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TUỆ ĐỨC THANH CAO THÙ THẮNG DIỆU
UYỂN LẠC CHÂU VIÊN
PHÁP BẢO TRUYỀN
Dịch nghĩa:
Tuệ trí đức lành cao vòi vọi
Vườn tâm sáng rở tợ
ngọc châu
SƠN CƯ
3-6-2016
TUỆ UYỂN
Tuệ -Uyển là bút danh của Tỳ kheo Thích Từ-Đức, Pd: Quảng Định,
hiệu Tuệ-Không xuất gia và tu học tại TU VIỆN KIM SƠN.
Thích
Từ Đức
Mobile: (831) 206-2398
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TUỆ ĐỨC THANH CAO THÙ THẮNG DIỆU
UYỂN LẠC CHÂU VIÊN
PHÁP BẢO TRUYỀN
Dịch nghĩa:
Tuệ trí đức lành cao vòi vọi
Vườn tâm sáng rở tợ ngọc
châu
SƠN CƯ
3-6-2016
TUỆ UYỂN
Tuệ -Uyển là bút danh của Tỳ kheo Thích Từ-Đức, Pd: Quảng Định,
hiệu Tuệ-Không xuất gia và tu học tại TU VIỆN KIM SƠN.
Thích Từ Đức
P.O. Box 1324,
Morgan Hill, CA 95038, USA
Mobile: (831) 206-2398
e-mail: tueuyen@gmail.com
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1-Phật Giáo Indonesia Cổ Xưa Và Hiện Đại
2- Alexander
Đại đế và Đức Phật: Sự tiến hóa xuyên văn hóa
3- Hiền Nhân Thích Ca Và Con Trai Của “Ra”
4- Văn
bản Gandharan tại Thư viện Quốc hội Hoa Kỳ có thể viết lại lịch sử Phật giáo
5- Tượng
Phật bằng đá được tìm thấy ở Ai Cập làm sáng tỏ ảnh hưởng của Ấn Độ
6- Nguồn Gốc Của Đại Thừa
One
day a student asked his Zen teacher to create a brushstroke calligraphy for
him, “something of great wisdom.”
The
Zen master, without hesitating, took up his brush and wrote: Attention.
His
student, a bit dismayed, asked, “Is that all?”
Without
a word, the master took to his brush again, and wrote, Attention. Attention.
His
student, feeling that was not so profound, got a bit irritated, complaining to
the master there was nothing so wise about that.
Again
the master responded in silence, writing Attention.
Attention. Attention.
Frustrated,
the student demanded to know what he meant by that word, attention. To which
the master replied, “Attention means attention.”1
William
James made explicit what that Zen master may have been hinting at: “The faculty
of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of
judgment, character and will,” he declared in his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. James went
on to say that “an education which should improve this faculty would be the
education par excellence.”
After
that bold claim he backtracked a bit adding, “But it is easier to define this
ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.”
Richie
had read this passage before he went to India, and after his transformative
moments at the Goenka retreat, those words flashed back in his mind with an
electric charge.
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. Attention
fatigue in radar operators was the practical reason this very aspect of
attention had been intensively researched during World War II, when
psychologists were asked how to keep operators alert. Only then did attention
come under scientific study.
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.
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.
The
original Zen study was for us seminal. It seemed the Zen brains could sustain
attention when other brains would tune out. This resonated with our own
experience at retreats on mindfulness, where we spent hours pushing our
attention to notice every little detail of experience rather than tune out.
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.”
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.
This
truncated view of attention gave only part of the story. Habituation describes
one variety of attention over which we have no conscious control, but higher in
our neural circuitry, above these bottom-of-the-brain mechanisms, different
dynamics apply.
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. Richie
and his team have found this quieted amygdala both in long-term vipassana
meditators and, with hints of the same pattern —though less strong—in people
after training in MBSR.4
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.
In
humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of the brain’s top layer,
the neocortex, than in any other species, and has been the site of the major
evolutionary changes that make us human. This neural zone, as we will see,
holds the seeds of awakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined
with emotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, and we also
can be disturbed by worrisome thoughts—both signs of the prefrontal cortex at
work.
While
William James wrote about attention as though it were one single entity,
science now tells us the concept refers not just to one ability but to many.
Among them:
Selective attention, the
capacity to focus on one element and ignore others.
Vigilance, maintaining a
constant level of attention as time goes on.
Allocating attention so we
notice small or rapid shifts in what we experience.
Goal focus, or “cognitive
control,” keeping a specific goal or task in mind despite distractions.
Meta-awareness, being able to
track the quality of one’s own awareness—for example, noticing when your mind
wanders or you’ve made a mistake.
