Neuroscience Has Much to Learn from Contemplative Traditions

Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an ideal way? What transformations occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a new book titled Beyond the Self, two friends engage in an unusually balanced conversation about meditation and the brain. Matthieu Ricard left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, while Wolf Singer is a distinguished neuroscientist. Below is a condensed and edited extract.

Matthieu Ricard: Although we find many treatises on “traditional sciences” in Buddhist literature; medicine, cosmology, botany, logic and so on; Tibetan Buddhism has not pursued the expansion of knowledge about the world through the natural sciences in the same way that Western civilizations have. Instead, it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2500 years and has accumulated, empirically, a vast body of experiential discoveries over the centuries. A great many people have dedicated their entire lives to this contemplative science.

Western modern psychology began with William James only a century ago. I cannot help but recall the observation made by Stephen Kosslyn, then a professor in Harvard's psychology department, at the Mind and Life meeting titled “Investigating the Mind,” which took place at MIT in 2003. He began his presentation by saying: “I want to start with a statement of humility in the face of the enormous amount of data that contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.”

It is not enough to reflect on how the human psyche works and develop complex theories about it, as Freud did, for example. Such intellectual constructions cannot substitute for two millennia of direct investigation of how the mind functions through penetrating introspection conducted by trained minds that have become both stable and clear.

Wolf Singer: Could you be more specific about that rather bold claim? Why should what nature has given us be fundamentally negative, requiring special mental practice for its elimination, and why should this approach be superior to conventional education or, if there is any conflict, to psychotherapy in its various forms, including psychoanalysis?

Ricard: What nature has given us is not, by any means, entirely negative; it is simply a parameter. Few people would honestly argue that there is nothing worth improving about the way they live and the way they experience the world. Some people regard their own emotional fragilities and conflicts as a valuable and distinct part of their “personality,” as something that contributes to the fullness of their lives. They believe this is what makes them unique and argue that they should accept themselves as they are. But isn't that an easy way to give up on the idea of improving the quality of their lives, which would cost only a bit of reasoning and effort?

Conventional modern education does not focus on transforming the mind and cultivating basic human qualities like loving-kindness and mindfulness. As we will see later, Buddhist contemplative science has much in common with cognitive therapies, particularly those that use mindfulness as a foundation for remedying emotional imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage endless rumination and exploration of the details and complexities of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the more fundamental aspect of the mind: luminous awareness.

Singer: So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation?

Ricard: Completely the opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression. What we need is to acquire freedom from the chain reactions of thought that rumination perpetuates endlessly. A person should learn to let thoughts arise and be free to depart the moment they arise, rather than allowing them to invade the mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future has not yet been born, and if a person remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially troublesome thoughts arise and pass without leaving traces.

Singer: So what you need to learn is to adopt a much more subtle approach to your internal emotional theater. Learn to identify the various nuances of your feelings with much higher resolution.

Ricard: Exactly. At first, it is difficult to do so as soon as an emotion arises, but if you become increasingly familiar with such an approach, it becomes quite natural. Whenever anger is just showing its face, we recognize it immediately and deal with it before it becomes too strong.

Singer: It is not different from a scientific endeavor, except that the analytical effort is directed toward the internal world rather than the external world. Science also tries to understand reality by increasing the resolution power of instruments, by training the mind to grasp complex relationships, and by breaking down systems into ever smaller components.

Ricard: It is said in Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small and easy tasks.

Singer: Your object of investigation appears to be the mental apparatus and your tool of analysis is introspection. This is an interesting self-referential approach that differs from Western science of the mind because it emphasizes the first-person perspective and collapses, in a certain sense, the instrument of investigation with its object. The Western approach, while using the first-person perspective to define what is mental phenomenon, clearly favors the third-person perspective for its investigation.

I am curious to discover whether the results of analytical introspection coincide with those obtained by cognitive neuroscience. Both approaches obviously try to develop a differentiated and realistic view of cognitive processes.

What guarantees that the introspective technique for the dissection of mental phenomena is reliable? If this is the consensus among those who consider themselves experts, how can you compare and validate subjective mental states? There is nothing that another person can observe and judge as valid; observers can only rely on the verbal testimony of subjective states.

Ricard: The same is true with scientific knowledge. First you must trust the credible testimony of a number of scientists, but then you can train yourself in the subject and verify the findings firsthand. This is quite similar to contemplative sciences. First you must refine the telescope of your mind and the methods of investigation for years to discover, for yourself, what other contemplatives have found and agreed with each other about what was found. The state of pure consciousness without content, which may sound intriguing at first, is something that all contemplatives have experienced. So it is not merely some kind of dogmatic Buddhist theory. Anyone who takes on the problem of stabilizing and clarifying their mind will be able to experience it.

