What brain science tells us about our different emotions.

It's one of the core teachings of mindfulness that we can "know" our feelings in different ways. If we are experiencing sadness, for example, we may become aware of a momentary, subjective sense of sorrow or follow a more conceptual, thought-based view of how it feels. Mindfulness-based interventions help people distinguish between the two modes of thinking. (We'll call them the narrative and the experiential modes. Researchers have spent the last ten years trying to determine which brain regions are activated when people experience emotions differently. It sounds like an important endeavor, but what are the steps to investigate these two brain feeling modes?

A first approach, by Norman Farb and his colleagues, trained participants to ask questions about their personality traits, such as if it made them feel stupid, intelligent, trustworthy, or lazy. At the same time, they were being scanned with a functional MRI. These questions activated either a narrative/analytic mode ("What does this say about me as a person?" "Is this a good or a bad thing?") or an experiential/concrete mode ("What is occurring from one moment to the next?" or "What am I aware of in my body?"). The researchers then examined how mindfulness training interacted between these two modes to determine if each method had a different brain response. The researchers tested two groups, one before they enrolled in MBSR and another after the program.

What did they discover?

The medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region often associated with self-evaluation or analysis in people who practice mindfulness, showed pronounced reductions. The participants also showed increased activity in the areas linked to immediate, moment–by–moment sensory experience (the lateral and prefrontal cortex).

Why are we so focused on ourselves?

Non-meditators had a strong link between the right insula (right prefrontal cortex) and the medial insula, whereas those trained in mindfulness "uncoupled" these areas.

This means that if these two areas are closely connected before practicing mindfulness, it will be very difficult to concentrate on the present without triggering thoughts of self.

This "uncoupling," linked to mindfulness, suggests that a person can now focus on the body without activating "stories" regarding the self. Having actual data showing this phenomenon is hugely important, as it supports the notion of a fundamental neural dissociation between two distinct forms of self-awareness--narrative and experiential modes--that are habitually integrated but can be uncoupled through mindfulness training.

Can we learn not to reflect so much on ourselves?

Based on the finding that mindfulness can increase the contrast between narrative and experiential processing modes, the next question is whether people can learn this practice when they feel sad rather than just reflecting on their descriptive adjectives.

Farb and colleagues returned to the fMRI scan and asked participants who had just started or completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to watch neutral and sad film clips as they were scanned. The unfortunate film clips again triggered activation in the medial prefrontal cortices (self-evaluation, analysis), language centers, and regions that direct self-focus. The somatosensory cortex and the right insula also showed lower levels of activity. Interestingly, the participants who completed the 8-week program had a lower tendency to feel sad. The brain patterns of these people changed. Frontal regions, which direct self-focus, were less active, and the moment-to-moment awareness of the insula was increased.

What to do when you are sad?

You may have attended an MBSR class or MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) and learned that mindfulness helps you to access information about your body's reactions when you experience emotions such as sadness. You know how to observe emotions without getting caught up thinking about them. This allows you to be more open to the bodily sensations associated with emotions. When viewed in terms of its impact on the brain, this practice may help restore the balance between the neural networks that support problem-solving and body-based representations of emotions, particularly if they are too heavily tipped towards the former. When we focus on self-referential problems solving when we're depressed, we're likely to get caught in a depression cycle.

We can make a major shift in our attention by practicing mindfulness. We can now approach our experiences more from an experiential perspective rather than a narrative. This shift in awareness is a tangible change in our minds, and mindfulness training allows this shift to happen even when we are experiencing sad thoughts or feelings. This is how mindfulness will enable us to create space for emotions and ourselves to coexist. We can then move into the next moment with greater choice and self-care.