← Altered Traits Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body
Altered Traits Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body Chapter 7. Attention!
Author: Daniel Goleman, Richard A. Davidson Publisher: Garden City, NY: Avery. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: Status:💥
Annotations
118
While William James wrote about attention as though it were one single entity, science now tells us the concept refers not just to one ability but to many. Among them:
- Selective attention, the capacity to focus on one element and ignore others.
- Vigilance, maintaining a constant level of attention as time goes on. Allocating attention so we notice small or rapid shifts in what we experience.
- Goal focus, or “cognitive control,” keeping a specific goal or task in mind despite distractions.
- Meta-awareness, being able to track the quality of one’s own awareness—for example, noticing when your mind wanders or you’ve made a mistake.
120
novices trained in MBSR significantly improved in orienting, a component of selective attention that directs the mind to target one among the virtually infinite array of sensory inputs. Let’s say you are at a party listening to the music, and tuning out a conversation going on right next to you. If someone were to ask you what they had just said, you’d have no idea. But should one of them mention your name, you would zero in on those dulcet sounds as though you had been listening to them right along. Known in cognitive science as the “cocktail party effect,” this sudden awareness illustrates part of the design of our brain’s attention systems: we take in more of the stream of information available than we know in conscious awareness. This lets us tune out irrelevant sounds but still examine them for relevance somewhere in the mind. And our own name is always relevant. Attention, then, has various channels—the one we consciously select and those we tune out of.
121
Richie’s dissertation research examined how meditation might strengthen our ability to focus as we choose by asking volunteers to pay attention to what they saw (a flashing light) and ignore what they felt (a vibration on the wrist) or vice versa, while he used EEG readings of their visual or tactile cortex to measure the strength of their focus. (His use of EEG to examine this in humans, by the way, broke new ground—it had only been done with rats and cats until then.) The meditators among the volunteers showed a modest increase in what he called “cortical specificity”—more activity in the appropriate part of the sensory areas of the cortex. So, for example, when they were paying attention to what they saw, the visual cortex was more active than the tactile. When we choose to concentrate on visual sensations and ignore what we touch, the lights are “signal” and the touch “noise.” When we get distracted, noise drowns the signal; concentration means much more signal than noise. Richie found no increase in the signal, but there was some reduction in noise—altering the ratio. Less noise means more signal.
- Catherine E. Kerr et al., “Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Anticipatory Alpha Modulation in Primary Somatosensory Cortex,” Brain Research Bulletin 85 (2011): 98–103.
122
Richie’s dissertation study, like Dan’s, was slightly suggestive of the effect he was seeking to find. Fast-forward several decades to far more sophisticated measures of the well-targeted sensory awareness Richie had tried to demonstrate. A group at MIT deployed MEG—a magnetic EEG measure with a much more precise targeting of brain areas than Richie’s old-time EEG had allowed—with volunteers who had been randomly assigned to either get an eight-week program in MBSR, or who waited to get the training until after the experiment was done.6 MBSR, remember, includes mindfulness of breath, practicing a systematic scan of sensations throughout your body, attentive yoga, and moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts and feelings—with the invitation to practice these attention training methods daily. After eight weeks those who had gone through the MBSR program showed a far better ability to focus on sensations—in this case a carefully calibrated tapping on their hand or foot—than they had done before starting the MBSR training, as well as better than those who were still waiting for MBSR. Conclusion: mindfulness (at least in this form) strengthens the brain’s ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions. The neural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained—contrary to the standard wisdom where attention was assumed to be hardwired and so, beyond the reach of any training attempt.
122
A similar strengthening of selective attention was found in vipassana meditators at the Insight Meditation Society who were tested before and after a three-month retreat.7 The retreat offered what amounts to explicit encouragement to be fully attentive, not just in the daily eight hours of formal sittings but throughout the day as well. Before the retreat, when they paid attention to selective beeps or boops, each at a different tone, their accuracy in spotting the target tones was no better than anyone else’s. But after three months the retreatants’ selective attention was markedly more accurate, showing more than a 20 percent gain.
130❗️
When we did our first vipassana courses in India, we found ourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings and goings of our own mind, cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following where those thoughts, impulses, desires, or feelings would have us go. This intensive attention to the movements of our mind boils down to pure meta-awareness.
In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus our attention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usually what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost.
Such awareness of awareness itself lets us monitor our mind without being swept away by the thoughts and feelings we are noticing.
131
Scientists refer to brain activity reflecting our conscious mind and its mental doings as “top-down.” “Bottom-up” refers to what goes on in the mind largely outside awareness, in what technically is the “cognitive unconscious.” A surprising amount of what we think is from the top down is actually from the bottom up. We seem to impose a top-down gloss on our awareness, where the thin slice of the cognitive unconscious that comes to our attention creates the illusion of being the entirety of mind.19
We remain unaware of the much vaster mental machinery of bottom-up processes—at least in the conventional awareness of our everyday life. Meta-awareness lets us see a larger swath of bottom-up operations.
