North of Pembroke campus sits a house that looks — from the outside — much like neighboring houses. But inside is a different story. The house has a laboratory in the basement and a prayer hall on the second floor.
The Cheetah House, located at 185 Brown Street, was founded in 2008 for Brown students seeking a supportive environment for their contemplative practices. The house's name comes from "citta," the Sanskrit word for both heart and mind. "Meditation is mind training, but also the cultivation of heart qualities" like compassion and empathy, said founder Willoughby Britton.
Studies show that meditation improves attention and emotional regulation, said Britton, a research associate in psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine. For that reason, students practicing meditation should have better focus and control over their emotions than other students.
Britton and Professor of Religious Studies Harold Roth are leading the Brown Contemplative Studies Initiative. Brown is considered a pioneer in the newly developing field of Contemplative Studies, which is committed to the study of contemplative practices and their potential, Roth said. The goal of the initiative is to establish a center for contemplative studies where students and researchers can study and develop objective and subjective approaches to contemplative practice through a variety of disciplines including science, humanities and the creative arts.
Britton is the leader of the scientific side of Brown's initiative. Her research focuses on the effects of meditation on attention and emotion regulation.
Recipe for focus
Britton wondered whether other high-focus practices — such as music, dance, theater and writing — would yield the same benefits as meditation.
Having spent over 7,000 hours of her life meditating, she wanted to know if this time could have been spent playing the guitar instead of sitting quietly, cultivating breath awareness.
Practices like meditation, music and dance require sensory motor integration, a focus on body sensations. Such activities tune the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
The prefrontal cortex modulates attention and controls the amygdala, a structure related to emotion. When the prefrontal cortex is properly functioning, the amygdala is inhibited. If not properly functioning, the disinhibited amygdala can cause emotional overreactions and — over time — emotional disorders like anxiety and depression.
Thus, people who have strengthened their prefrontal cortex through body-based attention training should have better focus and control over their emotions.
Britton wondered if all body-based attention training has the same effects on attention and emotional regulation. If so, musicians, dancers and meditators should all reap similar benefits.
Brains in the basement
To answer this question, Britton embarked on a years-long study.
Over the past three years, Britton's lab has studied students of music, dance and contemplative studies at Brown. Students of contemplative studies had participated in a minimum of three weekly hour-long meditation labs.
Study participants completed two hours' worth of questionnaires that asked about their moods, family psychological history, how much music they listen to and much more. They then underwent two hours of neuropsychological testing in the basement lab. The tests were designed to assess the functioning of three areas of the brain involved in attention and emotion regulation — the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala.
To assess the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, students completed what Britton called the "tedious" sustained attention to response test. To test the hippocampus and amygdala, students were exposed to emotionally loaded photographs and words, which they rated according to valence — pleasant to unpleasant — and physiological response — such as a cringe of disgust in response to a picture of a dead body or a burst of happiness in response to a picture of a smiling child eating ice cream.
Before coming to the lab for testing, students recorded their sleep for two consecutive nights using a cell phone-sized recorder. With two electrodes attached to the back of the head, the electroencephalogram-based recorder measured and recorded the electrical activity in the brain.
Britton said she is curious about the effects of attention training on sleep. In a previously published study, she found that multi-practice meditation resulted in decreased sleep propensity — a lower tendency to sleep.
Two hundred and eighty-eight students have volunteered their time, around 100 of whom are meditators. Ninety participants are students from meditation lab courses, and about 15 are advanced meditation practitioners who serve as a reference group. Because Britton's lab receives no funding from the University, Britton rewarded participants with home-cooked cupcakes and soup.
Many undergraduate students who work in the Britton lab do so as volunteers. Britton says a lack of opportunities for clinical research in Psychology on campus has led to a lot of interest in her lab.
Annie Brown '12 started working in the lab after attending a summer program in India where she taught neuroscience to Buddhist nuns and monks. In return, they taught her the Buddhist philosophy of the mind. She said she was amazed by the amount of overlap between scientific and Buddhist understandings of the mind, and decided to switch from a concentration in neuroscience to one in "contemplative cognition."
Because contemplative studies is not an official University department, Brown created an independent concentration. She is one of three head examiners in the lab, helping run the neuropsychological testing. Brown said the lab, besides conducting "phenomenal" research, is also a great community. "Because of our practice … we are approaching science contemplatively, and we are creating an intentional community of people who not only care about their work, but also care about each other," she said.
Britton found that the three groups — meditators, musicians and dancers — all demonstrated similar improvements in attention, but experienced different changes in emotion regulation, anxiety and depression. Britton has not yet published findings from this study, as she continues to collect data from students.
"College courses are not equal when it comes to emotional well-being," she wrote in an e-mail to The Herald, referring to the varying benefits of dance, music and contemplative classes. "Some may help with depression and stress, and some may make (them) worse!"
Respiren, respirez, breathe
This year, Britton added a fourth group to the study — students in language acquisition classes. Language acquisition — like music, dance and meditation — requires sensory motor integration training.
"Simplemente respiren," instructs Victoria Smith, senior lecturer of Hispanic studies to her basic Spanish students.
For a few minutes during class, students sit motionless with their eyes open or closed, hands relaxed in their laps, just simply breathing. Some of these students are subjects in Britton's study.
Smith is also part of the contemplative studies faculty. She said she incorporates contemplative practices in her class because she finds many students are too anxious and agitated. Smith says breath awareness practices slow the mind and allow students to "develop a witnessing state to (their) mental weather," helping them to reach their learning and creative potential.
Most students in Smith's class enjoy the opportunity to press the pause button on life. "It's nice that a professor takes time out of a class to realize that we're all really stressed, especially in one that moves as quickly as Spanish
," said Nuni Montaigne '12. Contemplative practices in Spanish class have sparked Montaigne to finally pursue meditation, which she said kept coming up in her life and conversations at Brown.
Several other students have acted upon Smith's encouragement to continue practicing outside of class, promising that even five minutes of sitting quietly daily helps with stress. Kyle Brine '13 began meditating two years ago. He said meditation is a part of his day separate from his busy life. When he returns from it, his problems don't seem like such a big deal, he said. "You start to see your thoughts as more external, and with that, all of your problems."
For students not involved in the Britton study or in classes that incorporate contemplative practices, there are other opportunities to reap the benefits of meditation. They can practice on their own, as suggested by Smith, or join the Brown Meditation Community, which meets throughout the week in Manning Chapel.
Tyler Keith '10.5, who leads the group on Tuesdays, said meditation helps him maintain "basic sanity" because he has learned not to be overtaken by his mind and emotions. Zach Schlosser '10.5 also spoke of how contemplative practices have helped him overcome anxiety, unhappiness and confusion. Both Keith and Schlosser live in the Cheetah House and have been on contemplative retreats.
But as the final results of Britton's study may tell, students may not even have to practice meditation to reap its benefits, but instead can spend their time dancing, learning a new language or playing a musical instrument.
