1 Meditation and the Brain

A Science of Mind

Our capacity to learn is far superior to that of other animals. Can we, with training, develop our mental skills, as we do for our physical skills? Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? These questions have been explored for 20 years by neuroscientists and psychologists who collaborate with people who meditate. Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the functional and structural transformations that occur in the brain due to different types of meditation? How much time is needed to observe transformations like this in people new to meditation?

Matthieu:

Although one finds in the Buddhist literature many treatises on “traditional sciences”—medicine, cosmology, botanic, logic, and so on—Tibetan Buddhism has not endeavored to the same extent as Western civilizations to expand its knowledge of the world through the natural sciences. Rather it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2,500 years and has accumulated, in an empirical way, a wealth of experiential findings over the centuries. A great number of people have dedicated their whole lives to this contemplative science. Modern Western psychology began with William James just over a century ago. I can’t help remembering the remark made by Stephen Kosslyn, then chair of the psychology department at Harvard, at the Mind and Life meeting on “Investigating the Mind,” which took place at MIT in 2003. He started his presentation by saying, “I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.”

It does not suffice to ponder how the human psyche works and elaborate complex theories about it, as, for instance, Freud did. Such intellectual constructs cannot replace two millennia of direct investigation of the workings of mind through penetrating introspection conducted with trained minds that have become both stable and clear. Any sophisticated theory that came out of a brilliant mind but does not rest on empirical evidence cannot be compared with the cumulated experience of hundreds of people who have each a good part of their lives fathomed the subtlest aspects of mind through direct experience. Using empirical approaches undertaken with the right instrument of a well-trained mind, these contemplatives have found efficient ways to achieve a gradual transformation of emotions, moods, and traits, and to erode even the most entrenched tendencies that are detrimental to an optimal way of being. Such achievements can change the quality of every moment of our lives through enhancing fundamental human characteristics such as lovingkindness, inner freedom, inner peace, and inner strength.

Wolf:

Can you be more specific with this rather bold claim? Why should what nature gave us be fundamentally negative, requiring special mental practice for its elimination, and why should this approach be superior to conventional education or, if conflicts arise, to psychotherapy in its various forms, including psychoanalysis?

Matthieu:

What nature gave us is by no means entirely negative; it is just a baseline. Most of our innate capacities remain dormant unless we do something, through training, for instance, to bring them to an optimal, functional point. We all know that our mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. The mind that nature gave us does have the potential for immense goodness, but it also creates a lot of unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others. If we take an honest look at ourselves, then we must acknowledge that we are a mixture of light and shadow, of good qualities and defects. Is this the best we can be? Is that an optimal way of being? These questions are worth asking, particularly if we consider that some kind of change is both desirable and possible.

Few people would honestly argue that there is nothing worth improving about the way they live and the way they experience the world. Some people regard their own particular weaknesses and conflicting emotions as a valuable and distinct part of their “personality,” as something that contributes to the fullness of their lives. They believe that this is what makes them unique and argue that they should accept themselves as they are. But isn’t this an easy way to giving up on the idea of improving the quality of their lives, which would cost only some reasoning and effort?

Our mind is often filled with troubles. We spend a great deal of time consumed by painful thoughts, anxiety, or anger. We often wish we could manage our emotions to the point where we could be free of the mental states that disturb and obscure the mind. It is easier indeed, in our confusion about how to achieve this kind of mastery, to adopt the view that this is all “normal,” that this is “human nature.” Everything found in nature is “natural,” but that does not necessarily make it desirable. Disease, for example, comes to everybody and is perfectly natural, but does this prevent us from trying to cure it?

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I wish I could suffer for the whole day and, if possible, for my whole life.” Whatever we are occupied with, we always hope we will get some benefit or satisfaction out of it, either for ourselves or others, or at least a reduction of our suffering. If we thought nothing would come of our activities but misery, we wouldn’t do anything at all, and we would fall into despair.

We don’t find anything strange about spending years learning to walk, read and write, or acquire professional skills. We spend hours doing physical exercises to get our bodies into shape. Sometimes we expend tremendous physical energy pedaling a stationary bike that goes nowhere. To sustain such tasks requires at least some interest or enthusiasm. This interest comes from believing that these efforts are going to benefit us in the long run. Working with the mind follows the same logic. How could it be subject to change without any effort, just from wishing alone? We cannot learn to ski by practicing a few minutes once a year.

We spend a lot of effort improving the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, then we transform the quality of our lives. This kind of transformation is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.

We significantly underestimate our capacity for change. Our character traits remain the same as long as we do nothing to change them and as long as we continue to tolerate and reinforce our habits and patterns, thought after thought. The truth is that the state that we call “normal” is just a starting point and not the goal we should set for ourselves. Our life is worth much more than that. It is possible, little by little, to arrive at an optimal way of being.

Nature also gave us the possibility to understand our potential for change, no matter who we are now and what we have done. This notion is a powerful source of inspiration for engaging in a process of inner transformation. You may not succeed easily, but at least be encouraged by such an idea; you can put all your energy into such a transformation, which is already in itself a healing process.

