Episode 49: Meditation And The Human Body With Dr Hemal Patel
How powerful is meditation? We’ve heard all the wonderful benefits about it for years from the spiritual community. But now, for the first time, we have officially entered a new age where the scientific community backs up the mystical, and even surpasses what we have previously known about meditation. In this episode, Anand teams up with Dr. Hemal Patel, a Professor and Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego, to share basic insights into how the meditating mind creates physical changes to alter the biology of living systems. Dr. Patel’s laboratory is poised to link physics, biophysics, and biology to potentially transform our understanding of the mind’s power to change human health.
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Meditation And The Human Body With Dr Hemal Patel
How powerful is meditation? We've heard all the wonderful benefits about it for years, but now we have officially entered a new age where science backs up the mystical, and even surpasses what we had previously known about meditation. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Hemal Patel, PhD, as he shares the data from the world's largest-ever study on the effects of meditation. Dr. Hemal H. Patel, PhD is a Professor and Vice-Chair for the Research in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Patel's career has focused on developing an integrated understanding of the organism by studying whole animal and cell physiology techniques with a particular focus on biomembranes and cellular energetics. He has brought interest in cardiovascular disease, cancer biology, neurodegeneration, aging and diabetes. He has published over 170 original manuscripts, reviews and book chapters featured in prominent journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, Journal of Biological Chemistry, FASEB Journal, and Circulation.
He has given over 70 research seminars nationally and internationally. He serves as a senior editor and editorial board member for seven international journals and reviews grants for the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, and many national and international foundations. His laboratory has been continuously funded by research grants since 2005.
Dr. Patel was initially skeptical about the ability of the mind to impact health. After reviewing early evidence, he was convinced that more research was needed to be done to discover the power and impact of meditation on biological markers that would define the mind-body connection. He is actively involved in using an unbiased discovery-based approach to reveal basic insights into how the meditating mind creates physical changes to alter the biology of living systems. Dr. Patel's laboratory is poised to link physics, biophysics, biology and potentially transform our understanding of the mind's power to change human health and potential.
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Welcome to the show, Dr. Hemal Patel. How are you?
It's good to see you.
I'm super excited to have you on. I had the privilege of meeting you at the Dr. Joe Dispenza event down in Florida back in January. You gave this amazing presentation that blew the minds of myself and pretty much everyone else in the audience. I'm honored to have you talk about your groundbreaking research as you're heading up the world's largest effects of meditation study. Thank you for coming on.
I'm excited. We love talking about the research that's going on and getting other people excited about it. I'm looking forward to it.
We're up the alley of the show because we're all about finding a limitless life and how we get there. As I've learned scientifically now, meditation is pretty much one of the best things you can do for your overall health mind, body and spirit. I've known that as a person who engages in it but scientifically, you've proven that to be the case. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and the research you've worked on in the past?
I got a couple of Bachelor's degrees. I started off as a Biology major in college. This was with the intent that I would eventually go to medical school and become a physician. If you're Indian, you have two choices. You became a lawyer or a physician at that time.
I failed both of those.
I failed one of them as well. I became a doctor but in a different light. I can talk about that. I went to a small Liberal Arts school in Northern Missouri. The focus of a Liberal education was that if you were a declared Science major, you had to be well-rounded. We had to take classes in Literature, History, Humanities, and other things. I thought, "Why don't I take an intro to Philosophy class and see what it's like?" I fell in love with Philosophy. I had this amazing professor, Natalie Alexander, who blew my mind in terms of thought. It was a survey course.
I did well in her class. I'm a Southeast Asian, so it is in our blood to continue to trudge along and work hard on these academic endeavors. It was interesting that I picked up on things that I had grown up learning about in Hinduism but never understood. I applied some of those ideas of how life, existence, and things come into this philosophical course. She encouraged me to take more classes. I ended up declaring a double major in Biology and Philosophy of Religion. Along that path, I discovered Western theology.
I did quite a lot of historical dive into Western theology. I even took two semesters of Koine Greek, which is biblical Greek. At one time, I could read parts of the Bible in the original language. After that, the thought was, "What do I do with the rest of my life?" I had set myself up for those two things. Most biologists went on to get Medical degrees, and most philosophers went on to get that Law degree because that gave you that grounding in logic and philosophical arguments. I ended up falling in love with research. I'm the only PhD in a family of MDs. All the kids became MDs.
I chose this alternative path of doing research. I ended up at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I got my PhD in a very broad area called Pharmacology and Toxicology. I purposely chose this because then I have the option to work in any living system that I potentially can dream up and work on. My PhD was focused on the heart. We were looking at how to protect the heart from an ischemic event. The problem is that the first sign of a heart attack is that you're having a heart attack. Most people die from that event because you get this massive necrotic injury that happens.
“What we’ve learned in academic medicine and research is that you come across people and you develop relationships over time.”
Our lab was focused on trying to figure out how we could intervene to protect that tissue from dying during this ischemic event that an individual has. We went on to show through a series of papers. It was a very collaborative group, so we got to know grad students that came well before us and after us. It was a nice family of science that we did. There were hundreds of papers published in this area. That was my foray into the initial workings of science and research. Typically, what happens after you finish your PhD is what an MD does. It’s to go off and do the residency.
A PhD scientist goes off and does what's called a postdoctoral fellowship. My wife, who I met in high school, was an MD. She did her training at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where I got my PhD. She was in the Navy, so it's a match to the San Diego program. I guess there are worse places we can end up. We ended up in San Diego. I did my postdoc here in the pharmacology department and the rest is history. We never left. It's an amazing academic and world environment to be in, in San Diego.
