The Science of Meditation

Richie Davidson has always been something of a dissenter. While other neuroscientists focused on the mechanics of how to think more efficiently and better, he found himself drawn to a different question: what is a truly relaxed and focused mind capable of doing? His own meditation practice and his encounters with experienced meditators offered him personal and testimonial evidence of the profound effects of mindfulness and other contemplative practices. But could he demonstrate this in a laboratory setting? Davidson devoted his career to this pursuit, a journey chronicled in a new book by Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.

The neuroscience of meditation investigates the full spectrum of practices, ranging from beginners who had never meditated before to practitioners who completed extensive training programs, and even to "Olympic-level" practitioners who logged more than 12,000 hours of meditation. Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation master and teacher at age 42, exemplifies an Olympic-level meditator with a persistent interest in scientific investigation. When he arrived at Davidson's laboratory at the University of Wisconsin in 2002, Mingyur had already accumulated more than 62,000 hours of meditation, including ten full years in retreat. He was the perfect candidate to demonstrate the long-term impact of sustained meditation practice. Yet even the serene and meticulously demanding Davidson was surprised by what happened next.

During the first session, a researcher instructed Mingyur, who was connected to an EEG machine, to practice a meditation generating compassion for 60 seconds, rest for 30 seconds, and repeat the cycle three more times. The moment Mingyur began to meditate, the research team was astonished by an unprecedented burst of electrical activity that appeared on their computer screens. At first, they thought Mingyur might have moved his head slightly, a common problem with EEG machines, which are notoriously sensitive to body movement. But as the session continued, Mingyur remained still, and each time he received the signal to meditate, the computers lit up in the same way. "The lab team knew that in that moment they were witnessing something profound, something that had never before been observed in a laboratory," Davidson and Goleman wrote in their book. "No one could predict where it would lead, but everyone felt they were witnessing a critical inflection point in the history of neuroscience."

For Goleman and Davidson, this was a long-awaited moment. Both had become interested in meditation practices after spending time practicing in India as graduate students at Harvard in the 1970s. But they struggled to convince the powerful figures in the psychology department to take their meditation research seriously, largely because it did not fit the behaviorist paradigm that was in vogue at the time. In fact, when Davidson proposed making meditation the subject of his doctoral dissertation, his advisor warned him it would be "a career-ending move."

So they shifted their focus. Davidson became an expert in affective neuroscience and conducted several groundbreaking studies on emotion and the brain, while Goleman became a celebrated columnist for the New York Times and wrote several influential books, including his bestseller, Emotional Intelligence. Yet their interest in studying meditation's effects persisted. A turning point came in 2000, when Davidson and other scientists gathered for a series of high-level discussions with the Dalai Lama about destructive emotions. At one point, the Dalai Lama turned to Davidson and challenged him to take some of the time-tested meditation practices that focus on taming these kinds of emotions and test them rigorously in the laboratory, stripped of their religious trappings. "If you find that they are beneficial for people," Goleman recalls the Dalai Lama saying, "then spread them as widely as you can."

What fascinated Goleman and Davidson was the question of what lasting marks meditation produces beyond the elevated states that can be experienced during the session itself. For them, meditation's impact on health and performance mattered, but what intrigued them even more was the role the practice played in cultivating enduring qualities like renunciation, equanimity, and impartial compassion. During their college years, Goleman and Davidson developed an elegant hypothesis to explain this role, published in an article they were writing: "The after is the before for the next during." In this formulation, the after referred to the internal changes that persist following a meditation session; the before was the baseline condition when we begin to meditate; and the during referred to the temporary changes that occur in the process. Goleman explains: "That was our way of talking about how, as you keep practicing, the things you see happening during the meditative state itself end up becoming part of who you are. They become traits."

It was an intriguing theory. The only problem was they had no scientific research at the time to support it. "We had the meditators," he laments, "but we didn't have the data."

But now that is changing. Recent research on long-term meditators shows that Goleman and Davidson's intuition was not far off. These new studies are confirming scientifically that sustained practice can produce lasting changes in brain function and the kind of behavioral transformation that, as they say, "dramatically raises the ceiling of what psychological science has understood about human possibilities."