Modern conventional education does not focus on transforming the mind and cultivating basic human qualities such as lovingkindness and mindfulness. As we will see later, Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage rumination and explore endlessly the details and intricacies of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the most fundamental aspect of mind: luminous awareness.

Wolf:

So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation?

Matthieu:

Totally opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression.

Wolf:

It is encouraging for our dialogue to have contrasting views on strategies to cure the mind. I suspect that the practice of meditation is often misunderstood. I have had little practice with it, but I learned to see what it is not: it is not an attempt to confront oneself with unresolved problems to search for their causes and eliminate them. It appears to be quite the contrary.

Matthieu:

When one looks at the process of rumination, it is easy to see what a troublemaker it is. What we need is to gain freedom from the mental chain reactions that rumination endlessly perpetuates. One should learn to let thoughts arise and be freed to go as soon as they arise, instead of letting them invade one’s mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future is not yet born, and if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace.

Wolf:

You have said in one of your books that every human being possesses in his mind a “nugget of gold,” a kernel of purity and positive qualities that is, however, concealed and overshadowed by a host of negative traits and emotions that deform his perceptions and are the major cause of suffering. To me, this sounds like an overly optimistic and untested hypothesis. It sounds like Rousseau’s dreams and seems to be contradicted by cases like that of the feral child Kaspar Hauser. We are what evolution imprinted by genes and culture via education, moral norms, and social conventions. What then is the “golden nugget”?

Matthieu:

A piece of gold that remains deeply buried in its ore, in a rock, or in the mud. The gold does not lose its intrinsic purity, but its value is not actualized. Likewise, to be fully expressed, our human potential needs to meet with suitable conditions.

Awareness and Mental Constructs

Matthieu:

The idea of an unspoiled basic nature of consciousness is not a naïve assessment of human nature. It is based on reasoning and introspective experience. If we consider thoughts, emotions, feelings, and any other mental events, they all have a common denominator, which is the capacity of knowing. In Buddhism, this basic quality of consciousness is called the fundamental luminous nature of mind. It is luminous in the sense that it throws light on the outer world through our perceptions and on our inner world through our feelings, thoughts, memories of the past, anticipation of the future, and awareness of the present moment. It is luminous in contrast to an inanimate object, which is completely dark in terms of cognition.

Let’s use this image of light. If you have a torch and you light up a beautiful smiling face or an angry face, a mountain of jewels or a heap of garbage, then the light does not become kind or angry, valuable or dirty. Another image is that of a mirror. What makes a mirror special is that it can reflect all kinds of images, but none of them belongs to, penetrates, or stays in the mirror. If they did, then all these images would superimpose, and the mirror would become useless. Likewise, the basic quality of the mind allows all mental constructs—love and anger, joy and jealousy, pleasure and pain—to arise but is not altered by them. Mental events do not belong intrinsically to the most fundamental aspect of consciousness. They simply occur within the space of awareness, of various moments of consciousness, and are made possible by this basic awareness. This quality can thus be called basic cognition, pure awareness, or the most fundamental nature of mind.

Matthieu:

The point is not to fragment the self but to use the capacity of the mind to observe and know itself to free oneself from suffering. We actually speak of nondual self-illuminating awareness, which emphasizes this point. There is no need for a dissociation of personality because the mind has the inherent faculty to observe itself, just as a flame does not need a second flame to light itself up. Its own luminosity suffices.

The practical point of all this is that you can look at your thoughts, including strong emotions, from the perspective given by pure mindfulness. Thoughts are manifestations of pure awareness, just like waves that surge from and dissolve back into the ocean. The ocean and waves are not two intrinsically separate things. Usually, we are so taken by the content of thoughts that we fully identify ourselves with our thoughts and are unaware of the fundamental nature of consciousness, pure awareness. Because of that we are easily deluded, and we suffer.

The entire Buddhist path is about various ways to get rid of delusion. Take the example of a strong experience of malevolent anger. We become one with anger. Anger fills our whole mental landscape and projects its distortion of reality on people and events. When we become overwhelmed by anger, we cannot dissociate from it. We also perpetuate a vicious cycle of affliction by rekindling anger each time we see or remember the person who made us angry. Although anger is clearly not an enjoyable state of mind, we cannot help triggering it over and over again, like adding more and more wood to the fire. We thus become addicted to the cause of suffering. But if we dissociate from anger and look at it dispassionately with bare mindfulness, then we can see that it is just a bunch of thoughts and not something fearsome. Anger does not carry weapons, it does not burn like a fire or crush one like a rock; it is nothing more than a product of our mind.

Working with Emotions

Gradual and Lasting Changes

Matthieu:

It is the same with scientific knowledge. You first have to rely on the credible testimony of a number of scientists, but later you can train in the subject and verify the findings firsthand. This is quite similar to contemplative science. You first need to refine the telescope of your mind and the methods of investigations for years to find out for yourself what other contemplatives have found and all agreed on. The state of pure consciousness without content, which might seem puzzling at first sight, is something that all contemplatives have experienced. So it is not just some sort of Buddhist dogmatic theory. Anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it.