That would make so much sense as to what led you to the study you're doing now. You had the background of learning about world philosophy and world religion and marrying that with science. I'm sure you don't meet a lot of people who are double-majored in Philosophy and pre-med.
I had a guru in college. My background in Philosophy of Religion comes from two major Germans in my life. Lloyd Pflueger was this amazing guy who taught Eastern religion and theology. He was a German that spent time in India and became a Hindu. The Western counterpart was this guy whose name was Dr. Mark Appold. He was the local pastor at the Lutheran Church. He was a Renaissance guy. He spoke seven languages, knew all of the original biblical languages, and taught around Western theology.
These are the two individuals that grounded my religious philosophy and theology training. With Lloyd, he became my meditation guide. He and I share this cosmic bond. He whispered this mantra in my ear decades ago. The only time it was ever spoken was when he whispered in my ear. I've never spoken it out loud. He's never done this as well. He and I shared this intense bond.
I meditated quite heavily as a college student. You’ve got to figure out how to get by on three hours of sleep, and meditation is the way to do it. Twenty minutes of meditation feels like a six-hour nap almost. It was very intense. Life catches up with you. I didn't think about it for the next however many decades until we started working with Joe Dispenza.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you met Dr. Joe Dispenza and how this opportunity came about for you to start researching people's minds during meditation?
What I've learned in academic medicine and research is that you come across people and develop these relationships over time. I got my Postdoc in Pharmacology. To stay at UCSD, I transitioned as a junior faculty member into the Department of Anesthesiology. It's a clinical department, but they tend to recruit a lot of PhDs that have a pharmacology background. It was a nice fit. We were doing research at the time with a couple of anesthesiologists.
One of the experiments that we were doing at the time was to put in an office an MD and a PhD. The idea was that at the end of the day, you would start talking to each other. The MD would rub off on the PhD to make the PhD start thinking about problems that affect the human condition. Most PhDs are in their molecular world where, "What is the application of this protein to the rest of biology?" By working with an MD, you can see how your science can impact human life and the experience.
The counterpart was to get that MD to think like this PhD, "How do you design the perfect experiment? How do you control things? How do you put elements like this?" I shared my office with Toby Moeller-Bertram. Toby was a junior faculty member in the department as well. He had finished his MD-PhD training and had become a pain specialist. He was practicing pain kinds of stuff and doing research in PTSD. We shared an office for almost a decade. We became good friends. We talked a lot about science and medicine, but we never interacted scientifically.
He then left the university and started his own mega clinic, which is very successful in the Palm Desert area in California. It's 18 or 19 clinics that he runs now. When the opioid crisis hit, he started experimenting with alternative approaches to pain management, and meditation was one of these. One of the practitioners in his clinic, Dr. Hilary Hamilton, who's been involved with our research endeavors for a number of years as well, said, "Do you mind if I do some meditations?" She was Joe’s student. She started showing Toby some of these things, and they were seeing some good results.
Meditation: One of the things that we've been playing around with in our more detailed study is looking at biometrics and ways of capturing, in a noninvasive way, data constantly in a 24/7 fashion.
Joe visited their clinic. Toby was very busy. You can imagine a busy pain clinic. Joe had invited Toby to come to an event, so we went to an event. Like most of us, when we go to a week-long event, our minds are skeptical first entering, and then you go through that experience, and you're blown away. Toby was blown away by what he saw. It's an amazing healing and people having these emotional experiences that change and transform who they are. He went up to Joe and said, "We've got to study this." Joe said, "I know." Toby said, "I've got a guy." I'm the guy.
Things come back full circle in academia. You never know what those contexts eventually end up being. Toby remembered that we do cool cell molecular biology and biochemistry. This is where this research needed to head. I don't think anyone in the world will argue that meditation creates stress relief and has some health benefits tied to that. The question then becomes how. We're trying to get to that how as, "Is there a molecular biochemical program that the mind launches to fix the body or is it all in your mind, which is what most people think?" We're trying to define that boundary.
You mentioned that you were offered this opportunity to start doing it. You had the blood samples they sent you, and you ignored them for six months.
We have a very busy research laboratory. I've been funded for a number of years through the Veterans Affairs System, as well as the NIH. We've had grants over the years from NASA, DOD and other entities. This is how most academic labs exist. We had a lot of projects ongoing at any given time. There are 30 to 40 projects ongoing in the lab. We have a very collaborative laboratory. Like most scientists, we have some niche things that we've become experts in, so everyone calls on you to do these things. My lab is a core place where we can do mitochondrial energetics and structure and function kinds of things.
In most diseases, mitochondria become dysfunctional. This is how you use and generate and utilize energy in a living system. For the living system to grow, survive, and do its normal function, you have to have energy. That ties back down to mitochondria. We've developed over the last couple of years expertise in how to look at mitochondria at a deep level. At any given time, we're working with 5, 10, 15 groups looking at mitochondrial projects. At that time, we were heavily invested in that aspect of the lab.
For 25 to 30 samples from individuals to come in and say, "Start looking at this," in an area where we're like, "It's meditation. What are we going to see in that sample?" It was a hard sell to people working in the lab. I can ask them to look at them, but it's how you put them into the flow of all the other things that have to get done. They sat in the freezer for about 3 to 4 months before we ever even started looking.
What was the catalyst to make you decide, "Let's start looking at this?" From there, what prompted you to start getting heavily involved in this? This is such a massive undertaking. Eventually, it became, but at the time, what were your thoughts going into this unknown? Not a lot of people have done this before.
