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A Mind Undisturbed

Our vulnerability to stress-worsened diseases like diabetes or hypertension reflects the downside in our brain’s design. The upside reflects the glories of the human cortex, which has built civilizations (and the computer this is being written on). But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.

Hover’s instructions included several two-hour meditation sittings during which students vowed not to make a single voluntary movement—twice as long as those at Goenka’s courses. These immobile sessions produced a level of pain, Jon said, he had never experienced in his life. But as he sat through that unbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his experience, the pain dissolved into pure sensations.

In his vision he realized that pain clinics are filled with people whose symptoms are excruciating and who can’t escape the pain except through debilitating narcotics. He saw that the body scan and other mindfulness practices could help these patients uncouple the cognitive and emotional parts of their experience of pain from the pure sensation, a perceptual shift that can itself be a significant relief.

In a study at Emory, people who had never meditated previously were randomly assigned to practice Mindful Attention Training or a compassion meditation. A third group, an active control, went through a series of discussions on health.9

The participants were scanned before and after they underwent eight weeks of training. While in the scanner they viewed a set of images—standard in emotion research—which includes a few upsetting ones, such as a burn victim. The Mindful Attention group showed reduced amygdala activity in response to the disturbing pictures. The changes in amygdala function occurred in the ordinary baseline state in this study, suggesting the seeds of a trait effect.

A word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala circuitry triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.

The amygdala connects strongly to brain circuitry for both focusing our attention and for intense emotional reactions. This dual role explains why, when we are in the grip of anxiety, we are also very distracted, especially by whatever is making us anxious. As the brain’s radar for threat, the amygdala rivets our attention on what it finds troubling. So when something worries or upsets us, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of fixation—

About the same time as Alan’s findings that mindfulness calms the amygdala, other researchers had volunteers who had never meditated before practice mindfulness for just twenty minutes a day over one week, and then have an fMRI scan.10 During the scan they saw images ranging from gruesome burn victims to cute bunnies. They watched these images in their everyday state of mind, and then while practicing mindfulness.

During mindful attention their amygdala response was significantly lower (compared to nonmeditators) to all the images. This sign of being less disturbed, tellingly, was greatest in the amygdala on the brain’s right side (there are amygdalae in both right and left hemispheres), which often has a stronger response to whatever upsets us than the one on the left.

In this second study, lessened amygdala reactivity was found only during mindful attention and not during ordinary awareness, indicating a state effect, not an altered trait. A trait change, remember, is the “before,” not the “after.”

If you give the back of your hand a hard pinch, different brain systems mobilize, some for the pure sensation of pain and others for our dislike of that pain. The brain unifies them into a visceral, instant Ouch!

But that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of the body, spending hours noticing our bodily sensations in great detail. As we sustain this focus, our awareness morphs.

What had been a painful pinch transforms, breaking down into its constituents: the intensity of the pinch and the painful sensation, and the emotional feeling tone—we don’t want the pain; we urgently want the pain to stop.

But if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinch becomes an experience to unpack with interest, even equanimity. We can see our aversion fall away, and the “pain” break down into subtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.

meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional hijacking.

The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts.

This connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotional reactivity: the stronger the link, the less reactive. Indeed, that relationship is so strong that a person’s reactivity level can be predicted by the connectivity. So, when these high-lifetime-hour meditators saw an image of a gruesome-looking burn victim, they had little amygdala reactivity. Age-matched volunteers did not show either the heightened connectivity or the equanimity on viewing the disturbing images.

While MBSR training did reduce the reactivity of the amygdala, the long-term meditator group showed both this reduced reactivity in the amygdala plus strengthening of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. This pattern implies that when the going gets tough—for example, in response to a major life challenge such as losing a job—the ability to manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators

Among those who show the most short-lived amygdala response, emotions come and go, adaptive and appropriate. Richie’s lab put this idea to the test with brain scans of 31 highly seasoned meditators (lifetime average was 8,800 hours of meditation practice, ranging from just 1,200 to more than 30,000).

They saw the usual pictures ranging from people in extreme suffering (burn victims) to cute bunnies. On first analysis of the expert meditators’ amygdalae, there was no difference in how they reacted from the responses of matched volunteers who had never meditated. But when Richie’s group divided the seasoned meditators into those with the least hours of practice (lifetime average 1,849 hours) and the most (lifetime average 7,118), the results showed that the more hours of practice, the more quickly the amygdala recovered from distress.22

This rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience.