Regarding cross-checking interpersonal experience, both contemplatives and the texts dealing with the various experiences a meditator might encounter are quite precise in their descriptions. When a student reports on his inner states of mind to an experienced meditation master, the descriptions are not just vague and poetic. The master will ask precise questions and the student replies, and it is quite clear that they are speaking about something that is well defined and mutually understood.

However, in the end, what really matters is the way the person gradually changes. If, over months and years, someone becomes less impatient, less prone to anger, and less torn apart by hopes and fears, then the method he or she has been using is a valid one. If it becomes inconceivable for someone to willingly harm another person, if the person has gradually developed the inner resources to successfully deal with the ups and downs of life, then real progress has occurred. It is said in the teachings that it is easy to be a great meditator when sitting in the sun with a full belly, but meditators are truly put to the test when faced with adverse circumstances. That is the time when you will really measure the change that has occurred in your way of being. When you are confronted with someone who criticizes or insults you, if you don’t blow a fuse but know how to deal skillfully with the person while maintaining your inner peace, you will have achieved some genuine emotional balance and inner freedom. You will have become less vulnerable to outer circumstances and your own deluded thoughts.

An ongoing study seems to indicate that while they are engaged in meditation, practitioners can clearly distinguish, like everyone who is not distracted, between pleasant and aversive stimuli, but they react much less emotionally than control subjects. While retaining the capacity of being fully aware of something, they succeed in not being carried away by their emotional responses.1 Normal subjects either do not perceive the stimuli (e.g., when being purposely distracted by being asked to perform a cognitively demanding task) and do not react or perceive it and react strongly.

Wolf:

I can see the virtue of this attitude. However, negative emotions also have important functions for survival. They have not evolved and been conserved by chance; they help us to survive. They protect us and help us avoid adverse situations. We have only talked about the disconnection and detachment of the negative components while preserving the positive components—empathy, love, carefulness, mindfulness, and diligence. For reasons of symmetry, one should expect that positive emotions also hamper an unbiased view of the world and fade with mental training.

Matthieu:

If love and empathy are biased with attachment and grasping, then they will surely be accompanied by a distortion of reality. Consequently, from a Buddhist perspective, biased empathy and grasping love are not positive because they result in suffering. Conversely, altruistic love has positive effects on all concerned: the beneficiaries as well as the one who expresses that love. Similarly, strong indignation in the face of injustice can motivate one to engage energetically in actions intended to right the wrong. If such indignation is not mixed with hatred and is not superimposed on reality, then it is constructive, unlike malevolent, out-of-control anger. It will result in less suffering and greater well-being for all. The positive or negative nature of an emotion should be assessed according to its motivation—altruistic or selfish—and its consequences in terms of well-being or suffering.

Wolf:

How can we conceive of a process that is uniquely initiated by our own brain? You want to change something in your brain by reducing as many intrusions as possible from outside; you can undertake a long promenade through your own brain trying to evoke certain feelings. This would seem to require a certain dissociation, a level splitting, because there needs to be an agent that works on another level to induce a change. You need to monitor your emotions, you need to alert your inner senses to have those emotions—because I think you can only work on them if you activate them—and then you have to learn to differentiate them. How do you do this? What are the tools?

Outer and Inner Enrichment

Matthieu:

The mind obviously has the ability to know and train itself. People do that all the time without calling it meditation. They voluntarily memorize things, as a student will do; they enhance their mental skills in playing chess and solving various problems through mental training. Meditation is simply a more systematic way of doing this with wisdom—that is, with an understanding of the mechanisms of happiness and suffering. This process requires perseverance. You need to train again and again. You can’t learn to play tennis by holding a racket for a few minutes every few months. With meditation, the effort is aimed at developing not a physical skill but an inner enrichment. I understand that the development of brain functions comes from exposure to the outer world. If you are born blind, then the visual areas of the brain will not develop and will even be colonized by the auditory functions, which are more useful to a blind person.2 In the late 1990s, research showed that rats kept in a plain cardboard box show reduced neuronal connectivity. But if they are placed in an amusement park for rats, with wheels, tunnels, and friends, within a month they form many new functional connections.3 Soon after, neuroplasticity was also shown to exist throughout the life course in humans.4 However, most of the time, our engagement with the world is semi-passive. We are exposed to something and react to it, thus increasing our experience. We could describe this process as an outer enrichment.

In the case of meditation and mind training, the outer environment might change only minimally. In extreme cases, you could be in a simple hermitage in which nothing changes or sitting alone always facing the same scene day after day. So the outer enrichment is almost nil, but the inner enrichment is maximal. You are training your mind all day long with little outer stimulation. Furthermore, such enrichment is not passive, but voluntary, and methodically directed.

When you engage for eight or more hours a day in cultivating certain mental states that you have decided to cultivate and that you have learned to cultivate, you reprogram the brain.

