The Science of Meditation

THE DEEP PATH AND THE WIDE

• While we had been isolated pioneers, we wanted to knit together a community of like-minded scholars and scientists who shared this quest. They could be supportive of each other’s work at distance, even if they were alone in their interests at their own institution.

ANCIENT CLUES

• Vipassana, the Theravadan meditation and root source of many now-popular forms of mindfulness.
• S. N. Goenka, a jovial, paunchy (bedonnant) former businessman recently turned meditation teacher.
• Goenka learned Vipassana from U Ba Khan.
• Twice-daily habit of twenty-minute meditation sessions, but this immersion in ten days of continual practice brought him to new levels. Goenka’s Method started with simply noting the sensations of breathing in and out- not just for twenty minutes but for hours and hours a day. This cultivation of concentration then morphed into a systematic whole-body scan of whatever sensations were occurring anywhere in the body.
• Undistracted concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit.
• Goenka’s instruction to « sweep » with a careful, observing attention head to toe, toe to head, through all the many and varied sensations of the body.
• He came away with a deep conviction that they were methods that could transform our minds to produce a profound well-being.
• Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather than getting swept away by the seductions of our thoughts, we enter the path of insight.

THE AFTER IS THE BEFORE FOR THE NEXT DURING

• While immersed in deep concentration, a meditator’s unhealthy state are suppressed.
• The true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.
• The after is the before for the next during. To unpack this idea, after refers to enduring changes from meditation that last long beyond the practice session itself. Before means the condition we are in at baseline, before we start meditating. During is what happens as we meditate.
• The nurture camp believed that our behaviour was shaped by our experiences; the « nature » camp says our genes as determining our behaviour.
• Neuroplasticity shows that repeated experience can change the brain, shaping it.
• Mastering a musical instrument enlarged the relevant brain centres. Violinists, whose left hands continuously fingered the strings while they played, had enlarged areas of brain that manage the finger work. The longer they had played, the greater the size.
• The brain can rewire itself in response to repeated experiences.
• Reinhold Niebuhr: 
• « God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
• Courage to change the things I can,
• And wisdom to know the difference »
• The more everyday mindfulness, the greater the subjective boost in well being.

THE BEST WE HAD

• Galvanise Skin Response (GSR) bursts of electrical activity that signify a dollop (une bonne cuillerée) of sweat. The GSR signals the body’s stress arousal.
• Today we know there are many aspects of attention, and that different kinds of meditation train a variety of mental habits, and so, impact mental skills in varying ways.
• Different types of meditation: focusing on breathing; generating loving-kindness; monitoring thoughts without getting swept away by them.
• One must be aware of the likely outcomes from a given meditation approach. They are not all the same.
• Mindfulness has become the most common translation of the Pali language’s word sati. « Awareness », « attention », « retention », « discernement »
• Some meditation traditions reserve « mindfulness » for noticing when the mind wanders. In this sense, mindfulness becomes part of a larger sequence which starts with a focus on one thing, then the mind wandering off to something else, and the the mindful moment: noticing the mind has wandered. The sequence ends with returning attention to the point of focus.
• John Kabat-Zinn definition of mindfulness: « The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience. »
• When your mind wanders, your counting accuracy suffers.
• The four main neural pathways meditation transforms are:
• Reacting to disturbing events
• Compassion and empathy
• Circuitry for attention
• Our very sense of self.

A MIND UNDISTURBED

• Everything you, be it great or small, is but one-eighth of the problem whereas to keep one’s state undisturbed even if thereby one should fail to accomplish the task, is the other seven-eights. 
• As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings. 
• Charles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that drive us mad, but the « shoelace that snaps with no time left »
• Vipassana course. Like Goenka, focus on your breath in order to build concentration for the first three days of the retreat, and then systematically scan the body’s sensations very slowly, from head to toe, over and over again for the next seven days. During the scan you focused only on the bare bodily sensations.
• Students vowed not to make any voluntary movement.
• MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• The key point: it is possible to register and then investigate and transform your relationship to whatever you are sensing at a given place in the body, even it is highly unpleasant.
• Mindful walking, mindful eating.
• The standard eight-week MBSR program.
• Mindful Attention Training starts with full focus on the breath, then progressively refines attention top observe the natural flow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.
• The amygdala, which has the privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilise us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or or dislike it.
• So when something worries or upsets us, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of fixation.
• Meditation, the theory goes, might mute our emotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations more bearable.
• Reappraisal of severe stress: thinking about it in a less threatening way.
• Burnout for those who care at home for loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s.
• The capacity to refrain from acting on whim (caprice) or impulse.
• The Trier Social Stress test (TSST). That devilish test delivers a huge dose of social stress, the awful feelings we get when other people evaluate, reject, or exclude us. 
• While MBSR training did reduce the activity of the amygdala, the long-term meditator group showed both this reduced activity in the amygdala plus strengthening of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. This pattern implies that when the going gets tough-for example, in response to a major life challenge such as losing a job- the ability to manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators compared to those who have only done the MBSR training.