SELECTING
ATTENTION
From
infancy, Amishi Jha can remember her parents meditating every morning using
beads to recite mantra, as they had learned in their native India. But Amishi was
not interested in meditation; she went on to become a cognitive neuroscientist
trained in the rigorous study of attention.
While
Amishi was on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Richie came to
lecture. During his talk he never mentioned meditation, but he did show fMRI
images of two brains—one in the depths of depression, the other happy. Amishi
asked him, “How do you get a brain to change from one to the other?”
“Meditation,”
Richie answered.
That
got Amishi’s interest, both personally and professionally. She started to
meditate, and began to do research on how the method might impact attention.
But she got pushback from her colleagues, who cautioned her that it was too
risky and might not be of broad scientific interest within the field of
psychology.
The
next year she attended the second meeting of the Mind and Life Summer Research
Institute, which proved transformative. The faculty, graduate students, and
postdocs she met there were a supportive community, who encouraged Amishi.
Richie
vividly remembers an emotional testimonial Amishi gave at this meeting about
how meditation was part of her root culture. While she had felt constrained in
pursuing such research in the academy, she felt she finally found her home with
like-minded scientists doing research in this area. Amishi has become a leader
of a new generation of scientists committed to contemplative neuroscience and
its benefits for society.
She
and her colleagues conducted one of the first rigorous studies of how
meditation impacts attention.5 Her lab, now based at the University of Miami,
found that novices trained in MBSR significantly improved in orienting, a
component of selective attention that directs the mind to target one among the
virtually infinite array of sensory inputs.
Let’s
say you are at a party listening to the music, and tuning out a conversation
going on right next to you. If someone were to ask you what they had just said,
you’d have no idea. But should one of them mention your name, you would zero in
on those dulcet sounds as though you had been listening to them right along.
Known
in cognitive science as the “cocktail party effect,” this sudden awareness
illustrates part of the design of our brain’s attention systems: we take in
more of the stream of information available than we know in conscious
awareness. This lets us tune out irrelevant sounds but still examine them for
relevance somewhere in the mind. And our own name is always relevant.
Attention,
then, has various channels—the one we consciously select and those we tune out
of. 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.
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.
SUSTAINING
ATTENTION
Zen
scholar D. T. Suzuki was a panelist at a symposium held outdoors. As he sat
behind a table with the other panelists, Suzuki was perfectly still, his eyes
fixed on a spot somewhere in front of him, seemingly zoned out in some world of
his own. But when a sudden gust of wind blew some papers across the table,
Suzuki alone among the panelists made a lightning grab for them. He wasn’t
zoned out—he was paying keen attention in the Zen fashion.
The
ability to sustain attention without habituating in Zen meditators, remember,
was one of the meager scientific findings about meditation back when we began
this scientific quest. That Zen study, though it had its limitations, spurred
us on.
Attention
flows through a meager bottleneck in the mind, and we allot that narrow
bandwidth parsimoniously. The lion’s share goes to what we choose to focus on
in the moment. But as we keep our attention on that thing, our focus inevitably
wanes, our mind wandering off to other thoughts and the like. Meditation defies
this mental inertia.
A
universal goal in meditation of every kind comes down to sustaining attention
in a chosen way or to a given target, such as the breath. Numerous reports,
both anecdotal and scientific, support the idea that meditation leads to better
sustained attention, or, to use the technical term, vigilance.
But
a skeptic might ask, Is it the meditation practice that enhances attention, or
some other factor? That, of course, is why control groups are needed. And to
show even more convincingly that the link between meditation and sustained
attention is not mere association, but rather a causal one, requires a
longitudinal study.
That
higher bar was met by Clifford Saron and Alan Wallace’s study, where volunteers
attended a three-month meditation retreat with Wallace as teacher.8 They
practiced focusing on their breath five hours per day and Saron tested them at
the beginning of the retreat, one month into it, at the end, and finally five
months later.
The
meditators improved in vigilance, with the greatest gains in the first month of
retreat. Five months after the retreat ended, each meditator took a follow-up
test of vigilance, and, impressively, the improvement gained during retreat was
still strong.
To
be sure, the gain was likely maintained by the hour of practice daily these
meditators reported. Still, this is among the best direct tests of a
meditation-induced altered trait in attention we have so far. Of course the
evidence would be all the more compelling if these meditators were to show the
same gain five years later, too!
WHEN
ATTENTION BLINKS
Watch
a four-year-old intently scan the crowd in a Where’s Waldo? drawing, and see
the moment of joy when she finally picks out Waldo in his distinctive
red-and-white-striped sweater from the confusing crowd. That happy excitement
over spotting Waldo marks a key moment in the workings of attention; the brain
rewards us for any such victory with a dose of pleasing neurochemicals.
