Yet Another Science Tidbit: Mindfulness and Brain Change

and our understanding of it is another, that gap will be a source of misery, for us and those around us.

The wider the gap, the more misery; the smaller the gap, the less misery.

The closing of the gap was the Buddha’s intent. His methods help us to do just that. I hope this practice lessens the gap, lessens the misery, clearing the way for much more happiness. I believe that’s our

Yet Another Science Tidbit

Mindfulness and Brain Change

The Harvard Business Review article “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain,”* by Christina Congleton, Britta K. Hölzel, and Sara W. Lazar, talks of the changes in brain functions that act as the “proof in the pudding” of meditation. Well, from one angle. The two neuroscientists and one psychologist give a bit of an overview of the research on this subject. They go into some detail about three beneficial well-documented brain changes, and generally point to others. The first is in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), just behind the brain’s frontal lobe. Self-regulation (consciously directing your attention) and holding o on knee-jerk reactions are associated with this area. A second benefit is mental flexibility. This latter function has to do not just with this area of the ACC itself, but also with the strength of the pathways between it and other parts of the brain. Meditators showed better performance in all of the above capacities, and their ACC showed more activity than non-meditators.

As if that weren’t enough to make us love the ACC, it’s associated with a third benefit of learning from experience to make good decisions. I’ll take two! Oh wait, I already have two—one on each side. So do you. Now to meditate and make them stronger . . .

The other brain region poster child in this article was the hippocampus. Despite its name it’s actually quite small. If you were to travel twothirds of the way between your temple and the very middle of your brain, you’d encounter this seahorse-shaped part. It’s associated with emotion and memory. In people su ering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other stress-related problems like depression, it becomes smaller. But in meditators the gray matter in that area increased! This points to resilience, which is a trump card in life, if you ask me.

true, natural state. I believe that the natural state of true reality is extremely joyful.

So...to come at it from another way . . .

The more our vision of reality matches true reality, the happier we are. The more our vision of reality matches true reality, the happier we are.

They sum up the research in this field further by saying, “These findings are just the beginning of the story. Neuroscientists have also shown that practicing mindfulness a ects brain areas related to perception, body awareness, pain tolerance, emotion regulation, introspection complex thinking, and sense of self. While more research is needed to document these changes over time and to understand underlying mechanisms, the converging evidence is compelling.”*

So that’s a very fancy way of validating Dan Harris’ claim about bicep curls for the brain.

Furthermore, as has been proven in various studies including the Shamatha (di erent spelling of “Shamata’) Project (Cli ord Saron, et al), as we practice, we get better at the “remembering” (i.e. “Oh yeah, I was practicing”) part. So if you’re doing a lot of forgetting and remembering as you practice, well done! Really, this all makes sense. The more you do something, the better you get at it. The more bicep curls, the stronger the bicep. I should hasten to add that you can’t make your ACC grow infinitely bigger—to Arnold Schwarzenegger bicep size, for example. Brain parts just don’t grow that big. But findings have consistently shown the ACC and other parts to grow measurably, even within weeks of beginning meditation.

Interestingly, scientists such as Davidson and some of his colleagues, who have studied meditation masters for decades, suspect that after such processes become deep, default habits (think “unconscious competence,” like riding a bicycle or reading these words), those brain parts become normal size again. This idea hasn’t been thoroughly studied yet, in the new field of contemplative science.

* Sara W. Lazar, Britta K. Holzel, and Christina Congleton. “Mindfulness Can

Literally Change Your Brain,” Harvard Business Review (digital), January 8, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/01/mindfulness-can-literally-change-your-brain