I consider myself a natural procrastinator. Until someone bugs me or has a deadline, I don't move. It's a thing that a lot of us fall into. There are certain individuals that are action-oriented and get stuff done. I have so much stuff on my plate that I have to hierarchically organize, and the things that my mind gravitates to are the things that I'm super excited about. This meditation stuff was cool. I didn't know who Joe was. I met him for a couple of hours at this event. There was Toby asking, "Have you looked at some of those samples?" Hillary was asking, "Have you started working on those?" Joe started asking as well. I'm like, "I’ve got to get these people something."
We started messing around with it in the lab. I had a fellow who was going to take on this project. I've talked about one. You've seen him on the stage at some of these events. He's an amazing guy. He's a super hard worker and constantly running around like a chicken with its head cut off. He's always into every project and doing all these amazing things. I said, "Could you scan these for me and look to see if there's some change in some of the composition?" The idea was how we could do something that costs us very little time and money to get at a core answer, whether this is worth pursuing.
At the time, we were starting to focus on things called exosomes. For the last couple of decades, exosomes were thought of as garbage that's sloughed off your cell membranes and floated around. If you look at it under an electron microscope where you can get high magnification, it looks like specks of dirt sitting around. If you go super high magnification, it turns out that this dirt has a shape. There are membranes and some meat to these things. It turns out that these are signaling entities that are secreted off of cells in a very controlled process.
It's not just garbage coming off, but it's material that the cell uses to communicate with other cells at a distance or cells around itself as well. There have been lots of evidence and some cool studies done in this protein that we were working on called caveolin. These cool studies were done where they took a prostate cancer or a cancer cell line that was heavily expressing caveolin and put it in a dish next to normal cells. What they noticed is that over time, these normal cells became cancerous.
“For a living system to grow, survive, and do its normal function, you have to have energy. That ties back down to mitochondria.”
There was something that this cell over here was secreting that then transformed this cell into a cancer cell type. It turned out that this cell was secreting some biological material through these exocytic pathways. These exosomes then made their way to this other cell, incorporated it into them and changed.
The thought was if the mind is doing something to the body and it's recreating a new environment physiologically in a molecular sense, the idea was that the best bet would be that the brain neurons were somehow in this elevated emotional state, sloughing off pieces of themselves. They then were circulating around and creating this potential downstream.
We have the blood. You can measure exosomes, particles, and things like that in the blood. We scanned them. It was 25 match samples pre-post. It took about a day and a half to do. When we looked at the profiles, there were some interesting changes in the profiles. We noticed that it's only in the two meditator groups. We had control, a novice group of meditators, and an experienced group of meditators. We saw no real major changes in the controls but in both the novice and the experienced meditators, after that week-long Indian Wells, we saw this dramatic elevation of these exosomes.
Can we describe what the novice is versus the advanced?
We have an arbitrary cutoff. These are all observational studies. An observational study is there's a group of people that are coming together. We then observe them in unique ways. You have to have certain cutoffs that we can define what one group we're observing versus the other. The controls in our study have typically been vacationing control. They're attending the event with their spouse in that hotel, but they're not attending the week-long workshops. They're relaxed. They may be doing some work, but they're sitting at the pool, having a fun relaxing time.
The novice experience are individuals that have been meditating for less than six months. They're new to this practice. They've never been to a live Joe Dispenza event. They haven't gone through the process of learning and expanding their mind. The experienced meditator is someone who has been meditating for more than six months and they’ve been to one or more live events.
Most of our experienced meditators in these cohorts have been to 4, 5 or 6 events. They're experienced and they incorporate this. Most of them practice aspects of meditation upwards of an hour-plus a day. It's a core part of who they are. It's exercising or a lot of breathing. It's an element of their daily survival that they incorporate into their lives. Those are the three groups.
I like to share something. When I went to the event, it was my first event. When I was online and talking to people at lunch, I heard people coming 17, 13 and 5 times. I'm like, "If it's so great, why don't you like to ride with it?" They're like, "It's so addictive. It's this feeling that you get." Every single time they come and they get recharged. They're able to spread more value and love into the world. Not only coming and doing the meditations but the community that is there creates an exponential effect of positivity around themselves. That's why people come over and over.
One of the reasons for the Quantum study that we did in Marco Island is that you got to experience or be are around those individuals that were in it. That was the intent. What is the individual and collective experience of that room going through that week-long process? Something that we've been thinking about for quite a while is how we capture that element. This is what then launched this massive study to look at a large group of people doing something over that week. We have a weekly meditation group that's formed in San Diego.
I admit it's tough for me to find an hour to meditate a day. There are certain days when I'll find space in my office to do it. The experience I get individually was the brain-tingling funky feeling that you get when you're meditating. It's that euphoric feeling, but it's not the same when you're around a group of people that are experiencing the same thing. There is something to this collective energy and this augmentation of your experience. This is why people keep coming back event after event. They see transformations in their lives, and they want to continue to evolve their life and their process.
Can you tell us a little bit about the Quantum study? What were the parameters you were doing, and what were the questions that you wanted to solve in that?
Meditation: The population diversity of bacteria increased with meditation, and some other chemical changes were observable.
It was in January. Much has happened since Marco Island. I can even remember that beach or that experience. We've only been working with Joe Dispenza for a few years. It seems like we've been working on this stuff for ten years. The way we originally started was we wanted to do some deep phenotyping. It's super expensive to do that. You can't look at 1,000 people.
