Back
to Richie on his retreat in Dalhousie with S. N. Goenka. A revelation came to
Richie on the seventh day, during the Hour of Stillness, which begins with a
vow not to make a single voluntary movement, no matter how excruciating your
discomfort.
Almost
from the start of that endless hour Richie’s usual ache in his right knee, now
intensified by the no-moving vow, went from pulsating jolts to torture. But
then, just as the pain reached the unbearable point, something changed: his
awareness.
Suddenly,
what had been pain disappeared into a collection of sensations —tingling,
burning, pressure—but his knee no longer hurt. The “pain” dissolved into waves
of vibrations without a trace of emotional reactivity.
Focusing
on just the sensations meant completely reappraising the nature of hurting:
instead of fixating on the pain, the very notion of pain deconstructed into raw
sensations. What went missing was just as critical: the psychological
resistance to, and negative feelings about, those sensations.
The
pain had not vanished, but Richie had changed his relationship to it. There was
just raw sensation—not my pain, along with the usual stream of angst-ridden
thoughts.
Though
while we sit we ordinarily are oblivious to our subtle shifts in posture and
the like, these small movements relieve stress that’s building in our body.
When you don’t move a muscle, that stress can build into excruciating pain. And
if, like Richie, you are scanning those sensations, a remarkable shift in your
relationship to your own experience can occur where the feeling of “pain” melts
away into a mélange of physical sensations.
In
that hour Richie, with his science background, realized in his most personal
reality that what we label as “pain” is a joining together of myriad constituent
somatic sensations from which the label arises. With his newly altered
perception, “pain” became just an idea, a mental label that puts a conceptual
veneer over what arises from a motley coincidence of sensations, perceptions,
and resistant thoughts.
This
was a vivid taste for Richie of how much mental activity is going on in our
mind “under the hood,” and about which we are oblivious. He understood that our
experience is not based on the direct apperception of what is happening, but to
a great extent upon our expectations and projections, the habitual thoughts and
reactions that we have learned to make in response, and an impenetrable sea of
neural processes. We live in a world our minds build rather than actually
perceiving the endless details of what is happening.
This
led Richie to a scientific insight: that consciousness operates as an
integrator, gluing together a vast amount of elementary mental processes, most
of which we are oblivious to. We know their eventual product—my pain—but
typically have no awareness of the countless elements that combine into that
perception.
While
that understanding has become a given in cognitive science today, back in the
days of the Dalhousie retreat there was no such understanding. Richie had no
inkling apart from his own transformation in awareness.
During
the first days of the retreat Richie would shift his position now and then to
relieve the discomfort in his knees or back. But after that nomoving perceptual
breakthrough, Richie could be still as a rock during marathon sessions of up to
three hours or longer. With this radical inner shift, Richie felt a sense that
he could sit through anything.
Richie
saw that if we actually paid attention in the right way to the nature of our
experience, it would change dramatically. The Hour of Stillness shows that
every waking moment of our lives, we construct our experience around a
narrative where we are the star—and that we can deconstruct that story we
center on ourselves by applying the right kind of awareness.
HOW
OUR BRAIN CONSTRUCTS OUR SELF
Marcus
Raichle was surprised—and troubled. Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington
University in St. Louis, had been doing pioneering brain studies to identify
which neural areas were active during various mental activities. To do this
kind of research back in 2001, Raichle used a strategy common at the time:
comparing the active task to a baseline where the participant was doing
“nothing.” What troubled him: during highly demanding cognitive tasks—like
counting backward by 13s from the number 1,475—there were a set of brain
regions that deactivated.
The
standard assumption was that such an effortful mental job would always increase
activation in brain areas. But the deactivation Raichle found was a systematic
pattern, one that accompanies the shift from the resting baseline of doing
“nothing” to doing any kind of mental task.
In
other words, while we’re doing nothing there are brain regions that are highly
activated, even more active than those engaged during a difficult cognitive
task. While we are working at a mental challenge like tricky subtraction, these
brain regions go quiet.
His
observation confirmed a mystifying fact that had floated around the world of
brain science for a while: that although the brain makes up only 2 percent of
the body’s mass, it consumes about 20 percent of the body’s metabolic energy as
measured by its oxygen usage, and that rate of oxygen consumption remains more
or less constant no matter what we are doing— including nothing at all. The
brain, it seems, stays just as busy when we are relaxed as when we are under
some mental strain.