For
those few moments, research tells us, the nervous system takes our focus
off-line and relaxes, in what amounts to a short neural celebration party. If
another Waldo were to pop up during the party, our attention would be occupied
elsewhere. That second Waldo would go unseen.
This
moment of temporary blindness is like a blink in attention, a short pause in
our mind’s ability to scan our surroundings (technically, a “refractory
period”). During that blink, the mind’s ability to notice goes blind and
attention loses sensitivity. A slight change that might otherwise catch our eye
goes by unnoticed. The blink measure reflects “brain efficiency,” in the sense
that not getting too caught up in one thing leaves our finite attentional
resources available for the next.
Speaking
practically, the lack of blink reflects a greater ability to notice small
changes—e.g., nonverbal emotional cues of a person’s shifting emotions
telegraphed by fleeting shifts in the small muscles around the eyes.
Insensitivity to such minor signals can mean we miss major messages.
In
one test of the blink, you see a long string of letters interspersed with
occasional numbers. Each individual letter or number is presented very briefly—for
50 milliseconds, which is 1/20 of a second, at a breathless rate of ten per
second. You are warned that each string of letters will contain one or two
numbers, at random intervals.
After
each string or fifteen or so, you are asked if you saw any numbers and what
they were. If two numbers were presented in a rapid-fire sequence most people
tend to miss the second number. That’s the attentional blink.
Scientists
who study attention had long thought this gap in attention immediately after
spotting a long-sought target was hardwired, an aspect of the central nervous
system that was inevitable and unchangeable. But then something surprising
happened.
Enter
the meditators at the annual three-month vipassana course at the Insight
Meditation Society, the same ones who did so well on the test of selective
attention. Vipassana meditation, on the face of it, might lessen the blink,
since it cultivates a continuous nonreactive awareness of whatever arises in
experience, an “open-monitoring” receptive to all that occurs in the mind. An
intensive vipassana course creates something akin to mindfulness on steroids: a
nonreactive hyperalertness to all the stuff that arises in one’s mind.
Richie’s
group measured the attentional blink in vipassana meditators before and after
that three-month retreat. After the retreat there was a dramatic reduction, 20
percent, in the attentional blink.9
The
key neural shift was a drop in response to the first glimpse of a number (they
were just noting its presence) so the mind remains calm enough to also notice
the second number, even if very soon after the first one.
That
result was a huge surprise to cognitive scientists, who had believed the
attentional blink was hardwired and so could not be lessened by any kind of
training. Once the news was out in science circles, a group of researchers in
Germany asked whether meditation training might offset the universal worsening
with age of the attentional blink, which becomes more frequent and creates
longer gaps in awareness as people get older.10 Yes: meditators who regularly
practiced some form of “open monitoring” (a spacious awareness of whatever
comes to mind) reversed the usual escalation of attentional blinks with aging,
even doing better than another group taken entirely from a younger population.
Perhaps,
the German researchers speculate, the nonreactive open awareness—simply
noticing and allowing whatever comes into the mind “just to be” rather than
following a chain of thoughts about it—becomes a cognitive skill that transfers
over to registering a target like the letters and numbers on the blink test
without getting caught up in it. That leaves their attention ready for the next
target in the sequence—a more efficient way to witness the passing world.
Once
the attentional blink had been shown to be reversible, Dutch scientists
wondered, What’s the minimum training that still lessens the blink? They taught
people who had never meditated before how to monitor their mind, using a
version of mindfulness.11 The training sessions lasted just seventeen minutes,
after which the volunteers were tested on the attentional blink. They blinked
less than a comparison group, who had been taught a focusing meditation that
had no effect on this mental skill.
THE
MULTITASKING MYTH
We
all suffer from the digital-age version of life’s “full catastrophe”: incoming
emails, pressing texts, phone messages, and more, storming in all at once—not
to mention the Facebook posts, Instagrams, and all such urgent memos from our
personal universe of social media. Given the ubiquity of smartphones and such
devices, people today seem to take in far more information than they did before
the digital age.
Decades
before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert
Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention.
A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”
Then,
too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Did you ever have the
impulse to tell a child to put down her phone and look in the eyes of the
person she is talking to? The need for such advice is becoming increasingly
common as digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills
like empathy and social presence.
The
symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what we are doing to connect,
lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those
around us sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to
the people we are with have silently, inexorably shifted.
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.
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
COGNITIVE
CONTROL
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.
Such steely focus is essential in jobs like air traffic control—where screens
can be filled with distractions from the controller’s main focus, a given
incoming airplane—or just in getting through your daily to-do list.
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.
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.
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.
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.