You have to look at a small subset because you have to be able to coordinate a time for them to get brain maps, time for them to give and donate blood for samples, and time to get them hooked up to Garmins and all the other measurement devices that we're looking at. It's a very satisfying experiment to do because we're slowly progressing to capture large data sets over an extended period of time. The dissatisfying aspect of that is when you were at an event, and there were more than 30 people there.
The thing is we're missing a lot of this stuff that's happening. Most of the studies that we were doing initially were on the healthies. We were not capturing individuals who were there to transform their lives from diseases and maladies that are plaguing them. This is how Quantum was born. I was sitting around trying to think of how we could incorporate a larger study where we capture a bigger portion of the room to see what's happening. I've started naming all our studies. Quantum stands for the quest to analyze 1,000 humans meditating.
When we were in Marco Island trying to launch this and trying to get all these people into the study, it felt like we bit off way more we could chew. It was a lot. At the end of the day, the subjects were very patient. I was amazed to see how easily it was for people to wait their turn in line and get access to the staff to help them set up. We ended up enrolling 978 people into Quantum. If you round up, we got 1,000. We were able to see 1,000 humans meditating. The goal of that study was to restrict no one from entering the study.
In the past, when we would put a solicitation out that we were doing research at one of these events, we would get 600 to 700 people volunteering to be subjects. Sadly, out of that 600, we can only pick 25 or 30 people because of the nature of those studies. I would constantly get comments and emails, and people would come up to me if I was at the event and say, "What do I need to do to get into your study?" Quantum was born out of that idea, "How could we do a study where we don't have to turn anyone away, or we could take any comer who wants to be involved in being studied?"
There was no exclusion other than your voluntary thing. If you didn't agree to consent to the study after you were informed about what we were going to do, you could opt out. Even with that, we've got 978 people. The goal was to have them do two things that would be very non-intrusive to their meditative experience. We want to make sure that they were going to go through that week without having to feel like they were being looked at under a microscope thing. The two simple things we thought of was that we could do health surveys.
Studies do this all the time. We sent out a pre-health survey before the event started, so we could capture what their health status is and how they view all the things in their life, emotionally, physically, and mental health-wise. The idea was to do this right as the event ended as a post-capture, and then to follow up at 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 months to see what happened after you leave. Did you go to more events? Where do you see this accelerating correction of things you found wrong with you or things you were working on in yourself before you started that event?
We thought that was not going to be super intrusive. You answer a bunch of questions. You do this every time you go to a doctor's office when you're filling out the intake paperwork. The second aspect is that it's self-reported, so you can say whatever. The idea was, could we capture something that someone can't invent about themselves? It's those kinds of things. There is some measure of what's happening in their body. One of the things that we've been playing around with in our more detailed study is looking at biometrics and ways of capturing data in a noninvasive way constantly in a 24/7 fashion.
Everyone in Quantum got one of these, a Garmin Vivo smart device. These are amazing. You don't even feel them on your wrist. Other than the annoying aspect that you got to charge them once a day because we were collecting so much data, there's no intrusive aspect. You put it on your wrist and forget about it. It measures your heart rate. We can get heart rate variability through beat to beat intervals. It measures your sleep, activity, aspects of your stress, and those things. We get a lot of information in a very passive way, and you're not consciously thinking about it.
You're sitting at that event and going through the meditations, and this thing is on your wrist, capturing all of that information. We have this information on 970 people all over the room. You can start to see where Quantum gets exciting. We've got biometric data on almost 1,000 people. We know their health status in terms of what they report to us before and after the event and at follow-up. A lot of our subjects had continued to wear these Garmins when they went home and continued to collect data on them as well. That was the initial thing.
For the ones that were a little more adventurous, we asked for one more aspect that was voluntary. We asked them in the consenting process to agree to give us some biospecimen collections. We wanted to look at an even more detailed aspect of their biological change and things that they were experiencing throughout that year or week, and ultimately throughout that year. The question for the research team was, "How could we do some aspect of the collection that we could make kits for and give to individuals so that they can do it on their own?" It's because manpower becomes the limiting thing.
“There’s a lot of evidence that suggests that your gut can control your biology. We wanted to see if meditation has an impact on your gut bacteria, what they do, and how they express and do things.”
In this detailed study we're doing, we have to get blood. You got to hope for a vessel and get blood out. That takes 10 and 15 minutes turnover. Ideally, in my world, I would have loved to get 1,000 blood samples that way from individuals. We were doing the math. We're doing a big study in San Diego, and we're going to bleed 90 people 3 times during the week. We calculated that each time, it would be about two hours of work for five people constantly bleeding to do that. To get 1,000 people to do that, it would take you all day times a team of 20 people doing blood work. It made no sense.
The thought was to think of something we could collect that they could do on their own. One of the interests of the lab and UCSD in general, and a lot of the scientific community now is the microbiome. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that your gut can control a lot of your biology. We wanted to look to see if meditation has an impact on your gut bacteria, what they do, and how they express and do things. That was an easy collection. You could convince people to do this in health settings all the time to give us a stool sample before the event started for them for that week, and then one at the end of the week.
The second aspect was to take a little popsicle stick, scrape your cheeks, put it into a tube, and we could collect cheek cells that we could do studies on. They're then archived and go into our boxes and freezers, and we have them stored away. I was expecting 200 to 300 people to bite and say, "We'll give you." It sounds like a lot to ask them to do this. I made some videos on how to do the cheek scrape, and we had a collaborator make a video on how to do the stool collections.