 

Glimpsing the Conscious Brain

Much of the early research on meditation focused on "state" effects. Studies often involved novices who were taught mindfulness techniques and then tested against control groups to determine what impact, if any, meditation had on their performance. Not all the research was rigorous, and some amounted to little more than promotion. But when you filter out studies that do not meet the highest scientific standards, as Goleman and Davidson did in their book, a clear picture emerges of what we know about the science of meditation and what we still need to learn.

Unsurprisingly, some of the strongest areas of research focus on attention. In one major MIT study, researchers found that volunteers who attended an eight-week stress reduction program based on mindfulness practice had a much greater ability to focus on their sensations than the control group, which had not received the training. Another study from the University of Wisconsin showed that just ten minutes of breath counting helped offset the harmful effects on concentration that come from juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. In yet another study, conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, just eight minutes of mindfulness practice improved concentration and reduced mind-wandering in practitioners. Researchers also found that mindfulness had a dramatic effect on working memory, the ability we have to manipulate stored information to reason and make decisions in real time. A group of students showed an improvement of more than 30% in their scores on university entrance exams after completing two weeks of mindfulness training.

Stress is another area where the evidence is particularly compelling. In a landmark study conducted by researchers at Emory University, volunteers underwent eight weeks of mindfulness training. They were then exposed to a series of disturbing images so their reactions could be observed. The result: a significant decrease in activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for triggering fight, flight, or freeze responses.

A third area that has yielded solid results is the study of compassion. According to Davidson, compassion practices, such as loving-kindness meditation, work very quickly, sometimes producing effects in just eight days of practice. "That doesn't mean those effects will last," he says, "but it suggests that kindness may be intrinsic to the mind. What practice does is reconnect us with that quality present in ourselves, so we can make it more accessible."

In a study conducted in Davidson's laboratory, a group of volunteers completed a two-week program practicing compassion meditation. The practitioners then had their brains scanned while viewing images designed to evoke empathy. After that, participants took part in a game in which they decided how much help to give to victims who had been deceived by a dishonest "dictator." In the end, volunteers who had completed the compassion training ended up donating twice as much money to the victims compared to the control group. Their scans showed greater activity in circuits related to attention, perspective-taking, and positive feelings. Similarly, other studies have found that compassion meditation strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and brain circuits linked to joy and happiness.

One area where results have not proven as promising is medical research. While several studies have shown that MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) and other methods can help reduce pain and anxiety, the track record is not as strong when it comes to curing medical syndromes or uncovering the causes of disease. There is some evidence that short-term mindfulness training can reduce inflammation, and that more intensive programs may stimulate an increase in telomerase, the part of DNA that slows cellular aging. But after an extensive review, Goleman and Davidson concluded that the best studies in the field focus mainly on reducing psychological suffering, which can exacerbate disease-related suffering, rather than on uncovering underlying biological mechanisms.

 

How to Loosen the Grip of Self

Recently, researchers have begun examining more closely the impact of sustained meditation on long-term practitioners. One of the most important findings is that repeated practice tends to make experienced practitioners much less attached to the ongoing narratives we construct about ourselves. And this is beginning to shed new light on how brain circuits function.

Although the brain represents only about 2% of our body mass, it burns about 20% of the body's metabolic energy, even when we are doing nothing. Why? Because when we are not focused on a specific mental task, the brain's default mode network, the hub that connects the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system, becomes highly active, weaving thoughts, emotions, hopes, and dreams together into a coherent self-narrative. Meditation interrupts this process, training us to notice when our mind wanders and bringing it back to focus. By doing this repeatedly, researchers speculate, we strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the default mode, and this calms the self-obsessed mind.

"All of us carry within our heads a narrative about ourselves that is associated with specific brain circuits," Davidson says. "At one extreme, consider someone with clinical depression who may have been genuinely convinced by this narrative and taken it as concrete reality. But what we've learned from certain types of meditation practice is that you don't need to get rid of the narrative; you simply need to change how you relate to it, making it your friend rather than your enemy. This allows us not to be caught by the narrative, so we can develop a healthier sense of self."

