘stuff': not only material possessions, but also the collected years of professional documents I no longer need; and, most importantly, frivolous activities or relationships that aren't nurturing and meaningful.

In his morning talks, Ajahn Brahm spoke of how not letting go can sustain pain, hurt, and anger, and reinforce worry. Now I am ready to let go of being a psychologist — both the one I was before and the variations of this I'd considered becoming.

And for the first time, I can let go of Anna without feeling as if I'm being sucked down a sinkhole. If she believes that she can achieve happiness by starting afresh, how can I say whether this is the right or wrong thing to do?

Is this surrender? Is it acceptance?

The holidays away where I thought we could be our old selves did not make a difference; they merely delayed the inevitable. But I have tried. My efforts to understand what she's been through have been thwarted, and I may never know what her experience of our marriage has been like. Yet I see now that I have been like the passenger standing at a bus stop waiting for a bus that's already gone, and looking expectantly up the road for it to lug around the corner. I will need to let go of the romantic ideal of the nuclear family that grows up together, sharing birthdays and Christmases, relatives and family friends. This is a sadness that will be difficult to sit with, but I've learnt a way through pain.

When I return home, Anna and I discuss how and when we will separate. I will see where this takes us. Let it unfold.

19

EARLIER IN 2011,
James Bennett-Levy learnt that a highly regarded German neuroscientist, Tania Singer, would be holidaying in our area before Christmas. He made contact with her and pinned her down to spend a day with us. He's invited a few of his colleagues, and me, to come along.

We meet up at his home and are all quickly on a first-name basis. Coffee orders are taken, and I go out with someone else to pick them up from the nearby cafe. When I get back, James has set up a projector in the living room. Once Tania's computer is plugged in, the opening graphic of a PowerPoint presentation projects onto the pale-yellow wall, left bare after the removal of an Indian tapestry. It says:
Empathy and Compassion from the Lens of Social Neuroscience – Its Measurement, Modulation, and Plasticity. Tania Singer, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

We settle into chairs, forming a rough semi-circle around Tania, while she stands. I like her immediately; she lacks pretension, and she smiles a lot. She is tall, fortyish, and speaks in German-accented English. Once a research psychologist, she is now the Director of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute. She's refreshed from her holiday, which, she says, included a self-imposed ban from internet access. She's very pleased to have this time with us.

Her primary research area is affective neuroscience — the brain and emotion. Most research in cognitive neuroscience, she tells us, has been done on processes such as memory and attention, but there is little on ‘affective networks', except for fear and psychological trauma. She's previously researched the human emotional response to pain. Today, she'd like to tell us of recent unpublished research on empathy and compassion.

In general, she says, it's more useful to think in terms of neural networks than fixed functions in localised parts of the brain. One area of the brain can serve different functions depending upon which network it is involved with. Her description fits in with my road analogy of the brain, with major and minor roads, crossroads and road junctions.

Emotional contagion, she says, is the precursor to empathy, and we share it with most mammals; we pick up on others' emotions unconsciously, and without realising the source of our emotional experience. If we are around other nervous people, for example, we become ‘infected' by their nervousness. Emotional contagion occurs most obviously within crowds of people: at political rallies, at football games, and in concerts.

Empathy, Tania says, is different from emotional contagion in that it requires a distinction between another and ourselves: ‘I know you are in pain and I know it is not mine,' she explains. And yet with empathy or empathic concern, we feel the other person's pain as if it were our own. Compassion, on the other hand, is a feeling of concern for someone else's wellbeing but without experiencing the same feelings as that person: ‘I don't share your anger but I want you to feel better,' Tania says. Compassion is feeling
for
someone; empathy is feeling
as
someone.

Empathising with someone else's emotional experience activates the same neural networks that would be active if we were having this emotional experience. This is called ‘affective resonance', which sounds to me like Daniel Siegel's concept of ‘resonance circuits'.

Being with a depressed person who you care for leads to you feeling down too, Tania says. ‘If you stay in empathy, you can get empathic distress.' Observing someone who is stressed changes our physiology: it raises cortisol levels, and changes heart rate and pupil size. Our mirror neurons fire to determine what the other person's actions mean. This gives us a second-hand experience of what it is like to be them.

Tania tells us that she first began her investigations on the neuroscience of empathy with Matthieu Ricard, the author of the book
Happiness: a guide to developing life's most important skill
, which I have already read. Ricard is a Tibetan Buddhist monk who, for most of his life, has actively practised compassion. Formerly he was a scientist, and he is interested in investigating the neurological correlates of contemplative practices.