It's not a huge commitment. It would take you ten minutes to do all of those things. You can do it on your own so no staff time. You can drop them into the box and we freeze them down. We ended up getting 894 pre-samples and about 780 or 790 post-samples. We have almost 800 matched samples. My mind is on fire about what we can do with this. Now we've got the Garmin data on 1,000 people. We're getting their health surveys. We have two pieces of cool biology that we can look at the entire microbiome aspect of this large group. We're looking for funding to do.
The next aspect is from the cheek scrape. We can extract DNA and start looking at DNA methylation patterns for epigenetic changes that happened during that week. From those epigenetic changes, you can make lots of conclusions about biological age, changes, other parameters of health, and then what's happening experientially in these individuals. It's an amazing massive dataset. We started going through it, and it turns out that when you look through the 978 people and their intake surveys that we got, there are eighteen things that people identify as problems that they came to the event with, that had at least 30 people or more within that entity.
You can look at anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disorders, hypothyroidism, diabetes and cancer. Now you've got eighteen of these things that the human condition suffers from that we have long-term captured data on. We can start looking to see how does the microbiome of someone who is a cancer patient alter and change from someone who's completely healthy, look at their age match controls, and start making lots of connections between this healthy individual, and this person with cancer and trying to see where they sit after that week-long experience.
You can look at it in a lot of granularities since this thing is on most people during the event. We can look to see what your heart is doing during a breakfast portion of the day versus when you're sitting there and listening to a lecture where you're largely quiet, but you've got your mind intently focusing on and wandering a little bit like most of our minds do, and compare it to that meditative experience where you're in that room meditating as a large group. You can get even more granular. During the meditation, we've timestamped the entire day.
I know when each of the songs changed during a meditation. Now we can look at your heart rate and your heart rate variability during the breath portion of the meditation, during the meditative emotional component of that, when you're coming out of that meditation, what you look like before you went into that state, and what you look like hours after you came out of that state. We can start making lots of cool analyses that then tie across that platform in 1,000 people. It's mind-boggling to think about what we're going to do.
It's cool because everyone's in one area. They're all relatively sleeping, getting up, and eating the same foods at the same time. It's going to be a very efficient way to study all these things because there are not a lot of external factors.
It's an amazing petri dish, which Toby describes. You can't do that in a sterile academic environment. You can bring 1,000 people to UCSD, but to keep them around for a week will be tough. That's the beauty of these week-long events. You've controlled for that environment.
Tell us about what you learned from the data that was collected. I know you talked about the gut microbiome and how there's so much more diversity that’s showing up after the meditations.
Meditation: How does the mind fix cancer? How does it fix Alzheimer's? How does it fix other things? Can it fix those things? Who knows?
That was the initial pilot we did. In getting prepped for the Marco Island event, we had run this small pilot as part of the Denver AFU towards the end of 2021. There were about 70 to 80 meditators at that time that were part of the San Diego group. They are interested in getting involved in the studies. I asked them to do this microbiome study to see how it would be to collect samples and do all that stuff.
The caveat was they had to do something that was a big ask. They had to give up meditation for seven days. No meditation or listening to any transformative stories. They had to go in through their stressful life with no relief. Out of the 70 to 80 people, only 16 said, "We could do this." It was incessant the emails you get, "Can I listen to Joe's voice?" I'm like, "You can't. It's a complete cold turkey withdrawal from everything meditative."
The idea was to wash the system out of that stress relief thing, put yourself into a stress state, then we would collect a pre-sample. They then were allowed to meditate to their heart's content. They could do whatever meditation they wanted and go about their lives when we collect a sample on day seven. We did an initial analysis of that. This was a non-Petri dish experiment. These individuals were sleeping on their own schedule because they were going about their normal life in San Diego. Some of them were at the Denver AFU, so there was some control over that. They were eating whatever they could.
We took a food log, so we could see what their food intake was. They were experiencing meditation as individuals, not as a group in this setting. Even with all of those confounding elements, we saw some dramatic changes from meditation and bacteria. The population of diversity of bacteria increased with meditation, and we were able to see some other chemical changes. The samples from Quantum are sitting at the core for sequencing by genomic sequencing. It is going to take a while. It's 1,600 samples that they have to go through.
They're predicting about 3 to 4 months to get all the sequencing done, and we've got a couple of months of data analysis around that. We're doing a subset of this. We're focusing on 2022 with InnerScience that are launched. It is the year of trying to understand cancer in this group of individuals a little better. We're going to purposely pick all of the individuals in Quantum that were cancerous or had some cancer background that they were trying to focus on during the event. We couple them to controls that were healthy, age, and sex-matched at the time, and then look at those populations for analysis.
We're hoping to present some of this data as a preliminary thing during the San Diego week-long event in April. We should hopefully have something by then. We're starting to look at the Garmin data. As you can imagine, it's massive. Imagine we're getting a heartbeat every couple of seconds for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for months.
We're starting to put that into a platform where we can look to see how each individual is transforming over time. The analytics is going to take a while to start putting together a database that we can start looking at. The initial thing that we started looking at is what is the population we're looking at. It's quite diverse, which is going to give us some cool answers.
During the presentation, I know you also talked about your studies on COVID and this particular protein that you guys isolated, which is such groundbreaking stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about that study?
This is one reason why it took us so long to initially start this research. In the first event that we were collecting samples at, Toby's group was doing the sample collection. It was at the Indian Wells event in 2019 in February, and then the world effectively shut down in March. We were not in our labs, so that contributed to some of this lag in time. In order to get back into the lab, we had to reinvent some of the things we were working on. If you were working on COVID, you could come back and do certain things in the laboratory.
