EMOTIONAL OR RATIONAL: WHAT BUDDHIST MEDITATORS CAN TEACH US ABOUT DECISION MAKING

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. April 21, 2011.

Have you ever wondered why we make the decisions that we make? Human nature is, on the face of it, determined by a combination of cognitive and emotional processes.  That is not to say that human beings can be generalized into percentages of rationality and emotionality, but what determines this ratio is a fascinating question and has been explored by researchers.

Interestingly, it had been previously shown that in a scenario known as the ultimatum game, in which there exists a “proposer” and a “responder” that may share a sum of money as suggested by the proposer, human nature as the responder is to reject all offers that permit the proposer more than 80% of the total sum. Rational thought would advocate that the responder accept all non-zero offers but humans tend to prefer to gain nothing than to gain what they consider to be an unfair portion. Brain imaging confirms that rejection of the ultimatum game correspond to activation of portions of the brain correlated with emotions. Why are some of us more capable of favoring rational thought? Who is capable of uncoupling emotional reactions from actual behavior and what makes them so?

                New Research published in the April edition of Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience by Ulrich Kirk, Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech; Jonathan Downar, University of Toronto; and Read Montague, Virginia Tech; shows that Buddhist meditators are far more likely to take what is offered.              

                Mindfulness meditation advocates a spirit of observation as opposed to judgment and involves techniques developed with the goal of well-being and emotional balance. This lead the researchers to believe that meditators would be more accepting in the ultimatum game of rewards that were socially considered unfair, than non-mediators. What they found was that the areas of the brain normally activated by an unfair proposal, specifically the anterior insula which is associated with emotions of disgust, violations, rejection and betrayal; were as expected, expressed in the non-meditator control group. However, meditators showed “no significant activation for either fair or unfair offers, and there was no significant relationship between anterior insula and offer rejection”.

              Meditators are therefore able to uncouple the negative emotional social understanding of an unfair offer from their decision making process. The western world has only recently begun to embrace mindfulness meditation but the origins of mindfulness meditation date back 2500 years in Buddhist tradition.  Meditators were found to draw on areas of the brain involved with attending to internal bodily states and attention to the present moment, whereas the control group of non-meditators drew upon areas associated with episodic memory and fictive error.

They concluded that “the trick may lie not in rational calculation, but in steering away from what-if scenarios, and concentrating on the interoceptive qualities that accompany any reward, no matter how small.”

REFERENCE: Kirk U, Downar J and Montague P. Interoception drives increased rational decision-making in meditators playing the Ultimatum Game. Front. Neurosci., 5:49; 2011.

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE FOOD CHAIN: CHEMICAL COMPOUND LINKED TO CHILDHOOD WEIGHT GAIN

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. April 10, 2011.

It is often the case in the study of human biology that the more answers provided by research, the more questions arise. The increase in the prevalence of obesity in the general population may have yet another element to consider as Spanish researchers have now been able to show that rapid weight gain and elevated obesity percentages occurring in infancy is in fact linked to the prenatal exposure of the pregnant woman to a chemical compound known as DDE (dichloro-diphenyl-dichloroethylene). It follows that a higher body mass index (BMI) in infancy increases the likelihood of obesity and metabolic diseases later on in life.

The team lead by Dr. Michelle A. Mendez was particularly interested in exploring the effects of endocrine disrupting compounds such as DDE, a byproduct of the infamous pesticide DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). The results, published in the Journal Environmental Health Perspectives, showed that from a total of 657 women in early pregnancy, DDE exposure in the first trimester doubled the risk of rapid weight gain in infants of normal weight mothers. Moreover, there was also a correlation with DDE exposure and an elevated BMI later on in infancy.

           Obesity is known to result in illness in many areas of medicine including cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, neurology, oncology, psychiatry, and endocrinology, to name a few. Although it has long been known that increased risk of obesity may well be established early in life, the factors surrounding this have been uncertain. It follows that wholly and solely blaming increased consumption of energy-dense foods and declining physical activity for the increased incidence of obesity is a misleading stance to take. A greater understanding of the mechanism of obesity will go a long way to reducing the stigma with which it finds itself surrounded.

Whether or not DDE’s role is causative in nature or part of a mechanism which enables increased infancy weight gain is unknown but it is at the very least cause for concern and further investigation. DDE is soluble in fat and known to accumulate in the fish and meat supply as a result.  The unfortunate fact is that the ban of DDT usage did not globally eradicate its use immediately and its appearance in the food chain, and therefore the appearance of its byproduct DDE, is still very much unpredictable.

References: 
Michelle A. Mendez, Raquel Garcia-Esteban, Monica Guxens, Martine Vrijheid, Manolis Kogevinas, Fernando Goni, Silvia Fuchs, Jordi Sunyer. "Prenatal Exposure Compound organochlorines, Rapid Weight Gain, and Overweight in Infancy." Environmental Health Perspectives , vol. 119, no. 2, February 2011.