Tania had him come to her lab. She put him into a functional MRI (fMRI) machine and asked him to ‘resonate with the suffering and pain of others as if the pain is your own' — an instruction to be empathic. He did this for an hour. When she asked him what it was like to experience others' suffering, he said that he felt distressed. After this, he was keen to do his regular compassion practice to ease the distress. Tania requested that he do this while in the fMRI machine, which he did.

What Tania had seen on the fMRI scans during Ricard's empathy practice was the activation of the empathy-for-pain network: primarily, the anterior insula and the anterior medial cingulate cortex. But what she saw on the fMRI scans during Ricard's compassion practice was remarkable. A completely distinct network was activated: primarily, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex
,
and the ventral striatum. From a neural point of view, she concluded, empathy and compassion are distinct emotional experiences.

What Tania says is an epiphany for me. It's suddenly clear to me that during my years of clinical work, each time I was with a client I was dipping into their pain — my body's physiology changing with theirs. I was experiencing their emotional suffering. When I was sitting face-to-face with the young woman's murderer, a man who feared for his own life, I was experiencing his fear too. During my Children's Court work, I was feeling the distress of the children I was with, and it was made worse by me imagining my own children in the same circumstances. I was undergoing, vicariously, the abuse and neglect of my children, in my body and in my brain.

During my psychology training, we were encouraged to attune to our clients by using communication micro skills: posture, positioning, the mirroring of body movements, and reading our own bodies to clue us into our clients' experience. We were trained in verbal skills called empathic and active listening: ways of checking in with our client to see if we were picking up correctly on their inner experience. These techniques helped us to fathom what it was like to be in the other person's world, to stand inside it with them. This means that psychologists, and other psychotherapists who are trained in a similar way, are being set up to experience empathic distress — the seed of vicarious trauma.

But Tania has good news. Because compassion is a different neural event from empathy, it allows for the option to retrain the brain to experience compassion rather than empathic distress.

Together with her PhD student, Olga Klimecki, Tania carried out a study with people who had no history of meditation or compassion practice. The experimental group was trained in empathy, and a second group was trained in a memory exercise for words (the control group). Before and after training, they were assessed on their responses to viewing, without sound, two types of video clips of real events. The low-emotion videos showed men, women, and children in everyday situations. The high-emotion videos were taken from news events and documentaries showing human suffering following injuries and natural disasters.

The empathy-trained subjects reported an increase in empathy and negative feelings after viewing both mildly and highly distressing videos, compared with the memory group. The empathy-trained group's fMRI scans showed activation of the empathy-for-pain network: the anterior insula and the anterior medial cingulate cortex.

Subsequently, the empathy-trained group was given instruction in a compassion practice: loving-kindness meditation, to engender feelings of warmth and care. This, as I knew by now, involved the visualisation of a close and loved person, a neutral person, and a difficult person, generating positive feelings towards them, and then projecting these feelings towards strangers and human beings in general.

Olga and Tania found that compassion training reversed the subjects' negative feelings after watching the video clips, reducing it back to baseline, and increased their positive feelings. Tania says these brain areas activated by compassion training — the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventral striatum — are associated with the care, love, and reward systems and involve the neurotransmitters oxytocin, dopamine, and opioids. Oxytocin facilitates feelings of trust and love, dopamine gives a sense of reward, and opioids provide pain relief.

Tania thinks that compassion training may be a form of psychological inoculation for people faced with human distress or adverse circumstances. The compassionate orientation does not eliminate the experience of negative feelings. Rather, it seems to provide a re-interpretation of human suffering; it leads to the compassionate person experiencing increased warmth and concern for others.

She emphasises that this research is in an early phase. Further investigations will look at the effect of different methods of compassion training on different population groups.

I ask Tania about psychological trauma and what role mindfulness and meditation can play in helping sufferers to recover from trauma. I've been using these practices to help me recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, I tell her.

She reminds us that in psychological trauma, an automatic response is triggered by a perceived threat, and the inhibitory function of the prefrontal cortex doesn't work effectively during a state of high fear. Traditional therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive behaviour therapy and practising detachment or suppression of emotion, have a partial effect on dampening the trauma response, she says. Meditation, on the other hand, is ‘something new'. She thinks it doesn't work on active inhibition, but on an earlier phase of not getting triggered to start with: when you ‘stay with the emotion' but recognise that ‘it's not me'. ‘You don't need to put up a wall against it,' she says.