We created pseudoviruses that we could work in our lab space, which is a Biosafety Level 2 facility. The pseudoviruses look on the viral surface like the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They have the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2. The inside was placed with the red recorder. When this fake virus attaches to a cell-like SARS-CoV-2 would, the material gets transferred inside and that cell turns red, and we can track which cells are red. A lot of the stuff we're doing with blood from individuals is a belief and a scientific assessment that this is true. How do you capture the experience of an individual?
“Unless you make meditation a part of your daily routine, it’s hard to incorporate it long-term. Most people will do it for a couple of weeks, and then fall back into their normal patterns.”
One of the things that we've been looking at is that whatever happens to you in your body, your blood is a capture of that. This is why when you go to your physician, they do blood work. The blood tells you a lot about what's happening in your living system, stress, health, disease, those kinds of things. Under that same token, that was the thought that under a meditative experience, if you can capture blood, you would capture elements of that meditative experience. What we then wanted to do was adopt that experience into a system that's never seen meditation, which is how we started these studies on this COVID pseudovirus study.
We took lung cells that you could buy from a company. These lung cells are the primary cells that COVID initially sees in your system. What we did is in a dish, so these are lung cells that never meditated. They don't come from a meditating individual. We can culture them and they divide, move them into new plates, and they keep going forever and ever. They become a very quality-controlled system that you can do assays in. To have them experience meditation, what we did is we took the blood from these meditating individuals before and after the event and exposed that plasma or blood environment onto these cells.
Whatever was floating around in these individuals was then transferred onto these cells. We've adopted that experience of meditation into a system that has never seen that. We can stress them in unique and strange ways and see what happens. In this assay, you let the cells meditate in a dish with this blood environment from the meditators, and then you can come and challenge them with the pseudovirus. What we noticed is that the cells that were incubated with plasma after the week-long event from a novice or an experienced meditator were able to exclude the virus from entering the cell. You then start connecting to that.
There's something inside the blood after a meditative experience that prevents virus entry into that cell. We began the quest to figure out what that factor was. We have a molecular biochemical lab. There are lots of ways biochemistry-wise that are quite simple to then fish out what those factors are. We went fishing and we did a series of subtractive experiments and we heated the sample. When you heat a sample, all of the protein in that blood gets denatured, and you put that sample onto the cells. When we did that and heat-treated the samples, the effect went away.
You can conclude that it's likely a protein that's being secreted in the blood of a meditator that's creating this effect. Now that we know it's a protein, we can try to fish out what these proteins are. We went through this process called immunoprecipitation, which is essentially a molecular fishing experience. As we fished out all of the things that bind to that virus, we then shot these into what's called a mass spectrometer, which identifies what these proteins are. It digests all the proteins into small pieces.
Put them into this expensive machine, and it tells you identity-wise what those things are, and you know what proteins are involved. A number of proteins came up in this complex. There was one family that looked interesting from a biological standpoint in terms of their function. We then identified this and did some other assays and looked at these certain families of proteins in this mix. It turns out that they're elevated and they have some biological potential. We went on to characterize this. It was satisfying from start to finish.
We had this experience of intensive meditation that these individuals are doing. They released factors into their blood that we were able to show and create this unique protective effect from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We were able to identify an element of these factors that created this effect in isolation. I'm sure more than 1 or 2 of these factors create this effect, but this one factor we did identify tracks perfectly with the biology of what we would predict. We saw an elevation in the meditators. It was cool that the meditating brain could do this through biology.
We think that this is the gateway to everything else. How does the mind fix cancer? How does it fix Alzheimer's? How does it fix other things? Can it fix those things? Who knows? We've got cell models that we can adopt the meditative experience into Alzheimer's cells, into ALS cells, into cells that are cancerous. If there is a biological effect at the level of the cell, we can then start fishing out those unique factors that create that biology as well. That's where we're headed. This is not rocket science. People have been experimenting in this realm for eons.
A classic experiment is these studies on a parabiosis that years and decades ago, they had taken old and young animals and connected their circulatory systems together. It turned out that when you paired them with parabiosis where they were sharing a circulatory system, this young animal was able to make this old animal a little bit younger. There were factors that a young organism generates that create youthfulness that you could then transfer into an older animal.
Instead of physically pairing the circulatory systems and sewing them together, people were able to take blood from a young mouse and transfer the blood products into an old mouse, and they saw the same effects. There were factors inside this young experience that moved to this older experience. I jokingly say that we're doing 7.7 billion experiments a day, and we're capturing none of that data. We all have a unique experience that we live with as humans, whether stressful or non-stressful environments.
The world is a unique place. All of these experiential things that we're exposed to in our environment create biology in our bodies that is resilient. We're capturing one small element of that in meditation. We're intentionally asking individuals to meditate for a week and try to see what environment they're creating and what potential that environment has to change the human experience down the stream. It starts with cells and we’ll eventually move into larger systems.
Meditation: It's interesting how science has accelerated around COVID over the last two years. There are a couple of studies that are utilizing this as a potential target downstream.
How did you know that it wasn't certain antibodies either through natural immunity, vaccination or anything like that, that these blood samples had that caused the pseudovirus not being able to get to the lung cell?
This was a concern that we had. We did look at antibody titers for SAR-CoV-2. When you're infected or vaccinated, you will elevate antibodies. This is how your body fights off infection. It recognizes that target and you get this antibody response. Interestingly, the Indian Wells events happened before COVID took off in the world. None of those individuals had access to vaccines at that stage. The two other events that we looked at from individuals where we had blood from was in Orlando in 2021 of April.
