Mapping the Mindful Brain

Very briefly, came upon some fascinating work by Judson Brewer, MD, interviewed here, at Buddhist Geeks. Dr. Brewer, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale is studying the effects of meditation on the brain.

The research, utilizing fMRI brain scanning, finds that meditating deactivates the parts of the brain associated with preoccupation with self, called the “default mode network”. Now, if you could limit the activity of the part of the brain that tended to make people unhappy, would you?

We found a clinical signal and went back to study the mechanism to see what’s actually going on. We compared the neural activity of 12 Buddhist meditators to those of novice meditators that we instructed that morning. As I’m sure your listeners are aware, the instructions are simple “pay attention to your breath” but they are maddeningly hard to do. It’s easy to teach someone, but it’s not that easy to change your brain. We had them do three different kinds of meditation and looked for what was similar among all three.

The researchers found that not only is there a common neurological association to meditation, but using fMRI scans to provide real-time feedback with meditators showed that “an active posterior cingulate correllated very highly with self-referential wandering brain activity” and when it was de-activated they were focussed or in a “flow” state.

So, what of it? Well, not long ago another study, done by Matthew Killingsworth, looked at the effect of the wandering mind. They concluded that about half the time we are thinking about ourselves, and when doing so we are generally unhappy. (Here’s a write-up of that research in Science Daily.)

So could you increase your odds of happiness by taking up a mindfulness practice — by taking that preoccupied self “off-line”, so to speak? There’s lots more research to be done, but it seems to point in that direction. One interesting thing about Brewer’s work, is his team is providing real-time feedback to meditators so that they are able to learn to meditate more efficiently. They had people who learned to meditate, whose meditation looked like those of longtime practitioners, within 9 minutes. (I’m not suggesting that this is a fast-track to learning to meditate like a long-time practitioner, but it does seem to make the learning much more efficient.)

You can also read an article about Brewer’s research at Yale Scientific.

11 Definitions of Mindfulness

photo by sonny abesamis (creative commons)

Mindfulness definitely has exciting applications for use in psychotherapy. Depending on how you conceptualize it, there are certain commonalities between states induced and fostered by both mindfulness and psychotherapy. But what is mindfulness? Here are eleven definitions of mindfulness, mostly from cognitive psychologists, but also from a few Buddhist meditators.

[If you’re interested in the topic of therapies that use mindfulness, check out KC Mindfulness, a blog written by someone that uses these interventions — it’s chock full of information.]

[Update: Here’s a link to a New York Times piece you may find of interest, How Meditation May Change the Brain. I’d also direct the interested reader to a host of resources at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center, part of the Semel Institute at UCLA. This page includes both a mindfulness bibliography and a summary of mindfulness research. Good stuff. But enough of that — here are the mindfulness definitions!]

1. The clear and singleminded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception (Nyanaponika Thera, 1972; cited in Brown & Ryan, 2003
2. Keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality (Hanh, 1976; cited in Brown & Ryan, 2003)
3. Psychological and behavioral versions of meditation skills usually taught in Eastern spiritual practices… [usually focused on] observing, describing, participating, taking a nonjudgmental stance, focusing on one thing in the moment, being effective (Linehan, 1993; as cited in Hayes and Shenk, 2004)
4. Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally (Kabat-Zinn, 1994)
5. A state of psychological freedom that occurs when attention remains quiet and limber, without attachment to any particular point of view (Martin, 1997).
6. Bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis (Marlatt & Kristeller, 1999)
7. A way of paying attention that originated in Eastern meditation practices (Baer, 2003).
8. To simply “drop in” on the actuality of [one’s] lived experience and then to sustain it as best [one] can moment by moment, with intentional openhearted presence and suspension of judgment and distraction (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).
9. Mindfulness captures a quality of consciousness that is characterized by clarity and vividness of current experience and functioning and thus stands in contrast to the mindless, less “awake” states of habitual or automatic functioning that may be chronic for many individuals (Brown & Ryan, 2003)
10. Broadly conceptualized… a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, 1998; Shapiro & Schwartz, 1999, 2000; Teasdale, 1999; Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002; as cited in Bishop et al., 2004)
11. A process of regulating attention in order to bring a quality of nonelaborative awareness to current experience and a quality of relating to one’s experience within an orientation of curiosity, experiential openness, and acceptance. We further see mindfulness as a process of gaining insight into the nature of one’s mind and the de-centered perspective (Safran & Segal, 1990) on thoughts and feelings so that they can be experienced in terms of their subjectivity (versus their necessary validity) and transient nature (versus their permanence) (Bishop et al., 2004).

See also my blog related to matters mindful — LA Eastsider Mindful.