Goal

The brain plays an important role in personal well-being. Poor brain functioning has a detrimental impact on physiological, psychological and social aspects of well-being. An increasing number of people have begun to recognise and utilise mind-body exercises as a means to improve brain function. However, the mechanisms underlying the effects of such exercises and their full benefits in human flourishing remain unclear. Most existing studies focus on stress reduction, under the theory that mind-body exercises can train the brain to induce relaxation responses by switching off or counteracting the stress responses that are produced by neural substrates for defence reaction. Other purported benefits of mind-body exercises include mood improvement, anxiety reduction, sustained attention and memory enhancement. It has been suggested that there is an improved self-regulation of the brain following meditation, signified by heightened state of awareness and focused attention. Most of these theories converge to the same direction, which is neuroplasticity and brain rewiring. The goal of this proposal is to investigate the patterns of brain rewiring in different mind-body exercises and how they may benefit different aspects of human well-being in different age groups with varying capabilities of neuroplasticity.

Opportunity

The support from the Foundation will avail the opportunity to consolidate previous findings and to unite world class researchers to study systematically brain rewiring through mind-body exercises. We challenge the research community to take this opportunity to identify practical and effective mind-body techniques with robustly measurable benefits from physiological, psychological and social perspectives, for different personalities at different stage of human development. The pandemic has raised awareness of emotional influence on health on one hand, and popularized the adaptation of online communication technologies on the other, creating an opportunity for multi-site, online-based experimental collaborations.

Roadblocks

There are many different forms of mind-body exercises, with some being more practical or effective than the others. The initial challenge would be to identify safe, effective, and practical exercises for the study. Once these exercises are found, the following challenges would be (i) to design experiments that can demonstrate their effectiveness using a unified set of physiological, psychological and social measures that are robust and meaningful, and (ii) to illustrate consistent patterns of brain rewiring associated with changes in specific outcome measures.

Breakthroughs Needed

To overcome the challenge of identifying safe, effective, and practical mind-body exercises, we need to bring together seasoned researchers and representatives from practicing groups in the field to sieve through the various forms of mind-body exercises using a set of pre-agreed selection criteria, taking into account safety, effectiveness, and practicality. At the same time, we will seek consensus on the criteria indicating successful brain rewiring. We then need to perform some pilot experiments to establish outcome measures that are sensitive to changes in brain rewiring among existing practitioners of mind-body techniques that may be chosen for study. We hope to identify three or more distinct types of mind-body exercises that fulfill the selection criteria. The research leaders then get together to design experiments that measure the same physiological, psychological and social outcomes for the selected exercises. Considering the compatibility of subjects and the practicality of initial community implementation, we expect to draw subjects from university students at the first stage of the study. Many universities already have some type of mind-body exercise class in place. We expect many students will participate as they are likely to benefit from the process.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Can we establish collaborations on brain rewiring study? Can the collaborations identify mind-body techniques that fulfill the basic selection criteria, and come up with sensitive measures in experimental design to test their effectiveness?
5 years: Have the experiments stayed on the same set of measures? Have the experiments showed significant benefits in the outcome measures?
10 years: How many experimental studies show significant benefits? (1 or more would be considered a success whereas 0 would indicate a failure)

Additional Information

Human well-being or flourishing is closely related to the health of individuals, which is under constant influence of the brain. For thousands of years, people living in the Eastern part of the globe have used mind-body exercises, such as Taichi, Qigong, meditation and Yoga, for health improvement. Recent studies focus on benefits of these exercises on physical and emotional health (1), with few of them paying attention to cognitive functions and social interactions, or to the underlying changes inside the brain. The goal of this proposal is to examine systematically the physiological, psychological and social benefits of mind-body exercises and to investigate the patterns of brain rewiring associated with these benefits.
Our working hypothesis is that, like physical exercises, mind-body exercises enable the brain to establish new functional circuits, thereby to improve our physiological and cognitive functions.
There are several obstacles in testing our hypothesis. The first obstacle is to decide on the types of mind-body exercises to study. As our focus is on long term well-being, mind-body exercises that impact on cognitive factions will be more preferable. However, our current knowledge concerning these type of exercises are vastly deficient. The second obstacle is about how to measure changes in well-being that is caused by the exercises through brain rewiring. While there is proposed measurement of well-being from broad domains of human life (2), more specific, intervention-sensitive measures are needed to support our working hypothesis.
Neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques will be used to study surrogate endpoints. For example, MRI and fMRI can be used to demonstrate neural correlates of personality, cognitive function and changes in mental processing (3,4). Electrophysiological recordings can be employed for studying reaction time and modulation of the autonomic nervous system under various situations, such as stress and excitement (5). We hope to establish a panel of surrogate endpoints that can serve as sensitive markers for brain rewiring and for different domains of well-being.
University students are ideal subjects of the initial experiments because the degree of neuroplasticity may be age-dependent. Furthermore, positive personality changes are conductive to life-long development of young individuals. In community projects, different age groups with specific conditions should be included, so as to maximize the applications of brain rewiring techniques.

References:
1. doi: 10.1016/j.psc.2013.01.011
2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1702996114
3. doi: 10.3390/bs9110112
4. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2018.04.035.
5. DOI: 10.1097/00002060-199711000-00005

Potential Collaborators:
1. Jian Kong, Harvard University, email: kongj@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
2. Tyler J. VanderWeele (Ref. 2)
3. Joseph Ciorciari, (Ref. 3)
4. Jingyu Liu (Ref.4)
5. Ka Fai Chung, University of Hong Kong, email: kfchung@hku.hk