This was when vaccines were just starting to become more mainstream. They were available to most of the healthcare workers. We started looking at the Denver retreat, which happened in July 2021 when vaccines were more prevalent and people had access to that. Out of that entire group of individuals, it was 100 or so people that we looked at over that timeframe. Only four of them were vaccinated, and the major heavy vaccination group was in Denver. We've started to look at those four individuals in isolation to see if their antibodies are through the roof or if they have a better response in this assay.
The other thing we've done is we've gone back. As controls, we've looked at vaccinated individuals that are non-meditators. We have a group of individuals that should have elevated antibodies, and we're looking to see what their blood does in the same assay. We'll have an answer pretty soon of whether there's a correlation between how much antibody you have against this virus versus what happens in our assay when we're looking at pseudo-virus effectivity. Early evidence suggests that something unique is being elevated in the plasma of meditators after this meditative experience that's not happening in the same line as these vaccinated individuals.
What is the most surprising thing you've learned from the research you've done over the last few years?
As a skeptic, the thing that has taken me to that next level is the fact that the mind can create a unique environment in your body that we can track. All of the data seems to suggest that there is something that happens at the capture level of the blood of the physiology. These are the things that could explain some of the amazing things we're seeing in health and resiliency in individuals. I was expecting some element of that, but not to the level we're discovering. It's blowing my mind with the fact that the mind can do these things.
Has it changed your views on life on how you approach it in any way? Do you meditate a lot more now because of all the studies or the research that you've conducted?
I meditate more than I ever have, but I would love to incorporate this. If you can make this an hour a part of your life, it would be transformative. I struggled to do that, which is another reason why a lot of people come back to these events. It’s because they fall into the trappings of life. When you're at an event, you're secluded. You're able to check out most of your daily duties, and you can focus for that week on this intensive event.
When you get back to your normal life, most people do these things like exercise and dieting, unless you make it a part of your daily normal routine of life, it's hard to incorporate it long-term. Most people will do it for a couple of weeks and fall back into their normal patterns. I'm a victim of that. It's a busy lifestyle that creates this. It's a mindset. I struggled to do it. There are certain weeks that I'm very good about meditating, and there are other weeks where it's tough to find that time. It's sad to say but I can't find an hour for myself to create resiliency and health. That's the struggle.
After the event, I have to prioritize it in my life. I know I need to do a better job of it, but I know that when I wake up first thing in the morning and don't do anything else but meditate, at least I get that in my system, and it creates a momentum effect. That's like working out too. If we wait until the end of the day when I haven't worked out yet, it's hard to get out of the house, go to the gym, that kind of thing. I have seen so many benefits of it in my life. I can't wait to do the event follow-up in Denver and do some brain mapping with you and be a part of the study.
I want to thank you. This research is so needed. I have a wellness center and people who were into holistic medicine, meditation, spirituality, all this kind of stuff. There's not a lot of funding from pharmaceutical companies to fund this stuff, even though we know that it works. The fact that you're taking on these monumental projects, and with the grace of God and so many amazing people who were involved in this study with you, we want to thank you from a collective because it's so needed. To marry science and mysticism together, that's where we find common ground as humanity. You can't have one or the other because then we're imbalanced.
“One of the things you learn as a scientist is to get thick skin and learn to take criticism well.”
We've got some amazing studies planned. My brain keeps thinking about newer things that we're doing. We're launching a series of studies that are going to take us into the next couple of years easily and beyond. I suspect we're going to discover something from Quantum that's going to lead to the next series of questions. We've got a couple of studies that we're planning for 2022. San Diego is an amazing place because we're here. To have an event in San Diego gives us access to tools and equipment that we would never be able to do anywhere else.
We've got some big things planned for San Diego. We're going to try to do some fMRI scanning of people who we're meditating before and after. We're launching a study called Genesis in San Diego, which is generating new insights into genetic signatures. The idea is to look at three elements of this. One element is twin sets. We're going to look at the brain and physiologically and blood map twins that are having unique experiences. One twin will be in the meditation room, meditating. The other twin will be somewhere else listening to nothing or elevated music.
We want to see how this twin's intense emotional state impacts this other twin that they're intertwined with. They share the same genetics. They are connected in ways that we are not to other people. We want to see how their experience changes, not only at the level of the brain but, is their blood chemistry changing at the same time? Is their physiology changing through Garmin and those kinds of things? It's going to be an interesting and exciting set of people we're looking at. It's a diverse group.
Some twin sets are both meditators. In other twin sets, neither of them are meditators. It's their first time to Joe events. In other twin sets, one is a meditator and the other is a skeptic. We're going to be able to create some interesting biology around that. We're also looking at the experience of connectedness in individuals. This is where genetics comes in. I don't know about you, but the person in my life that I was closest to before she passed away was my mother. You form these intense bonds with your mother because she carried you for nine months.
We're doing a study and a lot of this inspiration comes from the community. I had one woman and then a couple of others asked me in Marco Island if we were collecting breast milk. I'm like, "No, but that's an interesting idea." We're launching a study called Milk that’s part of Genesis. We will look at what happens in antibodies and factors in breast milk when a mother meditates during that week-long intensive experience. I suspect we're going to see some amazing changes.