Wolf:

In a sense, you make your brain the object of a sophisticated cognitive process that is turned inward rather than outward toward the world around you. You apply the cognitive abilities of the brain to studying its own organization and functioning, and you do so in an intentional and focused way, similar to when you attend to events in the outer world and when you organize sensory signals into coherent percepts. You assign value to certain states and you try to increase their prevalence, which probably goes along with a change in synaptic connectivity in much the same way as it occurs with learning processes resulting from interactions with the outer world.5

Let us perhaps briefly recapitulate how the human brain adapts to the environment because this developmental process can also be seen as a modification or reprogramming of brain functions. Brain development is characterized by a massive proliferation of connections and is paralleled by a shaping process through which the connections being formed are either stabilized or deleted according to functional criteria, using experience and interaction with the environment as the validation criterion.6 This developmental reorganization continues until the age of about 20. The early stages serve the adjustment of sensory and motor functions, and the later phases primarily involve brain systems responsible for social abilities. Once these developmental processes come to an end, the connectivity of the brain becomes fixed, and large-scale modifications are no longer possible.

Matthieu:

To some extent.

Wolf:

To some extent, yes. The existing synaptic connections remain modifiable, but you can’t grow new long-range connections. In a few distinct regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus and olfactory bulb, new neurons are generated throughout life and inserted into the existing circuits, but this process is not large scale, at least not in the neocortex, where higher cognitive functions are supposed to be realized.7

Matthieu:

A study of people who have practiced meditation for a long time demonstrates that structural connectivity among the different areas of the brain is higher in meditators than in a control group.8 Hence, there must be another kind of change allowed by the brain.

Processes of Neuronal Changes

Matthieu:

You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly.

Wolf:

Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas. The strength of interactions among centers can be modified by actually modulating the efficiency of the connecting synapses or dynamically configuring virtual highways. The latter strategy is probably based on the same principle as the tuning of a receiver to a specific radio station. The receiver is entrained into the same oscillation frequency as the sender.10 In the brain, myriad senders are active all the time. Their messages must be selectively directed to specific targets, and this routing must occur in a task-dependent way. Thus, different functional networks need to be configured from moment to moment, and this must be achievable at time scales much faster than the learning-dependent changes of synaptic efficacy. The training phase in meditation is probably capitalizing on the slow, learning-related modifications of synaptic efficiency, whereas the fast engagement in a particular meditative state of which experts seem to be capable likely relies on more dynamic routing strategies.

Matthieu:

You could thus gradually slow down the traffic on pathways of hatred and open wide the routes of compassion, for instance. So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

Wolf:

So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions.

Matthieu:

You can surely refine your knowledge of the various aspects of mental processes themselves.

Wolf:

Sure. You are aware of them, and you can familiarize yourself with them by focusing attention on them and then differentiating between them, forming category boundaries as one does when perceiving the outer world.

Matthieu:

You can also identify the mental processes that lead to suffering and distinguish them from those that contribute to well-being, those that feed mental confusion, and those that preserve lucid awareness.

Wolf:

Another analogy for this process of refinement could be the improved differentiation of objects of perception, which is known to depend on learning. With just a little experience, you are able to recognize an animal as a dog. With more experience, you can sharpen your eye and become able to distinguish with greater and greater precision dogs that look similar. Likewise, mental training might allow you to sharpen your inner eye for the distinction of emotional states. In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world.

Emotional Nuances

Matthieu:

Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances. If you look at a painted wall from a distance, it looks quite homogenous. However, if you look closely, you will see many imperfections: the surface is not as smooth as it seems; it has bumps and holes and white, yellowish, and dark spots, and so on. Similarly, when we look closely at our emotions, we find that they have many different aspects. Take anger, for instance. Often anger can have a malevolent component, but it can also be rightful indignation in the face of injustice. Anger can be a reaction that allows us to rapidly overcome an obstacle preventing us from achieving something worthwhile or remove an obstacle threatening us. However, it could also reflect a tendency to be short-tempered.

If you look carefully at anger, you will see that it contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in and of themselves. Likewise, desire has an element of bliss that is distinct from attachment; pride has an element of self-confidence that does not lapse into arrogance; and envy entails a drive to act that, in itself, is not yet deluded, as it will later become when the afflictive state of mind of jealousy sets in.

So if you are able to recognize those aspects that are not yet negative and let your mind remain in them, without drifting into the destructive aspects, then you will not be troubled and confused by these emotions. This process is not easy, to be certain, but one can cultivate this capacity through experience.

Effortless Skills

Wolf:

This resembles a general strategy that the brain applies when acquiring new skills. In the naïve state, one uses conscious control to perform a task. The task is broken down into a series of subtasks that are sequentially executed. This requires attention, takes time, and is effortful. Later, after practice, the performance becomes automatized. Usually, the execution of the skilled behavior is then accomplished by different brain structures than those involved in the initial learning and execution of the task. Once this shift has occurred, performance becomes automatic, fast, and effortless and no longer requires cognitive control. This type of learning is called procedural learning and requires practice. Such automatized skills often save you in difficult situations because you can access them quickly. They can also often cope with more variables simultaneously due to parallel processing. Conscious processing is more serialized and therefore takes more time. Do you think you can apply the same learning strategy to your emotions by learning to pay attention to them, differentiate them, and thereby familiarize yourself with their dynamics so as to later become able to rely on automatized routines for their management in case of conflict?