Research confirms this. In a study conducted at Yale University, researcher Judson Brewer and his colleagues found that the "default networks" of long-term meditators (averaging 10,500 hours of practice) were much less active than those of beginning meditators, particularly when the experienced meditators practiced loving-kindness, which shifted their focus beyond themselves. In another study, Brewer's team found that experienced meditators were more likely to report experiences of "distraction-free attention" and "effortless doing" than beginning meditators. At the final stage, where self-reference is released, Goleman and Davidson assert, the relationship with self changes and is no longer as "sticky" as before. "The same kinds of thoughts may arise in your mind, but they are lighter: not so convincing, with less emotional pull, and therefore they pass more easily," they add.

In his studies with Mingyur and other experienced practitioners (averaging 27,000 hours of practice), Davidson was struck by their extraordinary talent for emotional regulation. This proved especially true when these practitioners were subjected to intense pain. During one study, both long-term practitioners and the control group were exposed to a blast of heat generated by a thermal stimulator for 10 seconds, preceded by a 10-second warning. As soon as the warning began, the brains of those in the control group went haywire, registering almost as much pain as when the burning sensation actually occurred. The long-term meditators, by contrast, showed no reaction to the warning but displayed a much more intense response to the heat itself. And once the stimulus ended, they recovered much more quickly than the control group.

"This inverted V pattern, with little reaction during anticipation of the painful event, followed by a wave of intensity during the event itself, and then quickly recovering, can be highly adaptive," Goleman and Davidson wrote. "It allows us to be highly responsive to a challenge as it happens, without letting our emotional reactions interfere before or after, once they are no longer useful."

One of the most striking findings about long-term practitioners was their extremely high levels of gamma wave oscillation, not only during meditation but also while they rested. Bursts of gamma waves are normally rare occurrences, appearing for fractions of a second when brain regions suddenly synchronize in harmony. But Davidson and his colleague Antoine Lutz discovered that high-amplitude gamma patterns were part of their daily neural activity. The baseline readings taken before they began their meditations were 25 times higher than those of control group participants.

For Goleman and Davidson, this discovery was, in their words, like stumbling upon the "holy grail." It meant that these long-term practitioners were able to experience an unbroken state of open awareness in their daily lives. They described it as a kind of "spaciousness and vastness," as if "all their senses were open to the rich and full panorama of experience." This finding was, as the authors put it, the first "neural echo of the lasting transformations that years of meditation inscribe on the brain. Here was the treasure, hidden in the data all along: a genuine altered trait."

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

Davidson is accustomed to encountering skepticism whenever he publishes the results of a new study. "One kind of pushback I get is that I'm not an objective observer and that our data can't be trusted because I've publicly admitted to being a meditator," he says. "I love that comment. It's like telling a cardiologist studying the heart that he can't exercise for the rest of his professional life." Some of the scientific papers he is most proud of, he adds, are those that failed to show any differences between the meditator group and the control group. One example: several years ago, Davidson's laboratory was unable to replicate a study that made headlines showing that meditation slows brain shrinkage as we age.

Another common form of criticism is that the research is not very good, and that there is far more hype around the findings than actual evidence. In general, Davidson would agree with that assessment. When his research team was looking for studies on loving-kindness to include in their book, for instance, they found only 37 out of 231 studies that met the highest standards of experimental design. And Davidson narrowed this list down to 8 once he added another filter: the significance of the findings.

One of the biggest problems in meditation research is the lack of consensus on what the term mindfulness means. The mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn articulated the most widely used definition: "Awareness that emerges through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment by moment." But that definition does not capture the complexity of the concept as it appears in other meditation disciplines. And scientists unfamiliar with the nuances of practice often use "mindfulness" and "meditation" interchangeably. "For me, the fact that there are different definitions is not so much a problem, as long as we are clear about which definition we are using and, more importantly, what measures are being used to capture that metric," Davidson says. "As long as we have clarity about that and restrict our claims to that specific variation of mindfulness, we're fine. When we use the term to point to mindfulness in general, that's when problems arise."