Regarding cross-validation of interpersonal experiences, both contemplatives and the texts that address the various experiences a meditator might encounter are quite precise in their descriptions. When a student reports on their mental states to an experienced meditation teacher, the descriptions are not merely vague and poetic. The teacher will ask precise questions and the student answers them, and it becomes quite clear that they are talking about something that is well defined and mutually understood.

However, in the end, what really matters is the way a person gradually changes. If, after months or years, someone becomes less impatient, less inclined to anger, and less torn by hopes and fears, then the method they have used is a valid method.

A study that has been conducted seems to indicate that while engaged in meditation, practitioners can distinguish clearly, like any other person who is not distracted, between pleasant and aversive stimuli, but they react much less emotionally than subjects in the control group. While maintaining the capacity to be fully aware of something, they manage not to be carried away by their emotional responses.

Singer: How do you do that? What are the tools?

Ricard: This process requires perseverance. You must train again and again. You cannot learn to play tennis by holding a racket for a few minutes every several months. With meditation, the effort is directed toward developing not a physical skill, but an internal enrichment.

In extreme cases, you could be in a simple monastery where nothing changes or sit alone facing the same scene every day. Thus, external enrichment is almost zero, but internal enrichment is maximum. You are training your mind all day long with little external stimulus. Moreover, such enrichment is not passive, but voluntary and methodically directed. When you engage for eight hours or more a day in cultivating certain mental states that you have decided to cultivate and that you have learned to cultivate, you reprogram your brain.

Singer: In a certain sense, you make your brain the object of a sophisticated cognitive process that turns inward rather than outward, toward the world around you. You apply the brain's cognitive skills to study its own organization and functioning, and you do it in an intentional and focused way, similar to when you engage with events in the external world and when you organize sensory signals into coherent perceptions. You assign values to certain states and try to increase their predominance, which probably goes along with a change in synaptic connection, more or less the same way this occurs with the learning process resulting from interactions with the external world.

Perhaps we can briefly recapitulate how the human brain adapts to the environment, since this developmental process can also be seen as a modification or reprogramming of its functions. Brain development is characterized by a massive proliferation of connections and is parallel to a process of sculpting through which the connections being formed are stabilized or deleted according to functional criteria, using experience and interaction with the environment as its validation criterion. This developmental reorganization continues until approximately age 20. The early stages serve to adjust sensory and motor functions, and later phases involve primarily the brain systems responsible for social skills. Once these developmental processes come to an end, brain connectivity becomes fixed and large-scale changes are no longer possible.

Ricard: To a certain extent.

Singer: Yes, to a certain extent. Existing synaptic connections remain modifiable, but you can no longer create new long-range connections. In some distinct regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb, new neurons are generated throughout life and inserted into existing circuits, but this process is not large-scale, at least not in the neocortex, where higher cognitive functions are supposedly perceived.

Ricard: A study with people who have practiced meditation for a long period of time demonstrates that structural connections between different areas of the brain are greater in meditators than in control groups. Consequently, there must be another type of change allowed by the brain.

Singer: I find no difficulty in accepting that the learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from re-education programs where practice leads to small yet complementary behavioral modifications. There is also evidence of quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and survival strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning; changes distributed in the efficiency of synaptic connections; lead to drastic alterations of global brain states.

Ricard: You could also change the flow of neural activity, as when traffic on a highway increases significantly.

Singer: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is quite stable after age 20, but it is still possible to flexibly route activity from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensures that a given activation pattern is not transmitted diffusely to all connected regions of the brain, but routed only to specific selected areas.

Ricard: Until now, the results of studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clear, powerful, and well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables a person to generate these states by choice and to modulate their intensity even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Therefore, a person acquires the faculty to maintain general emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

Singer: So you need to use your cognitive abilities to identify the various emotional states more clearly and delineate them more precisely, and train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to selectively increase or decrease the activities of the subsystems responsible for generating the various emotions.

An analogy for this refinement process could be the enhanced differentiation of objects of perception, which is known to depend on learning. With only a little experience, you are able to recognize an animal as a dog. With more experience, you can sharpen your eye and become able to distinguish, with increasing precision, dogs that look similar. In the same way, mental training can allow you to sharpen your inner eye for the distinction of emotional states.

In the state of naivety, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should, therefore, become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures that explore mental training as a source of knowledge should possess a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the external world.

Ricard: Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 primary mental events and various subdivisions from there. It is true that through conducting a thorough investigation of mental events, a person becomes able to distinguish increasingly subtle nuances.