Matthieu:

You seem to be describing the meditation process. In the teachings, it says that when one begins to meditate, on compassion, for instance, one experiences a contrived, artificial form of compassion. However, by generating compassion over and over again, it becomes second nature and spontaneously arises, even in the midst of a complex and challenging situation. Once compassion becomes truly part of your mind stream, you don’t have to make special efforts to sustain it. We say it’s “meditating without meditation”: you are not actively “meditating,” but at the same time you are never separated from meditation. You simply dwell effortlessly and without distraction in this wholesome, compassionate state of mind.

Wolf:

It would be really interesting to look with neurobiological tools at whether you have the same shift of function that you observe in other cases where familiarization through learning and training leads to the automation of processes. In brain scans, one observes that different brain structures take over when skills that are initially acquired under the control of consciousness become automatic.

Matthieu:

That is what a study conducted by Julie Brefczynski and Antoine Lutz at Richard Davidson’s lab seems to indicate. Brefczynski and Lutz studied the brain activity of novice, relatively experienced, and very experienced meditators when they engage in focused attention. Different patterns of activity were observed depending on the practitioners’ level of experience. Relatively experienced meditators (with an average of 19,000 hours of practice) showed more activity in attention-related brain regions compared with novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators (with an average of 44,000 hours of practice) demonstrated less activation than the ones without as much experience. These highly advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control.12 This observation accords with other studies demonstrating that when someone has mastered a task, the cerebral structures put into play during the execution of this task are generally less active than they were when the brain was still in the learning phase.

Wolf:

This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!

Relating to the World

How Young Can One Start to Meditate?

Matthieu:

I must add that, although it certainly requires some maturity to achieve lasting stability in emotional control, it still seems possible to begin this process at an early age. Children do find strategies to recover a sense of balance and inner peace after going through emotional upheaval. In a book called The Joy of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche recounts how as a child he was extremely anxious and had frequent panic attacks. He was then living in Nubri, in the mountains of Nepal, near the Tibetan border. He came from a nice, loving family—his grandfather and father were great meditators—and did not experience any particular traumatic event, but he had these uncontrollable bursts of inner fear. But even at the age of six or seven years old, he found a way to alleviate his panic attacks. He used to go to a cave nearby and sit there alone, meditating in his own way for a couple of hours. He felt a welcome sense of peace and relief, as if turning off the heat, and he deeply appreciated the quality of those contemplative moments. Still, that was not enough to get rid of his anxiety, which kept on creeping back.

At the age of 13, he felt a strong aspiration to do a contemplative retreat and embarked on the traditional three-year retreat that is often practiced in Tibetan Buddhism. In the beginning, things became even worse. So one day he decided that enough was enough and that the time had come to use all the teachings he had received from his father to go to the depth of his problem. He meditated for three days uninterruptedly, not coming out of his room, looking deep into the nature of mind. At the end of it, he had gotten rid of his anxiety forever. When you now meet this incredibly kind, warm, and open person, who radiates well-being and inner peace, displays such great warmth and sense of humor, and teaches with limpid clarity on the nature of mind, you find it hard to believe that he ever experienced anything close to anxiety. He is a living testimony of the power of mind training and furthermore of the possibility to embark on it from an early age.14

Mental Distortions

Attention and Cognitive Control

Wolf:

Earlier, we were talking about the possibility of using mental practice as a tool to fine-tune the inner eye and the ability to use introspection to explore the cognitive functions of the brain and learn to form more differentiated categories of emotions and of cognitive processes in the same way that one can fine-tune one’s perception of the outer world. Experts in perfume factories, the “noses,” learn through practice to distinguish mixtures of odors that for most of us smell the same. It is conceivable that mental practice can do the same thing to the cognitive abilities of the brain and sharpen awareness of one’s own cognitive processes. This does require a substantial amount of cognitive control because in this case attention—unlike in the case of the “noses”—has to be directed toward processes originating within the brain.

There is now convincing neurobiological evidence suggesting that mental practice uses attention mechanisms to activate and analyze internal processes so that they can become the subject of learning processes.15 I allude to the seminal work by Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, who recorded electroencephalograms of you and other Buddhist practitioners while you were meditating.16 When I first saw these data at the meeting in Paris that was organized in memoriam of Francisco Varela, a good friend of both of ours, I was struck by the fact that there was a striking increase in meditators’ brains of the amplitude of oscillatory activity in a frequency range of 40 Hz, the so-called gamma frequency band. These oscillations were discovered some 25 years ago in the visual cortex and were suspected to play an important role in cognitive processes. Since then much work has been performed to investigate the putative functions of oscillations and synchrony in neuronal processing.