Another problem is the lack of detailed longitudinal studies that track subjects' progress over long periods of time. One particular gap, according to Goleman and Davidson, is the scarcity of research on meditation's long-term impact on self-attachment. This kind of study is expensive and time-consuming. But at some point, Goleman predicts, researchers will have the technological capacity to monitor meditators in their daily lives, not just in the laboratory, and see how they respond to real-life events as they happen.

One area that needs more research is the effect of practice duration. Certain types of biological changes, for example, are more associated with retreat practice than with daily practice. But it is unclear whether it is the long hours of practice, the support of community, or other factors that produce the results. There is also no good research on session duration. If a new meditation student decides to set aside 20 minutes a day to practice, should they do all 20 minutes in a single session or in four sessions of 5 minutes, or even in 10 sessions of 2 minutes? "Right now, we have absolutely no idea what the optimal strategy is for producing lasting change," Davidson says. "These are critical questions that can and need to be addressed scientifically if this work is really going to have broader impact."

The good news is that you don't need much meditation time to generate measurable results. "We've shown in the laboratory that meditating half an hour a day for two weeks is enough to produce changes in the brain," he adds. "Most people recognize that if you go to the gym for two weeks and exercise every day with a personal trainer, you'll feel the difference. But those changes won't persist unless you keep exercising. It's very similar with meditation. It's a form of mental exercise. And once you start feeling the benefit of the changes, that inspires you to keep practicing for the rest of your life."

Davidson believes that at some point, future research will bring a much more personalized approach to meditation practice. As our scientific knowledge of how meditation works expands, he predicts, "we'll be able to specify, with greater precision, which types of practices will be most beneficial for which types of people." It is not unlike the current revolution underway in medicine, where doctors are prescribing treatments based on their patients' genetic makeup. But in the case of meditation, Davidson thinks practices will be based on a person's particular configuration of emotional and cognitive strengths and weaknesses, a profile of their wellbeing.

Davidson is animated by this idea. "At this historical moment," he says, "I think we have a moral obligation to bring these practices to as many people as possible, to heal the world and cultivate a more collective form of human warmth, which I think most people would agree the world is in need of. It's similar, I think, to what climate scientists are doing. We can no longer just collect data and sit in our laboratories."

"Today, in most of the world, people practice some form of personal physical hygiene," he continues. "My aspiration is that people will care for their minds in the same way. They will engage in simple practices that become widely disseminated. I am convinced that the world would be a very different place if we could get past this critical threshold."

 

Definition: What Is Mindfulness?

Everyone thinks they know, and that is part of the problem.

Today, the term Mindfulness carries a broad and popular definition, and therefore inevitably a loose one. The term is generally used to refer to "paying attention to life," but it also carries more precise definitions, including the human capacity to be aware of one's own mind, body, and environment, and it also names the practices designed to cultivate this capacity.

Scientific research cannot rely on the broad definitions of common language. Researchers require an empirical definition, one that is not philosophical or spiritual and that points to something as concrete and measurable as possible.

One of the first elements of a definition of mindfulness is to distinguish the practice of mindfulness (the instruction given as a means to cultivate inherent mindfulness) from mindfulness as a basic human quality or ability.

There is also another distinction in the literature between "mindfulness state" (the immediate experience of being aware) and "mindfulness trait" or "dispositional mindfulness" (the enduring habits that indicate someone is being more attentive in their daily life). One of the most common definitions of mindfulness state comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn: "Mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose and without judgment, in the present moment."

In the laboratory, another component of the definition of mindfulness concerns the instructions that participants receive when asked to "practice mindfulness."

Once you have defined "mindfulness," the next major challenge is measuring it, either through self-reports, with questionnaires that generally focus on mindfulness trait (how attentive you are in daily life), or through technologies like EEGs and fMRIs, which measure brain activity in an attempt to identify mindfulness states or long-term changes in brain function.

A very significant article was published by four leading researchers in the October 2015 issue of American Psychologist ("Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective") that addressed the definition of mindfulness not by trying to arrive at a single definition but by mapping it as a "continuum of practices involving states and processes." They investigate, for example, the differences between practices that emphasize "focused attention" and those that emphasize "open monitoring." Although both are often called "mindfulness," the first emphasizes focus on a specific object, while the second encourages generalized attention, and what is being cultivated in each is likely to be different.

Originally published at mindful.org