Take anger, for example. Generally anger can have a malevolent component, but it can also be righteous indignation when confronted with injustice. Anger can be a reaction that allows us to quickly overcome an obstacle that threatens us. However, it could also reflect a tendency to have a short fuse. If you look at anger carefully, you will see that it contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in themselves. So if you are able to recognize those aspects that are still not negative and allow your mind to remain in them, without slipping into the destructive aspects, you will not be disturbed and confused by these emotions.

Another result of cultivating mental skills is that, after some time, you will no longer need to apply artificial effort. You can deal with the arising of mental disturbances the way the eagles I see from the window of my monastery in the Himalayas do. Crows usually attack them, even though they are much smaller. They dive toward the eagles from above trying to strike them with their beaks. However, instead of becoming alarmed and moving to avoid the crows, the eagles simply retract one wing at the last moment, letting the diving crow pass right through, and then extend it again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and is perfectly efficient. Being skilled at dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way. When you are able to maintain a clear state of attention, you see thoughts arise; you let them pass through your mind without trying to block or encourage them; and they disappear without creating many waves.

Singer: This reminds me of what we do when we encounter severe difficulties that require quick solutions, like a complicated traffic situation. We immediately summon a large repertoire of escape strategies that we have learned and practiced, and there we choose from them without thinking much, relying mainly on subconscious heuristics. Apparently, if we do not have experience with contemplative practices, we do not go through driving school for emotional conflict management. Would you say that is a valid analogy?

Ricard: Yes, complex situations become enormously simplified through training and the cultivation of effortless attention. When you learn to ride a horse, as a beginner you are constantly worried, trying not to fall with each movement the horse makes. Especially when the horse begins to gallop, it puts you on alert. But when you become an experienced rider, everything becomes easier. Riders in eastern Tibet, for example, can perform all sorts of acrobatics, like shooting arrows at targets or grabbing things off the ground while galloping at full speed, and they do all this calmly and with a big smile on their face.

A study with meditators showed that they can maintain their attention at an optimal level for long periods of time. When performing what is called a continuous performance task, even after 45 minutes they did not become tense and were not distracted for a moment. When I myself did this task, I noticed that the first few minutes were challenging and required some effort, but once I entered a state of “attention flow,” it became easier.

Singer: This resembles a general strategy that the brain applies when acquiring new skills. In the naive state, a person uses conscious control to do the task. The task is broken down into a series of sub-tasks that are executed in sequence. This requires attention, takes time, and requires effort. Later, after practicing, performance becomes automated. Usually, the execution of the behavioral skill is then performed by different brain structures than those involved in initial learning and task execution. Once this change occurs, performance becomes automatic, fast, and effortless, and no longer requires cognitive control. This type of learning is called procedural learning and requires practice. Such automated skills usually save you from difficult situations because you can access them quickly. They usually can also handle more variables simultaneously, due to parallel processes. Conscious processing is more serialized and therefore takes more time.

Do you think you can apply the same learning strategy to your emotions by learning to pay attention to them, to differentiate them, and thus familiarize yourself with their dynamics so that later you are able to rely on automated routines for their management in case of conflict?

Ricard: You seem to be describing the process of meditation. In the teachings, it is said that when someone begins to meditate on compassion, for example, a person experiences an artificial, forced form of compassion. However, through generating compassion again and again, it becomes instinctive and arises spontaneously, even in the midst of a complex and challenging situation.

Singer: It would be very interesting to look with neurobiological tools to see whether you possess the same shift in function that is observed in other cases where familiarity through learning and training leads to the process of automation. When analyzing the brain, one observes that different brain structures take over when skills that are initially acquired under the control of consciousness become automatic.

Ricard: This is what a study conducted by the laboratory of Julie Brefczynski and Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson seems to indicate. Brefczynski and Lutz studied the brain activities of novice, relatively experienced, and highly experienced meditators while they engaged in focused attention. Different patterns of activity were observed depending on the level of experience of the practitioners.

Relatively experienced meditators (with around 19,000 hours of practice) showed greater activity in the brain regions related to attention compared to novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators (with around 44,000 hours of practice) demonstrated less activation than those with less experience. These highly advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that allows them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the ability of experienced musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control. This observation is consistent with other studies demonstrating that when someone achieves mastery of a task, the brain structures engaged during the execution of that task are generally less active than they were when the brain was still in the learning phase.

Singer: This suggests that neural codes become more dispersed, perhaps involving smaller quantities of neurons, but more specialized ones, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a true expert, this seems to require at least the same amount of training that is required to become a world-class violinist or pianist. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily practice to reach 44,000 hours. Extraordinary!

Originally published at theatlantic.com