Of the many different functions that this temporal patterning of neuronal activity is likely to serve, its involvement in attentional mechanisms is particularly important in the present context. Several laboratories provided evidence that focused attention is associated with an enhancement of gamma oscillations and neuronal synchrony.17 If attention is directed to a particular subsystem in the brain to prepare it for processing, one observes an increase of synchronous gamma oscillations in that system. If you are about to direct your attention to a visual object, then the anticipation of having to process signals from this visual object increases oscillatory activity in the beta and gamma frequency range in visual areas of the cerebral cortex.

Likewise, if one anticipates that one will have to process an auditory signal, and one will have to use this signal to initiate a motor act, the brain begins to synchronize the oscillatory activity among the areas that will be involved in the future process—in this case, the auditory cortex and the premotor and motor areas. This facilitates rapid “handshaking” between the concerned areas and prepares the necessary coordination between sensory and executive structures.18

Thus, when a stimulus actually appears, the responses to this stimulus are enhanced and better synchronized than when the stimulus was not anticipated. This prerequisite is necessary to ensure rapid information processing and safe transmission of computational results across the cortical network.19

The phenomenon of binocular rivalry illustrates the close relations among synchronous oscillatory activity, conscious perception, and attention. If the two eyes are presented with different patterns that cannot be fused into a single coherent percept, then only one of the two images is perceived at any one time. If, for instance, a set of vertical lines is shown to the right eye and a set of horizontal lines to the left eye, one does not perceive a superposition of the two gratings, which would look like a checkerboard. Rather one sees either the vertical or horizontal grating, and these percepts keep on alternating every few seconds due to internal switching mechanisms. The question is, how is this selection and switching process achieved at the neuronal level?

At the early stages of visual processing in the primary visual cortex, this switch in perception is associated with a change in the synchronization of neuronal responses to the gratings. The grating that is actually perceived at a particular moment evokes responses that are more synchronized in the 40-Hz range than the responses to the grating not perceived at that moment.20 Each eye physically “sees” the same pattern all the time, but the subject perceives only the vertical or horizontal grating. These experiments suggest that it is easier for perceptual signals to access the level of conscious processing if they are well synchronized.

Matthieu:

Why does this switching happen without the subject being able to control it?

Wolf:

The signals from either the right or left eye are suppressed to avoid seeing double images. We perform this suppression all the time without being aware of it, and it is only under experimental conditions that we take notice of this phenomenon of interocular suppression. Because it involves an internal process to decide which of the available sensory signals should have access to consciousness, interocular suppression is frequently used as a paradigm to investigate the signatures of neuronal activity that are required for any neuronal activity to reach the level of conscious perception. In this context, it is noteworthy that practitioners of meditation can deliberately slow down the alternation rate of binocular rivalry.21 I experienced this myself after a few days of Zen practice while staring at the white wall in front of me. As I could infer from the changes in the far periphery of the visual field, the signals conveyed by my two eyes to my brain became suppressed in alternation at a remarkably slow rhythm of a few seconds.

Matthieu:

I did that once with Brent Field at Anne Treisman’s laboratory at Princeton and found out that it was possible to slow down the automatic switching between the left and right images and keep the perception of only one image up to 30 seconds or even a minute.

Wolf:

The neuronal correlate of a conscious perception compared with nonconscious processing appears to be a sudden and strong increase of precise phase synchrony—or, one could also say, of coherence of oscillatory activity, first in the gamma frequency range and subsequently during the maintenance period also in lower frequency ranges. Access to consciousness seems to require a particularly well-ordered global state of the brain.22

Matthieu:

So it’s the same as Francisco Varela’s “moony face experiment”?

Wolf:

Yes, it is closely related to Francisco’s experiment with the moony faces. He found an increase of gamma oscillations and synchrony between cortical areas, when subjects were able to identify a human face in pictograms consisting of black-and-white contours. If they failed to see a face and just perceived noninterpretable contours, the gamma oscillations had smaller amplitude and were less well synchronized.23

Now, this excursion was long but necessary, as you will see that it is closely related to the neuronal correlates of meditation—what Richard Davidson saw in your brain when you engaged in meditation.

Matthieu:

Not only me of course, but quite a few other meditators…

Wolf:

…quite a few others, fortunately, because in science you need repeatability. What he saw was a surprising increase of a highly coherent oscillatory activity in the gamma frequency range of 40 to 60 Hz.

The most interesting observation, however, was that this increase occurred over the central and frontal brain regions but not, as is the case when you direct attention to the outer world, over sensory areas. This finding suggests that you engaged your attentional mechanism to focus attention on processes in higher cortical areas, those areas that process highly abstract concepts, symbols, and maybe also feelings and emotions. It is difficult with electroencephalographic investigation to localize the activated areas, but the source of this activity is likely in areas other than the primary sensory areas because there was no sensory stimulation. Dangerously misleading in such measurements are artifacts caused by non-neuronal processes, such as muscle contractions and eye movements. I hope these potential sources of artifacts have been controlled for in the experiments on meditators.