This would be the start of thinking about how a meditating mother can transfer some of the positive elements of stress relief and factors to the child that's not meditating. There's a study I can't tell you about because there are some secret developments but it's going to be called Genes. We're going to look at some aspects of genetics as well as part of Genesis. In the year, we're hoping to keep the environment consistent. We're going to launch Quantum 2 in Marco Island at the advanced follow-up in the summer of 2022. The idea would be to get 1,000 people in the advanced community meditating and seeing what's happening with their experience over that intensive four days.
I know all these studies that you do require some funding. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're funded, what your needs are, and how can our community support you in this?
Being in an academic lab, it's a no-brainer that we should write grants on this and submit them. We are and we have. It's a tough nut to crack. We've submitted two grants that have not done so well there. We'll get comments on this second one soon. It was reviewed and not discussed at all in the study section, which is a bummer. It was the life of a scientist. I teach a course on Scientific Communication. One of the things you learn as a scientist is to get a thick skin. Take criticism well, and you're going to get rejected a lot of times. Resources are limited.
We have been fortunate, grateful and had a lot of abundances in moving this stuff forward. The research community has appealed to donors in this space, and there are people who want answers. They're willing to put their foot forward to get these answers done. Donors have come out of the community and supported our research. Having that resource has taken this work to the next level. We can run a study like Quantum without having to think about the financial resources that go into that. It's a massive study.
To get Garmins to everyone is almost $100,000 fare for that event. To collect the data and analyze it is hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the microbiome, it's a couple of hundred thousand dollars to do the sequencing for the epigenetics. It's almost $1 million to do sequencing on that many samples. It takes a lot of money to do those things. There's a group of individuals that have seen what we're capable of, where we're headed with the research, and what kinds of answers and questions we're going to unlock.
They formed a nonprofit called InnerScience Research Funds. They're trying to get the academic groups well-resourced in this space. They're interested in the meditative experience and all kinds of meditation research that tie to Joe and experiences outside of that. Joe incorporates a lot of elements of meditative practices. We want to study those pieces as well. InnerScience has become this conduit to move this research to the next level. It's nice to have those resources to do that and ask and answer these big questions.
Meditation: Being in an academic lab, it's a no brainer that we should write grants on this and submit them.
It's amazing to be able to say we're going to run Quantum 2 in August 2022, where if you had an NIH grant, you could run a Quantum study once in a five-year period. You would never be able to do Quantum because there aren't enough resources to look at 1,000 people. It's to think big and not have finances being the limiting factor in this. This is what we're going to have to do to answer these big questions and make this more mainstream. We will have to look at large studies like this.
If you're reading this and want to support this amazing research, please do so. Everybody who reads this knows how important meditation is. We're not getting funded by the pharmaceutical companies. We need your support as a community, so please do so. Dr. Hemal, why did you think you came here to Earth as Dr. Hemal Patel? What did you want to experience?
Think about your trajectories in life and all these decisions that came, what was the one point that guided you down to where you are? I don’t know. I grew up in India. I was born into this small, tiny village in Northwestern India. To think when I was born or when I was a young kid that I would end up in San Diego as a scientist looking at meditation wasn't even a part of life’s aspect. I had the mindset that I would always be a physician for many years. You then meet someone who changes your path for another area. I found research as a way to use my mind to do something else and go down this path.
I'm an individual that believes in fate. We're destined to do things that were designed to do. We have free will in this world, but that free will leads us to the path that we were expected to go down and get to. I feel like I'm in the right place, doing the right thing with the right aspect of my life. One of the things that I stress to our three kids and to mentees that come through my lab is that you want to find something in your life to do that doesn't feel like work. It's an organic natural extension of who you are, who you want to be, and can't wait to get into your space to do that work.
Science is like that for me. It's not work. I enjoy using my brain to come up with these crazy, amazing, cool experiments that then push the boundaries of our knowledge and get to that next level. I've done this for most of my career. One of the things that come up when I read something or quiet my mind are these amazing weird thoughts about biology and life and how the world exists.
It's amazing to have resources across my office in my laboratory where I can go and test that, and see if that's truly real or not. Meditation is making me stretch that aspect of my mind. I described some of these studies that we have planned. It's going to take the envelope and push it off the edge of my desk. We're ready to do it. We're going to uncover some amazing things.
Thank you so much for coming on. What's so impressive is that we just scratched the surface of everything that you're going to be unraveling. There is so much that has come out of what you've shown us so far. I'm excited to see the progress of everything you guys do. I'm happy to support you in any way I can.
I'm looking forward to seeing you in Denver and having a good time.
Thank you so much.
Important links
About Dr Hemal Patel
Hemal H. Patel, PhD, is a Professor and Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Patel’s career has focused on developing an integrated understanding of the organism by studying whole animal and cell physiology techniques with a particular focus on bio-membranes and cellular energetics. He has broad interests in cardiovascular disease, cancer biology, neurodegeneration, aging, and diabetes. He has published over 170 original manuscripts, reviews, and book chapters featured in prominent journals such as Science, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, Journal of Biological Chemistry, FASEB Journal, and Circulation. He has given over 70 research seminars nationally and internationally.
He serves as a senior editor and editorial board member for seven international journals and reviews grants for the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, and many national and international foundations. His laboratory has been continuously funded by research grants since 2005. Dr. Patel was initially skeptical about the ability of the mind to impact health, but after reviewing early evidence, he was convinced more research needed to be done to discover the power and impact of meditation on biological markers that would define the mind-body connection. Today, he is actively involved in using an unbiased, discovery-based approach to reveal basic insights into how the meditating mind creates physical changes to alter the biology of living systems. Dr. Patel’s laboratory is poised to link physics, biophysics, and biology to potentially transform our understanding of the mind’s power to change human health.