Meta-awareness allows us to track our attention itself—noticing, for example, when our mind has wandered off from something we want to focus on. This ability to monitor the mind without getting swept away introduces a crucial choice point when we find our mind has wandered: we can bring our focus back to the task at hand. This simple mental skill undergirds a huge range of what makes us effective in the world—everything from learning to realizing we’ve had a creative insight to seeing a project through to its end.
132❗️
There are two varieties of experience: the “mere awareness” of a thing, which our ordinary consciousness gives us, versus knowing you are aware of that thing—recognizing awareness itself, without judgment or other emotional reactions. For example, we typically watch an engrossing movie so swept away by the plot that we’ve lost awareness of being in a theater with all its surroundings. But we also can watch a movie attentively while maintaining a background awareness of being in the theater watching a movie. This background awareness doesn’t diminish our appreciation and involvement in the movie—it’s simply a different mode of awareness.
132
At the movies the person next to you with a bag of popcorn could be making crunching noises that you tune out but which nevertheless register in your brain. During such unconscious mental processing, activity lessens in a key cortical area, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC for short. As you become more aware of being aware, the DLPFC becomes more active.
Consider unconscious bias, the prejudices we hold but do not believe we have at all (as mentioned in chapter six, “Primed for Love”). Meditation can both enhance the function of the DLPFC and lessen unconscious bias.20
292
- R. C. Lapate et al., “Awareness of Emotional Stimuli Determines the Behavioral Consequences of Amygdala Activation and Amygdala-Prefrontal Connectivity,” Scientific Reports 20:6 (2016): 25826; doi:10.1038/srep25826.
115❗️
This was a seminal moment, an intellectual pivot point for Richie. He had the gut sense that he had found that most excellent education James sought: meditation. Whatever specific form it takes, most every kind of meditation entails retraining attention. But the research world knew little about attention back in our graduate school days in the 1970s. The one study that connected meditation to an improvement in attention was by Japanese researchers.2 They brought an EEG machine to a zendo and measured monks’ brain activity during meditation while hearing a monotonous series of sounds. While most monks showed nothing remarkable, three of the most “advanced” monks did: their brains responded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first. This was big news: ordinarily the brain would tune out, showing no reaction to the tenth bing, let alone the twentieth. Tuning out a repeated sound reflects the neural process known as habituation. Such waning in attention to anything monotonous can plague radar operators, who have to stay vigilant while scanning signals from mostly empty sky.
116
Ordinarily we notice something unusual just long enough to be sure it poses no threat, or simply to categorize it. Then habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar. One downside of this brain dynamic: we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, the same dish night after night, even, perhaps, our loved ones. Habituation makes life manageable but a bit dull. The brain habituates using circuitry we share even with reptiles: the brain stem’s reticular activating system (RAS), one of the few attention-related circuits known at the time. In habituation, cortical circuits inhibit the RAS, keeping this region quiet when we see the same old thing over and over. In the reverse, sensitization, as we encounter something new or surprising, cortical circuits activate the RAS, which then engages other brain circuits to process the novel object—a new piece of art in place of a too-familiar one, say.
117
Elena Antonova, a British neuroscientist who has attended the SRI, found that meditators who had done a three-year retreat in the Tibetan tradition had less habituation of eye blinks when they heard loud bursts of noise.3 In other words, their blinks continued unabated. This replicates (at least conceptually) that study from Japan where advanced Zen meditators did not habituate to repetitive sounds.
- Elena Antonova et al., “More Meditation, Less Habituation: The Effect of Intensive Mindfulness Practice on the Acoustic Startle Reflex,” PLoS One 10:5 (2015): 1–16; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0123512. The meditators were instructed to stay in “open awareness” during the noises, and the meditation-naive controls were instructed to “remain alert and awake throughout the experiment … and to return their awareness to the surroundings if they caught themselves mind-wandering.”
117
By zooming in on details of sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations that we otherwise would habituate to, our mindfulness transformed the familiar and habitual into the fresh and intriguing. This attention training, we saw, might well enrich our lives, giving us the choice to reverse habituation by focusing us on a deeply textured here and now, making “the old new again.”
117
Our early view of habituation saw mindfulness as a voluntary shift from the reflexive tune out. But that was as far as we had gotten in our thinking—and was already pushing the boundaries of accepted scientific thought. Back in the 1970s science saw attention as mostly stimulus-driven, automatic, unconscious, and from the “bottom up”—a function of the brain stem, a primitive structure sitting just above the spinal cord, rather than from a “top-down” cortical area. This view renders attention involuntary. Something happens around us—a phone rings—and our attention automatically gets pulled to the source of that sound. A sound continues to the point of monotony and we habituate. There was no scientific concept for the volitional control of attention—despite the fact that psychologists themselves were using their volitional attention to write about how no such ability existed!