PRIMED FOR LOVE

• When we are rushing through a busy day, worried about getting to the next place on time, we tend literally not to notice the people around us, let alone their needs.
• The word compassion, the Dalai Lama pointed out, signifies the wish that others be well.
• In her definition this includes being kind to yourself instead of self-critical; seeing your failures and mistakes as just part of the human condition rather than some personal failing.
• During compassion practice, the amygdala is turned up in volume, while in focused attention on something like the breath, the amygdala is turned down.
• The amygdala’s circuits light up when we are exposed to someone feeling a strong negative emotion- fear, anger and the like.
• The amygdala acts as a neural radar detecting the salience of whatever experience.
• The brain seems primed to learn to love.

• When we witness the pain and suffering of someone else we activate networks which underlie these very same feelings in ourselves.
• Matthieu Ricard, a Tibetan monk with a PhD in science and decades of meditation practice.
• When he cultivated empathy, sharing the suffering of another, she saw the action in his neural networks for pain. But once he began to generate compassion - loving feelings for someone who was suffering - he activated brain circuitry for positive feelings, reward and affiliation.
• Meditation as a way to cultivate wholesome mental qualities such as attention, mindfulness, perspective taking, empathy and compassion.
• The scan increased body awareness and lessened mind-wandering.
• When you focus on someone’s else suffering, you forget your own troubles.
• Brain studies have long shown women are more attuned to other’s people’s emotions than are men. Women, on average, seem to be more responsive to other people’s emotions than men.
• The ultimate source of peace is in the mind - which, far more than our circumstances, determines our happiness.
• There are three forms of empathy - cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.
• Compassion and loving-kindness increase amygdala activation to suffering while focused attention on something neutral like the breadth lessens amygdala activity.

ATTENTION!

