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Professor Charles Raison When I was at UCLA, I encountered some famous footage of Tibetan monks with the bizarre ability to raise their body temperature and steam dry sheets and lay out naked at 17,000 feet. I’m not naturally inclined to believe in the supernatural. But what really caught my attention was that this technique produced an intense euphoria. I had been interested in mood disorders for quite a while. There’s a huge overlap between body temperature and mood that is not very well known in psychiatry, but there are many papers showing that people who are stressed or have mood disturbances can develop a fever. Some people with major depression run between one and a half and two degrees hotter, especially at night.

So from a Western, scientific perspective, I started wondering if these guys had found some way of tweaking body systems involved in mood by altering their body temperature. One of the main reasons I came to Emory two years ago is because the psychiatry department specializes in the brain and the body systems in which mood and temperature regulation interact.

AE An emotional thermostat?

CR Maybe. But it’s not just emo-tional, given that the same systems that mediate stress are also involved in causing you to get a fever if you eat bad food or catch the flu. Another reason I came here is Emory’s connection with the Loesling Institute. Atlanta is like a modern version of fifteenth-century Florence—a fairly small city that through the vagaries of fate and luck has a coalition ripe for an explosion. The karma is right. We’ve got cutting-edge neuroimagers; we’ve got world-famous psychiatrists; we’ve got Geshe Lobsang, one of the best-known Tibetan monks in the Western Hemisphere. And I’ve been so impressed with the people in the Department of Religion.

AE When will your meditation study start?

CR We’ve already begun pilot studies. Since the Tibetans monks who raise their body temperature don’t want to be examined by Western scientists, we are trying to look at the same thing in a more doable way. Also, this technique of raising your body temperature is very complicated, and the Tibetans say that doing it without the all the proper set-up is potentially dangerous to your health, both mental and physical.

But there’s a little part of this heat meditation that involves a physical exercise called “vase breathing” that can be done without invoking the other stuff that the Tibetans say is more risky. So we’ve isolated this out and we’re going to study it in people who are not meditators by teaching them the technique and then doing before and after testing. Andrew Miller, Guiseppe Pagnoni, and I are interested in the idea that overall health is associated with this ability of the stress system to deal with a stressor and then pop! to turn off.

If you subject people to stress in a laboratory, everybody’s stress systems turn on. Some people turn on sluggishly and then stay up. Other people shoot up and then dive right back down. It turns out that people who have the big stress response that shoots up and then goes away quickly are happier, more relaxed, and have better relationships with other people when compared to people with chronically increased stress system activity. So it looks like this is a healthy pattern.

The chemicals released in people who have this more adaptive response raise body temperature. The people who have the more maladaptive response get more chemicals that cause body temperature to lower. So there’s an indication that psychological health may be related to turning on parts of the stress system that raise body temperature. Our hypothesis is that these Tibetan techniques turn on those same systems.

AE How does climate fit in?

CR If you look at the states in the U.S. where people live the longest, it’s Vermont and Utah. People generally tend to live longer in colder places. There’s also a certain amount of fat that animals have a lot of and people a little less, called brown fat. It’s like a heater, turning on this heat response, and there’s evidence that people who work in cold climates outdoors have more of this kind of brown fat.

Now Tibet is the coldest place in the world where people actually live. So it may not be an accident that these people have perfected this particular meditation technique: they are in an environment where evolution would favor the development of brown fat. It’s interesting that Scandinavian studies show
that people who can tolerate the cold by generating body heat have less anxiety and depression than people who are more vulnerable to the cold.