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Attention!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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! 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Attention, then, has various channels—the one we consciously select and those we tune out of. 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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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E. Ophir et al., “Cognitive Control in Multi-Taskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:37 (2009): 15583–87.

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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

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Clifford Nass, in an NPR interview, as quoted in Fast Company, February 2, 2014.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Michael D. Mrazek et al., “Mindfulness and Mind Wandering: Finding Convergence through Opposing Constructs,” Emotion 12:3 (2012): 442–48.

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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.

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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.

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Another way cognitive control helps us is in managing our impulses, technically known as “response inhibition.” As we saw in chapter five, “A Mind Undisturbed,” in Cliff Saron’s study the training upped a meditator’s ability to inhibit impulse over the course of three months and, impressively, stayed strong in a five-month follow-up.17 And better impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional well-being.

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Bajinder K. Sahdra et al., “Enhanced Response Inhibition During Intensive Meditation Predicts Improvements in Self-Reported Adaptive Socioemotional Functioning,” Emotion 11:2 (2011): 299–312.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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A Yogi’s Brain

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A SCIENTIFIC SURPRISE

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Antoine Lutz,

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Preparing the raw data on the yogis for sifting by sophisticated statistical programs has demanded painstaking work. Just teasing out the differences between the yogis’ resting state and their brain activity during meditation was a gargantuan computing task. So it took Antoine and Richie quite a while to stumble upon a pattern hiding in that data flood, empirical evidence that got lost amid the excitement about the yogis’ prowess in altering their brain activity during meditative states. In fact, the missed pattern surfaced only as an afterthought during a less hectic moment, months later, when the analytic team sifted through the data again.

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All along the statistical team had focused on temporary state effects by computing the difference between a yogi’s baseline brain activity and that produced during the one-minute meditation periods. Richie was reviewing the numbers with Antoine and wanted a routine check to ensure that the initial baseline EEG readings—those taken at rest, before the experiment began—were the same in a group of control volunteers who tried the identical meditations the yogis were doing. He asked to see just the baseline measures by themselves.

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When Richie and Antoine sat down to review what the computers had just crunched, they looked at the numbers and then looked at one another. They knew exactly what they were seeing and exchanged just one word: “Amazing!”

All the yogis had elevated gamma oscillations, not just during the meditation practice periods for open presence and compassion but also during the very first measurement, before any meditation was performed. This electrifying pattern was in the EEG frequency known as “high-amplitude” gamma, the strongest, most intense form. These waves lasted the full minute of the baseline measurement before they started the meditation.

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There are four main types of EEG waves, classed by their frequency (technically, measured in hertz). Delta, the slowest wave, oscillates between one and four cycles per second, and occurs mainly during deep sleep; theta, the next slowest, can signify drowsiness; alpha occurs when we are doing little thinking and indicates relaxation; and beta, the fastest, accompanies thinking, alertness, or concentration.

Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during moments when differing brain regions fire in harmony, like moments of insight when different elements of a mental puzzle “click” together. To get a sense of this “click,” try this: What single word can turn each of these into a compound word: sauce, pine, crab?*

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The instant your mind comes up with the answer, your brain signal momentarily produces that distinctive gamma flare. You also elicit a short-lived gamma wave when, for instance, you imagine biting into a ripe, juicy peach and your brain draws together memories stored in different regions of the occipital, temporal, somatosensory, insular, and olfactory cortices to suddenly mesh the sight, smells, taste, feel, and sound into a single experience. For that quick moment the gamma waves from each of these cortical regions oscillate in perfect synchrony. Ordinarily gamma waves from, say, a creative insight, last no longer than a fifth of a second—not the full minute seen in the yogis.

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In the yogis, gamma oscillations are a far more prominent feature of their brain activity than in other people. Our usual gamma waves are not nearly as strong as that seen by Richie’s team in yogis like Mingyur. The contrast between the yogis and controls in the intensity of gamma was immense: on average the yogis had twenty-five times greater amplitude gamma oscillations during baseline compared with the control group.

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The yogis’ pattern of gamma oscillation contrasts with how, ordinarily, these waves occur only briefly, and in an isolated neural location. The adepts had a sharply heightened level of gamma waves oscillating in synchrony across their brain, independent of any particular mental act. Unheard of.

Richie and Antoine were seeing for the first time a neural echo of the enduring transformations that years of meditation practice etch on the brain.

🔮 The Cosmos

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