So,
where are all those neurons, chatting back and forth while we do nothing in
particular? Raichle identified a swath of areas, mainly the mPFC (short for
midline of the prefrontal cortex) and the PCC (postcingulate cortex), a node
connecting to the limbic system. He dubbed this circuitry the brain’s “default
mode network.”1
While
the brain engages in an active task, whether math or meditating, the default
areas calm down as those essential for that task gear up, and ramp up again
when that mental task finishes. This solved the problem of how the brain could
maintain its activity level while “nothing” was going on.
When
scientists asked people during these periods of “doing nothing” what was going
on in their minds, not surprisingly, it was not nothing! They typically
reported that their minds were wandering; most often, this mindwandering was
focused on the self—How am I doing in this experiment? I wonder what they are
learning about me; I need to reply to Joe’s phone message—all reflecting mental
activity focused on “I” and “me.”2
In
short, our mind wanders mostly to something about ourselves—my thoughts, my
emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page—all the
minutiae of our life story. By framing every event in how it impacts ourselves,
the default mode makes each of us the center of the universe as we know it.
Those reveries knit together our sense of “self” from the fragmentary memories,
hopes, dreams, plans, and so on that center on I, me, and mine. Our default
mode continually rescripts a movie where each of us stars, replaying
particularly favorite or upsetting scenes over and over.
The
default mode turns on while we chill out, not doing anything that requires
focus and effort; it blossoms during the mind’s downtime. Conversely, as we
focus on some challenge, like grappling with what’s happened to your Wi-Fi
signal, the default mode quiets.
With
nothing much else to capture our attention, our mind wanders, very often to
what’s troubling us—a root cause of everyday angst. For this reason, when
Harvard researchers asked thousands of people to report their mental focus and
mood at random points through the day, their conclusion was that “a wandering
mind is an unhappy mind.”
This
self-system mulls over our life—especially the problems we face, the difficulties
in our relationships, our worries and anxieties. Because the self ruminates on
what’s bothering us, we feel relieved when we can turn it off. One of the great
appeals of high-risk sports like rock climbing seems to be just that—the danger
of the sport demands a full focus on where to put your hand or foot next. More
mundane worries take backstage in the mind.
The
same applies to “flow,” the state where people perform at their best. Paying
full attention to what’s at hand, flow research tells us, rates high on the
list of what puts us into—and sustains—a joyous state. The self, in its form as
mind-wandering, becomes a distraction, suppressed for the time being.
Managing
attention, as we saw in the previous chapter, is an essential ingredient of every
variety of meditation. When we become lost in thoughts during meditation, we’ve
fallen into the default mode and its wandering mind.
A
basic instruction in almost all forms of meditation urges us to notice when our
mind has wandered and then return our focus to the chosen target, say, a mantra
or our breathing. This moment has universal familiarity on contemplative paths.
This
simple mental move has a neural correlate: activating the connection between
the dorsolateral PFC and the default mode—a connection found to be stronger in
long-term meditators than in beginners.3 The stronger this connection, the more
likely regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the default areas,
quieting the monkey mind—the incessant selffocused chatter that so often fills
our minds when nothing else is pressing.
A
Sufi poem hints at this shift, speaking of the shift from “a thousand thoughts”
to just one: “There is no god but God.”4
DECONSTRUCTING
THE SELF
As
fifth-century Indian sage Vasubhandu observed, “So long as you grasp at the
self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.”
While
most ways to relieve us from the burden of self are temporary, meditation paths
aim to make that relief an ongoing fact of life—a lasting trait. Traditional
meditative paths contrast our everyday mental states—that stream of thoughts,
many laden with angst, or to-do lists that never end— with a state of being
free of these weights. And each path, in its particular terms, sees lightening
our sense of self as the key to such inner freedom.
When
the pain in Richie’s knee shifted from excruciating to suddenly bearable, there
was a parallel shift in how he identified with it. It was no longer “his” pain;
the sense of “mine” had evaporated.
Richie’s
hour of utter stillness offers a glimpse of how our ordinary “self” can reduce
to an optical illusion of the mind. As this keen observation gains strength, at
some point our very sense of a solid self breaks down. This shift in how we
experience ourselves—our pain and all that we attach to it— points to one of
the main goals of all spiritual practice: lightening the system that builds our
feelings of I, me, and mine.
The
Buddha, in telling of this very insight, likened the self to a chariot, a
concept that arises when wheels, platform, yoke, and so on are put together
—but which does not exist save as these parts in combination. To update the
metaphor, there is no “car” in the tires, nor the dashboard or the steel shell of
its body—but put all these together with the multitude of other parts, and what
we think of as a car manifests.
In
the same way, cognitive science tells us, our sense of self emerges as a
property of the many neural subsystems that thread together, among other streams,
our memories, our perceptions, our emotions, and our thoughts. Any of those
alone would be insufficient for a full sense of our self, but in the right
combination we have the cozy feel of our unique being.
