With this in mind, let us take a quick glance at some of the peer-reviewed scientific literature surrounding meditation.
One of the most telling of all research studies on meditation was conducted by two pioneers in the field of contemplative neuroscience, Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn.4 The study was eye-opening for many reasons. It was the first major study conducted in a business setting, with employees of a biotechnology company as subjects. This makes it highly relevant for somebody like me who operates in the corporate world. The study showed that after just eight weeks of mindfulness training, the anxiety level of the subjects was measurably lower, which is nice but not surprising, since the name of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s training program is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
More surprisingly, when the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains was measured, those in the meditation group showed significantly increased activity in the parts of their brains associated with positive emotions. The most fascinating finding had to do with their immune function. Near the end of the study, subjects were given flu shots, and those in the meditation group developed more antibodies to the influenza vaccine. In other words, after just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, subjects were measurably happier (as measured in their brains) and showed a marked increase in developing immunity. Remember that this study was not conducted on bald guys wearing robes living in a monastery, but on ordinary people with real lives and real high-stress jobs in corporate America.
A later study conducted by Heleen Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson, et al., focused on attention.5 Specifically, it explored meditation in relation to an interesting phenomenon known as “attentional-blink” deficit. There is a very simple way to explain attentional blink. Let’s say you are shown a series of characters (either numbers or letters of the alphabet) on a computer screen one at a time, in quick succession (with about fifty milliseconds of delay between letters, which is half of one-tenth of a second). Let’s say the entire series is made up of letters, except for two numbers. For example, let’s say the series is P, U, H, 3, W, N, 9, T, Y. There are two numbers within the series of letters. Your task is to identify the two numbers.
Attentional Blink Task
Here is the interesting part: if the two numbers are presented within half a second of each other, the second one is often not detected. This phenomenon is known as attentional blink. Somehow, after the first salient target is detected, mental attention “blinks,” and it takes a while before the brain can detect the next one.
This attentional blink has previously been assumed to be a feature of our brain’s wiring, and therefore, immutable. Slagter’s study shows that after just three months of intensive and rigorous training in mindfulness meditation, participants can significantly reduce their attentional blink. The theory is that with mindfulness meditation training, one’s brain can learn to process stimuli more efficiently, hence after processing the first salient target, it still has the mental resources to process the second.
This study is a fascinating glimpse into the possibility of upgrading the operating efficiency of our brains with mindfulness meditation. So if your job depends on your ability to pay attention to information for a prolonged period of time, maybe this meditation thing can help you get a raise.
There are many more interesting scientific studies of meditation. We’ll just point out a few more salient ones.
Antoine Lutz showed that adept Buddhist meditators are able to generate high-amplitude gamma brain waves, which are often associated with high effectiveness in memory, learning, and perception.6 Better still, these adepts exhibit higher gamma-band activity even at baseline, when they are not meditating, suggesting that meditation training can change your brain at rest. If you pump iron a lot, you will have bulging muscles even when you are not working out in the gym. Similarly, when you do a lot of meditation training, you will have strong mental “muscles” of calmness, clarity, and joy even when you are just hanging out.
One early study in this field by Jon Kabat-Zinn revealed that mindfulness can greatly accelerate the healing of a skin condition known as psoriasis.7 The methodology was simple. All participants were given the usual treatments, but for half of them, tapes of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditation instructions were played to the participants during the treatment, and just playing the tapes significantly accelerated the healing process. While I find the results fascinating, what is compelling about this study is that psoriasis is something tangible and visible—a skin disease characterized by red spots that grow larger as they get worse. So when you talk about how meditation can help you heal in this context, it’s not just woo-woo talk by some New Age person; it is something so tangible, you can see it and actually measure it with a ruler.
Finally, there is a study that suggests meditation can thicken your neocortex. This study, conducted by Sara Lazar, took MRI snapshots of mindfulness meditators and non-meditators, and showed that meditators have a thicker cortex in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing.8 Of course, these measurements show correlation, not causation, which means it is entirely possible that people with a thicker cortex in those brain regions just happen to be meditators. However, the study also showed that the longer the meditation subjects have been practicing meditation, the thicker those parts of their brains are, which suggests that meditation practice is causing those observed changes in the brain.
The above was just a snapshot of some of the research in the last twenty-five years. It is remarkable that mindfulness helps improve everything from attention and brain function to immunity and skin disease. Mindfulness feels almost like MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife—it is useful in every situation.
Remember, if Meng can sit, so can you.
Mindfulness Without Butt on Cushion
Extending the Benefits of Mindfulness beyond Sitting
Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere.
—Buddha
Mindfulness may be one of the most important things you can ever learn in your life. But don’t take it from me. Here’s what William James, the father of modern psychology, had to say:
And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.1 (emphasis by original author)
There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you can learn. I hope that makes you feel better about spending money on this book.
In the previous chapter, we learned that mindfulness meditation is a key tool in developing emotional intelligence. In this chapter we will learn ways to extend mindfulness into every aspect of our daily lives. The mind of calmness and clarity you experience while sitting in mindfulness meditation is very nice, but it only becomes life changing when you can bring up that mind on demand, in day-to-day life. This chapter shows you how.
In General, Generalize Mindfulness
One of the most important things a mindfulness meditator needs to do is extend the benefits of mindfulness beyond sitting into every part of life. During sitting meditation, you may experience some degree of calmness, clarity, and happiness, and