A new US study has shown that the qualities of compassion and kindness may be able to be taught via meditation classes.

Imaging technology has shown that individuals who participate in meditation focusing on kindness and compassion experience changes to areas of the brain that make them more empathetic to others feelings.

Study co-author Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said ‘Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic’.

However, Dr Louis Teichholz, medical director of complementary medicine and chief of cardiology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, accepted the findings with caution, saying, ‘I think there’s no question that people can benefit from these practices. I think the question is how easy is it to get trained enough so that it will make a clinical difference, and I don’t think this study answers that’.

Explaining the nature of the study, Lutz said, ‘The main research question was to see whether some positive qualities such as loving-kindness and compassion or, in general, pro-social altruistic behaviour, can be understood as skills and can be trained’.

For the study, 16 Tibetan monks and lay practitioners with at least 10,000 hours of meditation experience each were compared with 16 ‘novice’ control subjects who had only a basic introduction to compassion meditation.

Study participants in the control group were instructed to wish loved ones well-being and freedom from pain and then to wish these benefits to the whole of humankind.

‘We looked at whether there were any differences between experts and novices in generating compassion with the idea that a central practice in this tradition [of meditation] is to cultivate these positive emotions. We wanted to see if there were any differences in the way the brain was reacting’ said Lutz.

All of the participants were linked to an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) during their periods of meditation and non-meditation. In each state, the subjects were played sounds aimed at producing a range of responses, including the sound of a woman in distress (negative), the sound of a baby’s laughter (positive), and the sound of restaurant background noise (neutral).

Lutz commented, ‘We showed altered activation in brain circuitry that was previously linked to empathy and perspective-taking or the capacity to understand other’s intentions and mental states and, more precisely, the insula was more activated, particularly in response to negative emotional sounds’.

The activation of this area of the brain was particularly heightened in the monks when they were subjected to the sounds of the woman in distress.

‘The next step is to see if this works. If it works, then it can be applied to selective populations - for instance, depressed people or, more broadly, in education’ said Lutz.