Meditative
traditions of all kinds share one goal: letting go of the constant grasping—the
“stickiness” of our thoughts, emotions, and impulses—that guides us through our
days and lives. Technically called “dereification,” this key insight has the
meditator realize that thoughts, feelings, and impulses are passing,
insubstantial mental events. With this insight we don’t have to believe our
thoughts; instead of following them down some track, we can let them go.
As
Dōgen, founder of the Soto school of Zen, instructed, “If a thought arises,
take note of it and then dismiss it. When you forget all attachments
steadfastly, you will naturally become zazen itself.”
Many
other traditions see lightening the self as the path to inner freedom. We’ve
often heard the Dalai Lama talk about “emptiness,” by which he means the sense
in which our “self’—and all seeming objects in our world —actually emerge from
the combination of their components.
Some
Christian theologians use the term kenosis for the emptying of self, where our
own wants and needs diminish while our openness to the needs of others grows
into compassion. As a Sufi teacher put it, “When occupied with self, you are
separated from God. The way to God is but one step; the step out of yourself.”5
Such a step out of the self, technically
speaking, suggests weakening activation of the default circuitry that binds
together the mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent
mental processes into the cohesive sense of “me” and “mine.”
The
stuff of our lives becomes less “sticky” as we shift into a less attached
relationship toward all that. At the higher reaches of practice, mind training
lessens the activity of our “self.” “Me” and “mine” lose their selfhypnotic
power; our concerns become less burdensome. Though the bill still must be paid,
the lighter our “selfing,” the less we anguish about that bill and the freer we
feel. We still find a way to pay it, but without the extra load of emotional
baggage.
While
almost every contemplative path holds lightness of being as a primary aim,
paradoxically, very little scientific research speaks to this goal. Our reading
of the meager studies done so far suggests there may be three stages in how
meditation leads to greater selflessness. Each of these stages uses a different
neural strategy to quiet the brain’s default mode, and so free us a bit from
the grip of the self.
THE
DATA
David
Creswell, now at Carnegie Mellon University, was another young scientist whose
interest in meditation was nurtured by attending the Mind and Life Summer
Research Institute. To assess the early stage, found among meditation novices,
Creswell’s group measured brain activity in people who volunteered for a
three-day intensive course in mindfulness.6 The volunteers had never meditated
before, but in this mindfulness course they learned that if you are lost in
some personal melodrama (a favorite theme of the default mode), you can
voluntarily drop it—you can name it, or shift your attention to watching your
breath or to bare awareness of the present moment. All of these are active
interventions, efforts to quiet the monkey mind.
Such
efforts heighten activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal area, a key circuit
for managing the default mode. As we’ve seen, this area springs into action
anytime we intentionally attempt to quiet our agitated mind—for instance, when
we try to think of something more pleasant than some upsetting encounter that
keeps running over and over in our mind.
Three
days of practicing these mindfulness methods led to increased connections
between this control circuitry and the default zone’s PCC, a primary region for
self-focused thought. Novices in meditation, this suggests, keep their mind
from wandering by activating neural wiring that can quiet the default area.
But
with more experienced meditators, the next phase of downscaling the self adds
lessened activity in key sections of the default mode—a loosening of the
mechanics of self—while the heightened connections with control areas continue.
A case in point: researchers led by Judson Brewer, then at Yale University,
(and who has been on the faculty at the SRI) explored brain correlates of
mindfulness practice, comparing highly experienced meditators (averaging around
10,500 lifetime hours) with novices.7
During
the meditation practice, all those tested were encouraged to distinguish
between simply noting the identity of an experience (itching is occurring, say) and identifying with it (I itch)—and
then to let go. This distinction seems a crucial step in loosening the self, by
activating metaawareness—a “minimal self” that can simply notice the itch
rather than bring it into our story line, my
itch.
As
mentioned, when we are watching a movie and are lost in its story, but then
notice that we are in a movie theater watching a film, we have stepped out of
the movie’s world into a large frame that includes the movie but goes beyond.
Having such meta-awareness allows us to monitor our thoughts, feelings, and
actions; to manage them as we like; and to inquire into their dynamics.
Our
sense of self gets woven in an ongoing personal narrative that threads together
disparate parts of our life into a coherent story line. This narrator resides
mainly in the default mode but brings together inputs from a broad range of
brain areas that in themselves have nothing to do with the sense of self.
