Encouragement for this new way of thinking comes from an unusual ally. Neuroscience is furnishing hard evidence that the brain is plastic, endowed with a lifelong capacity to reorganize itself with each new experience. "We now know that neural firing can lead to changes in neural connections, and experience leads to changes in neural firing," explains UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. Violinists' brains actually change as they refine their skill. So do the brains of London cabbies, whose livelihood depends on the sharpness of their memory. Likewise, through repeated practice in focusing attention, meditators may be strengthening the neural circuitry involved in the voluntary control of attention.
One Tibetan lama told Wallace that before training, his mind was like a stag with great antlers trying to make its way through a thick forest; the animal got snagged on branches time after time. But after many years of practice, his mind was more like a monkey in a jungle, swinging freely from vine to vine.
Such adepts are the Lance Armstrongs of meditation, says Davidson, whose pioneering brain scans of monks provide tantalizing evidence that emotions like love and compassion are in fact skills—and can be trained to a dramatic degree. Studies also suggest that the monastic life is not a requirement; even brief, regular meditation sessions can yield substantial benefits. Nor is a belief in Buddhism necessary. "I'm convinced that you can make a huge difference in your life if you start out with even 30 minutes a day," Ricard says. "By maintaining the practice, there is a trickle of insights. Drop by drop, you fill a jar."
One recent study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 40 minutes of daily meditation appears to thicken parts of the cerebral cortex involved in attention and sensory processing. In a pilot study at the University of California at San Francisco, researchers found that schoolteachers briefly trained in Buddhist techniques who meditated less than 30 minutes a day improved their moods as much as if they had taken antidepressants.
There are many types of meditation, and they can be used to develop a number of mental skills. This attitude focuses on practices that address common emotional struggles. Through basic meditation techniques, it's possible to cultivate a longer attention span, develop emotional stability, understand the feelings of others and release yourself from the constraints you place on your own happiness.
Attention: Stabilize the Mind
Computers, pagers, video games, telemarketing calls, nonstop e-mail—all blast our attention span to smithereens. Modern life does a swell job of distracting us. But perhaps the problem lies not in our cell phones but in ourselves. After all, we're the ones constantly making choices about what to attend to and what to ignore.
The trouble is, most of us make these choices semiconsciously at best. We don't even attempt to control our attention, perhaps because we don't know how. Buddhists maintain that the capacity can be refined through a consistent practice of meditation: The mind is by nature unstable, inherently distractible, and meditation is a means of stabilizing it.
"Meditation is about paying attention," says Kabat-Zinn. Cultivating concentration doesn't just stabilize and clarify the mind, it can also improve creativity and productivity while enhancing relationships. Imagine if you actually paid attention 100 percent to your spouse!
The strategy that starts you on this road is mindfulness, which means both cultivating nonjudgmental awareness of a specific object and seeing deeply into things. A common approach is to focus on an object or on the sensations of your own breathing, noting every inhale and exhale, and patiently returning your attention to your breathing each time it wanders.
"You practice focusing on one object," says Clifford Saron, a neuroscientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis. "You begin to observe the flux of moment-to-moment perception. With practice you can detect patterns in those fluctuations."
It's like you're flexing a muscle in the brain. University of Wisconsin's Davidson contends that the mental exercise of meditation strengthens and stabilizes neural networks in the medial prefrontal cortex—the brain's executive control center, involved in the regulation of attention. "People don't recognize that there is lots of plasticity in the circuitry," he adds. "More than previously thought."
The effort in the exercise is to balance awareness between dullness and distraction. To do so, you use the self-monitoring process that psychologists call metacognition: awareness of awareness. It's what lets you know when, on the one side, you're starting to drift off and need to muster fresh interest and, on the other, you're getting distracted and need to bring your attention back. As you gradually fine-tune your concentration, you notice the habitual chaos of your thoughts and, gradually, the calm that lies behind them. "Awareness trumps thoughts," says Kabat-Zinn, "because you can be aware of your thoughts."
In his book, The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind, Wallace describes a nine-stage program to achieve quiescence, a state the Buddhists call shamatha (pronounced sha-ma-ta). As one Buddhist scholar put it, attention becomes "an oil lamp unmoved by the air; wherever the awareness is directed, it is steady and sharply pointed."
Even among novices, studies show, a brief meditation session can be more effective than a nap in improving performance on tests that require concentration. But its benefits don't stop there. Meditation can radically transform emotion.
Tags:
b alan wallace,
brain,
Buddhism,
buddhist,
careful attention,
cognitive capacity,
consciousness studies,
dispatcher,
emotion,
game boy,
heart and mind,
human suffering,
malice,
meditation,
mind,
mortals,
new channels,
passions,
personal feelings,
science and religion,
separate rooms,
squalls,
technology techniques,
term strategy