One way to interpret these findings is that you intentionally activate internal representations, focus your attention on them, and then work on them in much the same way as you process external information. You apply your cognitive abilities to internal events.

Matthieu:

Or you keep a meta-awareness of a particular state that you are trying to develop, such as compassion, and maintain this meditation state moment after moment—

Wolf:

—keeping your attention focused on particular internal states, which can be emotions or the contents of imagination. In essence, it is the same strategy as one applies with the perception of the outer world—except that most of us are far less familiar with focusing attention on inner states.

Matthieu:

This fits with the definition of meditation, which is to cultivate a particular state of mind without distraction. Two Asian words are usually translated as “meditation”: in Sanskrit, bhavana means “to cultivate,” and in Tibetan, gom means “to become familiar with something that has new qualities and insights as well as a new way of being.” So meditation cannot be reduced to the usual clichés of “emptying the mind” and “relaxing.”

Wolf:

Just as in cases where we focus attention on external events, learning occurs as a consequence of attending to something. When one attentively observes an object, one learns about the object. Changes in synaptic connections between neurons occur, and the next this object is observed, it will appear more familiar. It is recognized much more easily and faster, and it can be recalled from memory and enter awareness—but all this is only possible if one directs one’s attention toward the object while it is perceived.

Matthieu:

It could be maintaining and cultivating the experience of benevolence. Altruistic love, for instance, occurs in everyone’s mind from time to time, but it usually does so in a transient way and is quickly replaced by another state of mind. Because we do not cultivate altruistic love systematically, this short-lived state will not be well integrated in the mind and will not lead to lasting changes in our dispositions. We all experience thoughts of lovingkindness, generosity, inner peace, and freedom from conflict. Yet these thoughts are fleeting and will soon be replaced by other thoughts, including afflictive ones such as anger and jealousy. To fully integrate altruism and compassion in our mind stream, we need to cultivate them over longer periods of time. We need to bring them to our minds and then nurture them, repeat them, preserve them, and enhance them, so that they gradually fill our mental landscape in a more durable way.

The idea is not only to generate but to perpetuate over an extended period of time a powerful state of mind that is saturated with benevolence. Elements of repetition and perseverance are common to all forms of training. However, the particularity here is that the skills you are developing are fundamental human qualities such as compassion, attention, and emotional balance.

Wolf:

Right. Meditation, then, is a highly active, attentive process. By focusing attention on those internal states, you familiarize yourself with them, you get to know them, and this facilitates recall if you want to activate them again.

This must go along with lasting changes at the neuronal level. Any activity in the brain that is occurring under the control of attention is memorized. There are modifications in synaptic transmission; synapses will strengthen or weaken. This in turn will lead to changes in the dynamical state of neuronal assemblies. Thus, through mental training, you create novel states of your mind, and you learn to retrieve them at will. I find it remarkable that this possibility has been discovered at all. What was the incentive to withdraw attention from the outer world, direct it toward internal states, subject them to cognitive dissection, and eventually gain control over them? Why is it that Eastern traditions have focused so much on the internal rather than the external universe?

Matthieu:

Well, I guess it is because these mental states are key determinants of happiness and suffering. This is truly important in anyone’s life. What I find even more surprising is how little attention has been paid in the Western world to the inner conditions of well-being and how much people underestimate the capacity of the mind to transform the way we experience things.

Wolf:

A particularly fascinating aspect is that this kind of mental training leads to changes in the brain that are long lasting and persist beyond the meditation process. A recent study from Harvard University showed that in long-term meditators, the volume of the cerebral cortex is increased in certain areas of the brain.24 Research done at my daughter Tania’s laboratory has also shown that structural changes occur in the brain of subjects initially new to meditation who trained for nine months in three types of practices: three months of mindfulness, three months in perspective taking, and three months in lovingkindness. Each type of meditation produced structural modification in a specific area, which are different from one meditation to the other. Such increases in volume have also been observed after learning motor skills or intensive sensory stimulation and are due to a learning-dependent increase of the neuropile (i.e., the compartment containing the connections between neurons). The number and size of synapses and their targets, the spines of the dendrites, increase, just as with other forms of training and learning.25

Attentional Blink

Wolf:

Another well-controlled study points in the same direction and suggests long-term modifications of the mechanisms that control attention. It appears that the maintenance of the high level of attention required to sustain meditative states causes a modification of the mechanisms that sustain attention.

Let me explain the finding. A researcher in the laboratory of Anne Treisman, an expert in attention research, investigated a phenomenon called attentional blink in long-term meditators.26 One can show a sequence of words or images in rapid succession and adjust the parameters in such a way that subjects perceive only a fraction of the stimuli. Once subjects perceive one image, the next image, maybe even the next two images, will not be perceived because the brain is still engaged with the processing of the first image and thus has no attentional resources left to process the following image or images. This inability to process the subsequent images is called attentional blink. The idea is that attention, while it is engaged in processing one consciously perceived image, is not available for the processing of the next one. Heleen Slagter and Antoine Lutz have also shown that after three months of intensive training in meditation on full awareness, attentional blink was considerably reduced.27

Matthieu:

So, when you have a quick succession of images, letters, or words, when you clearly identify one of them, that process involves your mind to such an extent that you will not be able to see one or more of the images that follow just after the one you have recognized.