The
seasoned meditators in the Brewer study had the same strong connection between
the control circuit and the default mode seen in beginners, but in addition had
less activation within the default mode areas themselves. This was particularly
true when they practiced loving-kindness meditation—a corroboration of the
maxim that the more we think of the well-being of others, the less we focus on
ourselves.8
Intriguingly,
the long-term meditators seemed to have roughly the same lessened connectivity
in the default mode circuitry while they just rested before the test as they
displayed during mindfulness. That’s a likely trait effect and a good sign:
these meditators intentionally train to be as mindful in their daily lives as
during meditation sessions. The same lessened connectivity compared to nonmeditators
was found by brain researchers in Israel studying long-term mindfulness
meditators, who had on average around 9,000 hours of practice under their
belts.9
Further
indirect evidence for this change in long-term meditators comes from a study at
Emory University of seasoned Zen meditators (three years– plus practice, but
lifetime hours unknown) who, compared to controls, seemed to show less activity
in parts of the default area while focusing on their breath during brain scans.
The bigger this effect, the better they did on a test of sustained attention
outside the scanner, suggesting a lasting drop in mind-wandering.10 Finally, a
small but suggestive study of Zen meditators at the University of Montreal
found lessened default area connectivity while just resting among Zen
meditators (with an average 1,700 hours of practice) compared to a group of
volunteers trained in zazen for just one week.11
There’s
a theory that what captures our attention signifies an attachment, and the more
attached we are, the more often we’ll be so captivated. In an experiment
testing this premise, a group of volunteers and one of seasoned meditators
(4,200 hours) were told they would get money whenever they recognized certain
geometric shapes within an array.12 That was, in a sense, the creation of a
mini-attachment. Then, in a later phase, when they were told to simply focus on
their breath and ignore those shapes, the meditators were less distracted by
them than were the control group.
Along
these lines, Richie’s group found that meditators who had an average 7,500
lifetime hours, compared to people their own age, had decreased gray matter
volume in a key region: the nucleus accumbens.13 This was the only brain region
showing a difference in brain structure compared to age-matched controls. A
smaller nucleus accumbens diminishes connectivity between these self-related
regions and the other neural modules that ordinarily orchestrate to create our
sense of self.
This
is a bit of a surprise: the nucleus accumbens plays a large role in the brain’s
“reward” circuits, a source of pleasurable feelings in life. But this is also a
key area for “stickiness,” our emotional attachments, and addictions —in short,
what ensnares us. This decrease in gray-matter volume in the nucleus accumbens
may reflect a diminished attachment in the meditators, particularly to the
narrative self.
So,
does this change leave meditators cold and indifferent? The Dalai Lama and
other highly seasoned practitioners come to mind—like those who came to
Richie’s lab, most of whom tend toward joyousness and warmth.
Meditation
texts describe long-term practitioners achieving an ongoing compassion and
bliss, but with “emptiness,” in the sense of no attachment. For instance, Hindu
contemplative paths describe vairagya, a later stage of practice where
attachments drop away—renunciation, in this sense, happens spontaneously rather
than through force of will. And with this shift emerges an alternate source of
delight in sheer being.14
Could
this indicate a neural circuit that brings a quiet enjoyment, even as our
nucleus accumbens–based attachments wane? We will see just such a possibility
in chapter twelve, “Hidden Treasure,” from brain studies of advanced yogis.
Arthur
Zajonc, the second president of the Mind and Life Institute, and a quantum
physicist and philosopher to boot, once said that if we let go of grasping, “we
become more open to our own experience, and to other people. That openness—a
form of love—lets us more easily approach other people’s suffering.”
“Great
souls,” he added, “seem to embody the ability to engage suffering and handle it
without collapse. Letting go of grasping is liberating, creating a moral axis
for action and compassion.”15
A
THIEF IN AN EMPTY HOUSE
Ancient
meditation manuals say letting go of these thoughts is, at first, like a snake
uncoiling itself; it takes some effort. Later, though, whatever thoughts come
to mind are like a thief entering an empty house: there’s nothing to do, so
they just leave.
This
segue from at first making an effort to later effortlessness seems a universal,
though little-known, theme in meditation paths. Common sense tells us that
learning any new skill takes hard work at first and becomes progressively
easier with practice. Cognitive neuroscience tells us this shift to
effortlessness marks a neural transition in habit mastery: the prefrontal areas
no longer make an effort to do the work, as the basal ganglia lower in the
brain can take over—a neural mode that marks effortlessness.
Effortful
practice at the early stages of meditation activates prefrontal regulatory
circuits. However, the later shift to effortless practice might go along with a
different dynamic: lessened connectivity among the various nodes of the default
circuitry, and lessened activity in the PCC as effortful control is no longer
needed—the mind at this stage is truly beginning to settle and the
self-narrative is much less sticky.
