Something else is happening, according to a new study, hopefully with promise for sufferers of chronic pain.
Told that mindfulness meditation can reduce pain, a sceptic might reasonably reach for the placebo effect as an explanation.
But that is not what is going on, according to an experiment published in Biological Psychiatry, which found mindfulness produced pain reduction superior to sham, placebo and control, accompanied by a distinct signature on brain fMRI.
The University of California San Diego-based team took 115 healthy subjects and assigned them to either guided mindfulness meditation, sham meditation, a placebo cream they were told would ease pain (but was actually petroleum jelly), or an audiobook for control.
The sham meditation consisted merely of deep breathing, while real mindfulness aims to make the subject aware of experience while eliminating judgement and evaluation. The Back Page is no expert or adherent, but we gather that the idea of using mindfulness on pain is to detach the underlying experience from the fear, unhappiness and general mental clamour that makes it worse.
The researchers applied a “very painful but harmless” heat stimulus to the back of the subjects’ legs (fun), scanned their brains, had them rate the experience and used something called multivariate pattern analysis to detect which brain regions and networks were involved under each condition.
Mindfulness produced significantly greater reductions in ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness than the other three arms, they report.
While the placebo cream only reduced the brain activity pattern known to be associated with the placebo effect, mindfulness reduced patterns associated with nociception and negative emotions.
It also reduced the synchronisation between brain areas involved in introspection, self-awareness and emotional regulation, which together form the “neural pain signal”, something the researchers say is common across individuals suffering from pain and across different types of pain.
The placebo and sham meditation produced no increased activity here compared with controls, and the patterns they did activate showed little overlap.
Co-author Professor Fadel Zeidan, a professor of anaesthesiology and of empathy and compassion research at UC San Diego, said: “By separating pain from the self and relinquishing evaluative judgment, mindfulness meditation is able to directly modify how we experience pain in a way that uses no drugs, costs nothing and can be practised anywhere.”
It’s certainly a nice thought – but, as always, “more research is needed” especially in subjects who suffer from chronic pain, rather than healthy people subjected to a bit of mild torture.
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