The green approach to sustainable enhancement: meditation practice and an ethic of brain friendly modulation
Creators: name: Larrivee, Denis
name: Steele, Diane
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2015

description: From pharmacological manipulation to interfacial neurotechnologies, approaches to neuroenhancement span a broad and expanding technology spectrum. Many such procedures introduce profound changes in brain function, oftentimes with serious health risks. The Presidential Commission for the study of Bioethical issues (Gray Matters II, 2015), by contrast, has recommended enhancement protocols that are minimally intrusive and that avail themselves of the brain’s latent plastic capacity for sustained change. Because the former procedures often incur substantial personal risk whereas the latter do not such a preference may be said to exercise an ethic of least risk exposure. Among protocols now used for therapeutic purposes is meditation. Meditation  practice, in fact, is widely distributed amongst varying cultural traditions, usually in association with religious practice. In its secular forms it has been employed as a means to achieve control over random and spontaneously occurring thoughts. Increasingly, well documented studies show that meditation practice accrues numerous cognitive, as well as corporal benefits. Among these are included a spectrum of brain anatomical changes, e.g., increased callosal fiber tracts, altered cortical gyrification, cortical thickening, larger hippocampal and frontal cortex volumes, and neurophysiological differences, e.g. frequency shifts in EEG gamma wave patterns, that are correlated with improved neurophenomenological abilities and corporal improvements in various bodily systems such as reduced inflammatory response, epigenetic modifications, and cardiovascular fitness (Lutz et al, 2015). Often cited are enhanced learning and discursive reasoning, self-awareness, attentive focus, and emotional and pain regulation. The practice of mindfulness meditation, for example, has been shown to decrease the experience of chronic pain in long term sufferers (Kabat-Zinn, 1982). Meditative forms originating in western tradition, additionally, have typically emphasized attentional control over dialogical expression and the awareness of self and other. Contemplative practice in this tradition often emphasizes disciplinary intent that is ordered to virtue and self integration. Meditative prayer, for example, assists the reshaping of neural circuits for empathic understanding. These have been shown to reduce medicalization, now socially widespread, that is associated with self dispersive behaviors. We propose that meditative practice is consistent with an ethic of least risk exposure, yet affords a spectrum of benefits of cognitive, personal, and social natures that may match or exceed that of proposed invasive procedures. <br><br>Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. 2015. GRAY MATTERS: Topics at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society, p 32.<br>Lutz, A, JD Dunne, RJ Davidson. 2015. Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness. In <i>Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.<br>Kabat-Zinn, J. 1982. An outpatient program in Behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation. <i>Gen Hospital Psychiatry</i> 4:33 – 47.<br>