• When we take active control of our attention- as when we meditate - we deploy this pre-frontal circuitry (self-control, happiness and compassion), and the amygdala (the brain’s Fight or flight center) quiets.
• Meditation can actually make you a happier and more compassionate person.
• Every aspect of attention involves the prefrontal cortex.
• Meditation impacts attention.
• 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.
• What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
• Digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social présence.
• The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to the people we are have silently, inexorably shifted.
• The brain does not « multitask » but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent text...)
• Multitaskers are « suckers for irrelevancy », which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.
• Cognitive control lets us focus on a specific goal or task and keep in mind while resisting distractions.
• Attention is crucial for working memory.
• « Response inhibition »
• Impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional well-being.
• Cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following those thoughts, impulses, desires, or feelings.
• 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.
• The effect of an intensive mindfulness retreat where people meditated for more than eight hours each day for a month.
• 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.
• 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.
• The PCC (PostCingulate Cortex), a node connecting to the lambic system.
• In short, our minds wander mostly to something about ourselves- my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page.
• Because the self ruminates on what’s bothering us, we fell relieved when we 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.
• Managing attention is an essential ingredient of every variety of meditation.
• 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 being unique.
• Such a step out of the self, technically speaking, suggest weakening activation of the default circuitry that binds together the mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent mental processes in to the cohesive sense of « me » and « mine ».
• Ancient meditation manuals say letting go of these thoughts is, at first, like a snake uncoiling itself; it take some effort.
• Common sense tells us that learning any new skill takes hard work at first and becomes progressively easier with practice.
• The brains of those with the most hours of meditation show little effort in keeping their focus one-pointed, even despite compelling distractions.
• Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners.
• When the Dalai Lama once was asked what had been the happiest point in his life, he answered, « I think right now ».
• The relief comes in how people relate to their pain.
• Life’s stress can cause psoriasis.
• Epinephrine is an important freeze-fight-or-flight chemical, along with the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn raises the body’s energy expenditure to respond to the stressor.
• MBSR can help speed healing psoriasis.
• The benefits seem to show up even with juts four weeks of mindfulness practice (around thirty hours total), as well as with loving kindness meditation.
• What meditators say: it gets easier to handle life’s upsets. Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where ou mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
• The topic showing meditation seemed to help lower blood pressure.
• Sugar turns on the gens for diabetes; exercise turns them off.
• The meditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly.
• A slower breath rate indicates reduced autonomic activity, better mood, and salutary health.
• Meditation slows the usual shrinkage of our brain as we age, at age fifty, longtime meditator’s brains are « younger » by 7,5 years compared to brains of non meditators of the same age.
• These experts, who had logged off-the-charts hours of meditation, being some of the most optimistic and and happy people.
• Consider the Dalai Lama, now in his eighties, who goes at bed at 7:00 p.m. and gets a full night’s sleep before he awakens around 3:30 for a four-hour stint of spiritual practice, including meditation. Add another hour of practice before he goes to bed and that gives him five hours a day of contemplative time.
• Better emotion regulation and sharpened attention.
• Meditation (in particular, mindfulness) can have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and pain - about as much as medications but with no side effects.
• The best outcomes were in those patients most able to « decenter , that is, step outside their thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming and going, rather than getting carried away by « my thoughts and feelings ». In other words, these patients were more mindful. And the more time they put into mindfulness practice, the lower adds of a relapse into depression.
• If I was getting angry, I could throw a little compassion and loving-kindness for myself and the other person.
• Although his chronological age was forty-one at the time, his brain fit most closely for those with chronological age was thirty-three.
• These adepts have shown remarkable mental dexterity, instantly and with striking ease mobilising these states: generating feelings of compassion, the spacious equanimity of complete openness to whatever occurs, or laser-sharp, unbreakable focus.
• Antoine Lutz, now a professor at the Lyon Neuroscience research center.
• Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during moments when different brains regions fire in harmony, like moments of insight when different elements of a puzzle « click » together.
• In the yogis, gamma oscillations are a far more prominent feature of their brain activity than in other people.
• PCC: Post Cingulate Cortex, a key area for self-focused thought.
• Develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockage.
• Learn to accept the pain rather than to try to get rid of it.
• « Anticipatory anxiety »
• One metric for effortlessness here comes down being able to keep your mind on a chosen point of focus and resist the natural tendency to wander off into some train of thought or be pulled away by a sound, while having no feeling of making an effort. This kind of ease seems to increase with practice.
• A word about the global significance of these yogis. Such people are are very rare, what some Asian cultures call « living treasures ». Encounters with them are extremely nourishing and often inspiring, not because of some vaunted status or celebrity but because of the inner qualities they radiate.
• « In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes »
• Matthieu Ricard: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilises, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.
• This is why so many professional performers - in sports, theatre, chess, music, and many other walks of life - continue to have coaches throughout their career. No matter how good you are, you can always get just a bit better.
• We each have sat in meditation every morning four more than forty years.
• One important difference about meditation on retreat is that there are teachers available who can provide guidance.
• Experts on the other hand, practice differently. They do intensive sessions under the watchful eye of a coach, who suggest to them what to work on next to get even better. This leads to a continuous learning curve with involvement.
• MBSR program offers both cognitive and somatic practice (l’apprentissage de la conscience du corps en mouvement dans l’espace)
• At a practical level, all forms of meditation share a common core of mind training -e.g., learning to let go the myriad of distractions that flow trough the mind and to focus on the object of attention or stance of awareness.
• How does twenty minutes a day during commuting compare to twenty minutes a day sitting in a quiet place at home?
• All meditation methods at their root are practices in strengthening attention.
• Our society suffers from an attention deficit.
• We consider boosting attention skills to be nothing short of an urgent public health need.
• What if we could exercise our minds like we exercise our bodies?
• Participants did thirty minutes of focused attention meditation followed by thirty minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise two times a week for eight weeks. Benefits included improved executive function, supporting the notion that the brain was shaped positively.
• We envision a time when or culture treats the mind in the same way it treats the body, with exercises to care for our mind becoming part of our daily routine.
• An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.