This Is Your Brain on Mindfulness

Meditator's find truth through carefully exploring their inner subjective experience in what some people like to call “first-person investigation.” Science looks to the external material world and relies on third-person investigation and methodologies that lead to discoveries that can be tested and replicated by peers in the scientific world. The ways that these traditions search for truth couldn’t be more different, and yet it shouldn’t surprise us to find that the two truths are actually one.

Nevertheless, scientists have traditionally viewed meditators’ assertions with a healthy skepticism, and meditators have often felt the same way about scientists’ requirement for objective proof of meditation’s benefits. More recently, however, there has been an explosion of both popular and scientific interest in the biology and neuroscience of meditation. The National Institutes of Health has funded ongoing investigations are exploring the role of meditation and mindfulness on health and healing; and neuroscientists have recorded brain waves and made pictures of brain activity in many thousands of meditators, ranging from novices in urban practice centers to monks in the secluded monasteries of Tibet.

There is no question that you can become a perfectly good meditator without any complicated neuro imaging technology. On the other hand, for those of us who are interested in practicing mindfulness and other related forms of meditation, the modern science of meditation offers us a window into some very interesting—and important—areas of our practice and our lives. Can the benefits meditators say they experience—increased calm, decreased stress, better attention, and so forth—be traced to actual neural changes?

In the last several decades, the scientific study of meditation has provided increasingly concrete proof of the inseparability of body and mind. It has also demonstrated ways we can literally change ourselves and our world through practice; shown us the observable changes in the systems and subsystems that govern our attention as we progress from the focus of mindfulness to the panorama of awareness; and even given us a glimpse of the biological basis of the illusion of the self.

Changes in Regions of the Brain

One of the most interesting areas of research on the effects of contemplative practices has explored the possibility that the actual structure of the brain is changed by meditation practice. Several neuroscientists have shown that some of the brain regions activated during meditation are actually different in people who meditate regularly, and the most recent evidence suggests that the changes can occur in as little as eight weeks. This finding is at odds with what we think we know about brain structure in adults. We used to believe that sometime shortly after twenty-five or thirty years of age the brain was finished with growth and development. From then on, the brain became progressively impaired by age and injury, and it was all downhill from there. But recent meditation research suggests that this glum outcome may not be inevitable. Meditation practice is associated with changes of specific brain areas that are essential for attention, learning, and the regulation of emotion.

Maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise. When you exercise your muscles in the gym, they become larger as well as stronger. Their structure changes. In fact, almost any structure of the body changes when it is used more often. It now seems that this is also true for the brain. For instance, we know that when you learn to juggle, the part of the brain involved with tracking objects in space becomes larger. Meditation shouldn’t be any different. Like all cutting-edge research, this work on brain size is controversial, but it has already become an area for deeper investigation by more researchers