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'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers -- mindfulness. The researchers analyzed data obtained from a study published in 2015 that compared mindfulness meditation to placebo analgesia. In this follow-up study, Zeidan sought to determine if dispositional mindfulness, an individual's innate or natural level of mindfulness, was associated with lower pain sensitivity, and to identify what brain mechanisms were involved. In the study, 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated first completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness, to determine their baseline levels. Then, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, they were administered painful heat stimulation.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
I saw that movie!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
This study resonates with my personal experience. Say I'm in pain at the dentist's, or an insect bite, or fatigue from endurance exercise. I could drop straight into the normal instinctual fight-or-flight emotional response to the pain. But instead I get my mind to observe the pain as a detached analytical observer -- to try to document the sensations of the pain in all their aspects, like a scientist would. I pretend there's no axiom that says "this sensorial experience implies that emotional response". And, hey presto, there the emotional response just doesn't happen.
In this context, Mindfulness is an oxymoron, where to become mindful is to remove oneself from one's own mind. It's the application of adding a level of indirection (*) to every variable.
Mindfulness in this context is just a measure of how people score on a straightforward practical questionnaire. The questions are practical, so there's no oxymoron. The only oxymoron comes from your own putative definition "remove oneself from one's own mind" which isn't what was used in the study. Here are some of the questions in the questionnaire, on a scale from Rarely to Almost Always:
Q. I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning or talking.
Q. I am able to appreciate myself.
Q. I pay attention to what’s behind my actions.
Q. I am friendly to myself when things go wrong.
Q. I am impatient with myself and with others.
Note that the "mindfulness" used in this context doesn't require you to semantically analyze the questions for what you believe to be contradictions or oddities or the logic of the questions; it's merely an observation of how people respond to it, correlated with population observations of how other people respond to it.
I think your analogy of "adding a level of indirection" isn't the right one. These questions make it sound like mindfulness is more like executing the code under a debugger, and being in the habit of pausing it in tough situations or just periodically, and inspecting the values of local variables so as to have a better idea of what's going on. The alternative would be to only figure out what's going on by looking at the output values of all functions, or what's printed to stdout.
They make sense if you practise mindfullness.
Ah, much as like religion makes sense if you practice the religion, then. Not at all from an objective perspective, because it must be a subjective experience. In other words: BS
It is true what you are saying, in that there is a big difference between objective data and subjective expression. And we should not pretend that this is like measuring something objective. Having said that, subjective experience is not BS. If your partner says "I love you and want to have babies and start a family and grow old together", that is all subjective, yet, people have to base the biggest decisions in their lives on whether they intuit that their partner is being sincere, or whether they think their partner is lying, either to them or to themselves.
Objective science is amazing, and there is the rest of life where no, you cannot be objective, but you cannot just ignore subjectivity and intuition and interpretation and sincerity either, because you'd not be able to function.
And if you go to a doctor and complain that it hurts, but the doc says they can't find anything wrong with you, too often there are cases where yes there really is something wrong with you, but all you know is how you feel. Ie. "subjective BS".
But yes, pretty much all of "mindfulness" is a phenomenology, not an objective science. Which is why trying to correlate it with brain activity is interesting.
What the earlier poster refers to though is something that tends to be heard in mindfulness and meditation circles. And yes it is subjective, but "suffering" is a subjective experience, and we can't tell people who are suffering, because they just lost their job, that they should quit whining because it is "all in their head". As humans we are similar and there are phenomenological experiences which most of us would agree are "suffering". Likewise, as a collection of humans who practice mindfulness, we can compare and talk about whether it seems to reduce suffering.
And of course a group of people can delude themselves just as a group of scientists peer reviewing each others' clique of speciality can all delude themselves with group think.
So by all means take that study with a large pinch of salt.
Mindfulness is simply about noticing that when a bad feeling or bad situation comes up, those events are a bit like a drama on a TV show and you are watching the TV show. The TV is like your consciousness, a screen on which or within which, the image is manifesting, and the TV does not get upset about the drama, the drama is merely a function of what the TV is supposed to be doing naturally.
So there is a sort of "feeling lighter" and from there you then participate in, and accept more, the drama, and out of that, you probably find answers better. Mindfulness is like, the opposite of running away from problems.
In Buddhism I gather there is the story of a guy who is shot by an arrow and is obviously in pain, but rather that accept the situation and deal with it, he is very upset that he is shot by an arrow, ie. he is mentally in a state of rejection of the situation, he hates it, and that adds another layer of upset and suffering, in that he just hates the situation, and so he experiences even more pain. "I can't stand it!!" Subjectively he has added additional layers of suffering and pain, to the original "arrow stuck in leg" pain.
So maybe there is something about whether a stimulus in one part of the brain gets relayed or not, to other parts of the brain, and as your brain is the physical side of your mind, if you alter your mind with a practice of accepting, maybe your brain does rewire, given the material assumption that everything you experience is created by the brain, or could not happen unless the brain itself was doing it.
If in your mind you have loosened the connections between phenomena so that a pain is more in isolation, more localised, then maybe the brain is also loosening the connections between centres and allowing that is happening in one centre to have less influence on the other centres.