That
was found in another study by Judson Brewer, where seasoned meditators reported
their experience in the moment, allowing scientists to see what brain activity
correlated with it. When the meditators showed decreased activity in their PCC,
they reported feelings like “undistracted awareness” and “effortless doing.”16
In
the scientific study of any skill that people practice, from dentistry to
chess, when it comes to sorting out the duffers from the pros, lifetime hours
of
practice are gold. A pattern of high effort at the start segueing into less
effort along with more proficiency in a task shows up in experts as diverse as
swimmers and violinists. And as we’ve seen here, the brains of those with the
most hours of meditation showed little effort in keeping their focus
one-pointed, even despite compelling distractions, while those with fewer
lifetime hours put in more effort. And at the very start, beginners showed an
increase in biological markers of mental effort.17
The
rule of thumb: the brain of a novice works hard while that of the expert
expends little energy. As we master any activity, the brain conserves its fuel
by putting that action on “automatic”; cuing up that activity shifts from top-of-the-brain
circuits to the basal ganglia far below the neocortex. We’ve all accomplished
the hard-at-first to no-sweat transition when we learned to walk—and as we’ve
mastered every other habit since. What at first demands attention and exertion
becomes automatic and effortless.
At
the third and final stage of letting go of self-referencing, we conjecture, the
control circuitry’s role drops away, as the main action shifts to looser
connectivity in the default mode, the home of the self. Brewer’s group found
such a decrease.
With
a spontaneous shift to effortlessness comes a change in the relationship to the
self: it’s not so “sticky” anymore. The same sorts of thoughts can arise in
your mind, but they are lighter: not so compelling, with less emotional oomph,
and so float away more easily. This, at any rate, reflects what we hear from
the advanced yogis studied in the Davidson lab, as well as from classic
meditation manuals.
But
we have no data on this point, which remains a ripe research question. And what
that future research might find could be surprising—for example, with this
shift in relationship to the self, we may see change not so much in the
currently known neural “self-systems” but rather in other circuitry yet to be
discovered.
Lessening
the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners, has been
oddly ignored by meditation researchers, who perhaps understandably focus
instead on more popular benefits like relaxation and better health. And so, a
key goal of meditation—selflessness —has only thin data, while other benefits,
like health improvements, are heavily researched, as we will see in the next
chapter.
A
LACK OF STICKINESS
Richie
once saw tears begin to stream down the Dalai Lama’s face as he heard about a
tragic situation in Tibet—the latest self-immolation among Tibetans protesting
the Communist Chinese occupation of their land.
And
then, a few moments later, the Dalai Lama noticed someone in the room doing
something funny and he began laughing. There was no disrespect for the tragedy
that brought him to tears, but rather, a buoyant and seamless transition from
one emotional note to the other.
Paul
Ekman, a world expert on emotions and their expression, says this remarkable
affective flexibility in the Dalai Lama struck him as exceptional from their
very first meeting. The Dalai Lama reflects in his own demeanor the emotions he
feels from one person, and then immediately drops that feeling as the next
moment brings him another emotional reality.18
The
Dalai Lama’s emotional life seems to include a remarkably dynamic range of
strong and colorful emotions, from intense sadness to powerful joy. His rapid,
seamless transitions from one to another are particularly unique —this swift
shifting betokens a lack of stickiness.
Stickiness
seems to reflect the dynamics of the emotional circuitry of the brain,
including the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. These regions very likely
underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering —attachment
and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems
rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.
The
stickiness spectrum runs from being utterly stuck, unable to free ourselves
from distressing emotions or addictive wants, to the Dalai Lama’s instant
freedom from any given affect. One trait that emerges from living without
getting stuck seems to be an ongoing positivity, even joy. When the Dalai Lama
once was asked what had been the happiest point in his life, he answered, “I
think right now.”
IN
A NUTSHELL
The
brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing that demands mental
effort, just letting our mind wander; we hash over thoughts and feelings (often
unpleasant) that focus on ourselves, constructing the narrative we experience
as our “self.” The default mode circuits quiet during mindfulness and
loving-kindness meditation. In early stages of meditation this quieting of the
self-system entails brain circuits that inhibit the default zones; in later
practice the connections and activity within those areas wane.
This
quieting of the self-circuitry begins as a state effect, seen during or
immediately after meditation, but with long-term practitioners it becomes an
enduring trait, along with lessened activity in the default mode itself. The
resulting decrease in stickiness means that self-focused thoughts and feelings
that arise in the mind have much less “grab” and decreasing ability to hijack
attention./.
9
