Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about
12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed to be
so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me.
More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness.
As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two
minute per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen
Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the
first step to consistently achieving it. So even thought two minutes
won’t make much difference, that’s where I started.
Whether you’re as skeptical as I used to be, or you’re well ahead of
me with a meditation habit of several hours, I think it’s always
interesting to find out how new habits affect our brains. I had a look
into meditation to see what’s going on inside our brains when we do
this, and what I found is pretty interesting.
What is meditation?
There are different ways to meditate, and since it’s such a personal
practice there are probably more than any of us know about. There are a
couple that are usually focused on heavily in scientific research,
though. These are focused-attention, or mindful meditation,
which is where you focus on one specific thing—it could be your
breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of
you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one
point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when
it wanders.
The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is
open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of
the things happening around you—you simply notice everything without
reacting.
What happens in your brain when you meditate
This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology
like fMRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding
of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate, kind of similar
to how scientists have previously looked at measuring creativity in our brains.
The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves,
which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a
single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.
In the image below you can see how the beta
waves (shown in bright colors on the left) are dramatically reduced
during meditation (on the right).
Below is the best explanation I found of what happens in each part of the brain during meditation:
Frontal lobe
This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for
reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During
meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
Parietal lobe
This part of the brain processes sensory information about the
surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation,
activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
Thalamus
The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by
funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other
signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming
information to a trickle.
Reticular formation
As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts
the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal
signal.
How meditation affects us
Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look
at the research into the ways it affects our health. It’s in fact very
similar to how exercising affects our brains.
Better focus
Because meditation is a practice in focusing our attention and being
aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re
not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular bouts of meditation.
Focused attention is very much like a muscle, one that needs to be strengthened through exercise.
Less anxiety
This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more
we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because
we’re actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.
What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our
brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the
medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information
relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways
from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center
are really strong.
When you experience a scary or upsetting
sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you
feel scared and under attack.
When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that
we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our
Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen
the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part
of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear
centers.
So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here’s a good example:
For example, when you experience pain, rather than
becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you
can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story
about what it might mean.
More creativity
As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in and we’ve explored the science of creativity in depth before.
Unfortunately, it’s not the most easy thing to study, but there is some
research into how meditation can affect our creativity. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands
studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if
there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that
people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any
obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task
following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring
meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to
come up with new ideas.
More compassion
Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment
showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad
or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants
were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions
to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They
also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing
images.
Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala—the part of the
brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of
the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it
was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people.
Another study in 2008
found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation
levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to
empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who
didn’t meditate.
Better memory
One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr,
a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the
Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation
were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain
“their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.
Less stress
Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study
split a group of human resources managers into three, which one third
participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body
relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A
stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and
after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had
participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.
More gray matter
Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter
in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what
this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray
matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional
stability and heightened focus during daily life.
Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on
gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.
Getting started with Meditation
Here’s a great infographic that gives an overview of the different kinds of meditation a
Note from Leo: One of the best apps I’ve come across to help you get started with Meditation is called Headspace. Invented by a former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, this is meditation geared towards busy people like you and me.
The way it works is that Andy guides you through 10 minutes of simple
meditation every day. You don’t have to do anything, just sit down and
turn on the app and let Andy’s calm voice (his voice is truly amazing –
the app is worth trying just for that!) explain to you how to approach
meditation.