Note: sciences obsession with existence and non-existence.
In keeping with the scientific standards of the day, the reality of their own experience was simply ignored in favor of what could be objectively observed.
118
Take the emotional centers in the midbrain’s limbic system, where much of the action originates when emotions drive our attention. When Dan wrote Emotional Intelligence, he drew heavily on research by Richie and other neuroscientists on the then new discovery of the dance of the amygdala, the brain’s radar for threat (in the midbrain’s emotion circuits) with prefrontal circuitry (behind the forehead) the brain’s executive center, which can learn, reflect, decide, and pursue long-term goals. When anger or anxiety is triggered, the amygdala drives prefrontal circuitry; as such disturbing emotions reach their peak, an amygdala hijack paralyzes executive function. But when we take active control of our attention—as when we meditate—we deploy this prefrontal circuitry, and the amygdala quiets.
119
Richie’s scientific career has tracked the locus of attention as it moved steadily up the brain. In the 1980s he helped found affective neuroscience, the field that studies the midbrain’s emotional circuitry and how emotions push and pull attention. By the 1990s, as contemplative neuroscience began and researchers started looking at the brain during meditation, they knew how circuitry in the prefrontal cortex manages our voluntary attention. This area has today become the brain’s hot spot for meditation research; every aspect of attention involves the prefrontal cortex in some way.
128
Yet we are largely impervious to these effects. Many denizens of the digital world, for instance, pride themselves on being able to multitask, carrying on with their essential work even as they graze among all the other incoming channels of what’s-up. But compelling research at Stanford University has shown that this very idea is a myth—the brain does not “multitask” but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts … ).12 Attention tasks don’t really go on in parallel, as “multitasking” implies; instead they demand rapid switching from one thing to the other. And following every such switch, when our attention returns to the original task, its strength has been appreciably diminished. It can take several minutes to ramp up once again to full concentration.
- E. Ophir et al., “Cognitive Control in Multi-Taskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:37 (2009): 15583–87.
128
The harm spills over into the rest of life. For one, the inability to filter out the noise (all those distractions) from the signal (what you meant to focus on) creates a confusion about what’s important, and so a drop in our ability to retain what matters. Heavy multitaskers, the Stanford group discovered, are more easily distracted in general. And when multitaskers do try to focus on that one thing they have to get done, their brains activate many more areas than just those relevant to the task at hand—a neural indicator of distraction. Even the ability to multitask efficiently suffers. As the late Clifford Nass, one of the researchers, put it, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.13
- Clifford Nass, in an NPR interview, as quoted in Fast Company, February 2, 2014.
129
Cognitive control, on the other hand, lets us focus on a specific goal or task and keep it in mind while resisting distractions, the very abilities multitasking harms. The good news for multitaskers: cognitive control can be strengthened. Undergrads volunteered to try ten-minute sessions of either focusing on counting their breath or an apt comparison task: browsing Huffington Post, Snapchat, or BuzzFeed.14 Just three ten-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially. If multitasking results in flabby attention, a concentration workout like counting breaths offers a way to tone up, at least in the short term. But there was no indication that the upward bump in attention would last—the improvement came immediately after the “workout,” and so registers on our radar as a state effect, not a lasting trait. The brain’s attention circuitry needs more sustained efforts to create a stable trait, as we will see.
- Thomas E. Gorman and C. Shawn Gree, “Short-Term Mindfulness Intervention Reduces the Negative Attentional Effects Associated with Heavy Media Multitasking,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 24542; doi:10.1038/srep24542. 129
Still, even beginners in meditation can sharpen their attention skills, with some surprising benefits. For instance, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara gave volunteers an eight-minute instruction of mindfulness of their breath, and found that this short focusing session (compared to reading a newspaper or just relaxing) lessened how much their mind wandered afterward.15
While that finding is of interest, the follow-up was even more compelling. The same researchers gave volunteers a two-week course in mindfulness of breathing, as well as of daily activities like eating, for a total of six hours, plus ten-minute booster sessions at home daily.16 The active control group studied nutrition for the same amount of time. Again, mindfulness improved concentration and lessened mind-wandering.
-
Michael D. Mrazek et al., “Mindfulness and Mind Wandering: Finding Convergence through Opposing Constructs,” Emotion 12:3 (2012): 442–48.
-
Michael D. Mrazek et al., “Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering,” Psychological Science 24:5 (2013): 776–81.
130
A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory. Attention is crucial for working memory; if we aren’t paying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place. This training in mindfulness occurred while the students in the study were still in school. The boost to their attention and working memory may help account for the even bigger surprise: mindfulness upped their scores by more than 30 percent on the GRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note.
Notes
Amount: 7