META-AWARENESS
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. “That which is aware of sadness
is not sad,” observes philosopher Sam Harris. “That which is aware of fear is
not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as
anyone else.”18
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.
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.
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
Cognitive
psychologists test meta-awareness by giving people mental tasks so challenging
that errors are inevitable, and then tracking the number of such errors—and
whether the person notices there might have been an
error
(that’s the meta-awareness angle). These tasks are purposely devilish, designed
and calibrated to ensure that whoever takes it will make a certain percentage
of mistakes, and, what’s more, that their confidence in their responses will
vary.
Imagine,
for instance, having 160 words whiz by in succession for 1.5 seconds each. Then
you see another set of 320 words, half of which you’ve seen before in that
zippy presentation. You have to press one of two buttons to tell if you think
the word you see in the second set was in the previous list, or not. Then you
rate your confidence in your accuracy for each word, a metric for
meta-awareness to the degree you both have confidence in and make the correct
response.
Psychologists at UC–Santa Barbara used such a
mental challenge with people learning mindfulness for the first time, as well
as a group who had a course in nutrition.21 Meta-awareness improved in the
meditation group, but not a whit in those taking the nutrition class.
WILL
IT LAST?
Amishi
Jha’s lab tested the effect of an intensive mindfulness retreat where people
meditated for more than eight hours each day for a month.22 The retreat boosted
participants’ “alerting,” a vigilant state of readiness to respond to whatever
you encounter. But although in a previous study she had found an improvement in
orienting with beginners in a brief course of mindfulness, surprisingly, these
retreat participants showed no such boost.
This
nonfinding represents important data if we are to get a full picture of how
meditation does and does not matter. It helps us get a portrait of how various
aspects of attention change—or do not—with different types of meditation, and
at differing levels.
Some
changes might occur right away, while others take longer: while orienting may
budge initially and then stall, alerting seems to improve with practice. And,
we suspect, meditation sustained over time might be needed to maintain such
shifts in attention, lest they fade.
About
the time when Richie was doing his Harvard research on signal-tonoise shifts in
meditators, cognitive scientists such as Anne Treisman and Michael Posner
pointed out that “attention” represents too gross a concept. Instead, they
argued, we should look at various subtypes of attention, and the neural
circuitry each involves. Meditation, the findings now show, seems to enhance
many of these subtypes, though we don’t yet have the full picture. Amishi’s
results tell us that picture will be nuanced.
A
word of caution: while some aspects of attention improve after just a few hours
(or, it seems, minutes!) of practice, this by no means indicates those
improvements will last. We’re skeptical that quickie, one-time interventions
matter much after any temporary improvements fade. There is no evidence, for
instance, that the erasure of the attentional blink induced by seventeen minutes
of mindfulness will make a detectable difference mere hours later, after that
state wanes. The same holds for those ten-minute mindfulness sessions that
reversed the erosion of focus from multitasking. We suspect that unless you
continue the practice every day, multitasking will still weaken your focus.
Our
hunch would be that pushing a neural system like attention in a lasting way
requires not just these short trainings and continued daily practice, but also
intensive booster sessions, as was the case with those who were at the shamatha
retreat and then were tested five months later in Cliff Saron’s study.
Otherwise the brain’s wiring will regress to its previous status: a life of
distraction punctuated with periods of concentration.
Even
so, it’s encouraging that such short doses of meditation improve attention. The
fact that these improvements come with such rapidity confirms William James’s
conjecture that sharper attention can be cultivated. Today there are meditation
centers in Cambridge no more than a fifteen-minute walk from where William
James once lived. Had they been there during his lifetime, and had William
James practiced at one, he would no doubt have found his missing education par
excellence.
IN
A NUTSHELL
Meditation,
at its root, retrains attention, and different types boost varying aspects of
attention. MBSR strengthens selective attention, while long-term vipassana
practice enhances this even more. Even five months after the three-month
shamatha retreat, meditators had enhanced vigilance, the ability to sustain
their attention. And the attentional blink lessened greatly after three months
on a vipassana retreat—but the beginnings of this lessening also showed up
after just seventeen minutes of mindfulness in beginners, no doubt a transitory
state for the newcomers, and a more lasting trait for those retreatants. That
same practice-makes-perfect maxim likely applies to several other quickie
meditations: just ten minutes of mindfulness overcame the damage to
concentration from multitasking—at least in the short term; only eight minutes
of mindfulness lessened mind-wandering for a while. About ten hours of
mindfulness over a two-week period strengthened attention and working
memory—and led to substantial improved scores on the graduate school entrance
exam. While meditation boosts many aspects of attention, these are short-term
gains; more lasting benefits no doubt require ongoing practice./.
8