Wolf:

The time interval during which you are “blind” is in the range of 50 to a few hundred milliseconds depending on the complexity of the processed image and subject age. The surprising finding was that experienced meditators, even if they had already reached a certain age—the blink interval increases with age because attentional mechanisms slow down—had remarkably short blink intervals. They perceived each of the stimuli even at high presentation rates.

Matthieu:

There is an unpublished result about a 65-year-old meditator who showed no attentional blink at all.

Wolf:

We have confirmed this. In aged long-term practitioners, the attentional blink was as short as in young controls.28 This finding indicates that long-term meditation alters attentional mechanisms. Another remarkable finding has been reported in the follow-up study that Richard Davidson performed with you and your colleagues. It showed a close correlation between the amplitude of the attention-related, highly synchronous gamma oscillations over central cortical areas and your subjective judgment on the actual depth and clarity of your meditative state. It is important to demonstrate such correlations between biophysical measures and subjective phenomena; if there is a statistically significant correlation, then it is likely that there is more than an accidental coincidence and perhaps even a causal relation. As far as I know, these robust and convincing data show that meditation is associated with a special brain state and does have lasting effects on brain functions.

Matthieu:

Regarding attentional blink, from an introspective perspective, it would seem that usually someone’s attention is captured by the object because it goes to the object, sticks to the object, and then has to disengage from the object. There is a moment of thinking, “Oh, I have seen a tiger” or “I have seen that word.” Then it takes some time to let it go. But, if you simply remain in the state of open presence, which is the state that works best to reduce attentional blink, you simply witness the image without attaching to it and therefore without having to disengage from it. When the next image flashes, a 20th of a second later, you are still there, ready to perceive it.

Wolf:

So the process of meditation has two effects: You learn to work on your own attentional mechanisms, and then you become an expert in engaging and disengaging attention at will. The question is how deeply these practitioners process the individual pictures. Apparently they attach less attention to each image and therefore can perceive the successive images more easily. Could it be that they just process less thoroughly and therefore can follow more rapidly than naïve subjects, that they perform less analysis and therefore are less refractory? Are meditators in general dealing with the phenomena in the outer world in a different, perhaps more superficial way, just brushing past it and not taking anything seriously?

Matthieu:

I don’t think it’s a question of being “serious” but rather of the relative magnitude of grasping and attaching to perceptions and outer phenomena.

Wolf:

Not attaching to them?

Matthieu:

Yes. Buddhism says that if we don’t engage constantly in the process of attraction and repulsion, this is liberating. You also spoke about instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes, with which humans extend their cognition. From a contemplative perspective, fine tuning one’s introspection toward perceptive and mental processes, rather than being powerless against and blindly caught in their automatisms, corresponds to enhancing the quality and power of the mind’s telescope. This allows one to see those processes happening in real time and not be carried away and fooled by them.

It seems that the different types of meditation that have been investigated have all had quite different signatures in the brain. They might all generate gamma waves, with different magnitudes, but they certainly activate distinct areas of the brain.

Wolf:

This is what you would expect because if you direct your attention toward particular emotions, train in developing compassion, or train in pure attention and empty the workspace of consciousness of any other content, then you are probably engaging different brain systems, which should result in different activation patterns. You will probably always find the attention-dependent activation patterns because meditation always requires focused attention, but the content-related activation patterns will depend on whether you direct your attention to visual, emotional, or social contents. In addition, one expects to find specific activation patterns in the respective brain regions. The common denominator of meditation, and this may sound surprising, is the high level of cognitive control.

Matthieu:

After the 2000 Mind and Life meeting, I went to visit Paul Ekman, the world’s leading expert on the facial expression of emotions, at his lab in San Francisco. He had a few of us go through a test in which we were presented with faces showing a neutral expression. Then for 1/30th of a second, a picture flashed of the same face showing one of the six basic emotions that are universal to all human beings: joy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. You could see that there had been a change, but it was very, very fast. If you were to go slowly, frame by frame, then you would see that the single image with the emotion is clear—a broad smile, a cringe of disgust, and so on. But when it is only displayed for 1/30th of a second, it looks like only a quick twitch in the face, which then immediately goes back to its neutral expression. The emotion thus briefly displayed is quite difficult to identify without training. Those microexpressions, as Paul calls them, occur involuntarily all the time in daily life and are uncensored indicators of one’s inner feelings, but usually we are not skillful in identifying them.

Wolf:

Exactly.

Matthieu:

It turns out that a small number of people naturally recognize these microexpressions quite well, and you can learn to recognize them through training. In our case, two meditators took the test. Personally, I didn’t feel that I had done well on the test, and I felt that the skill required did not have much to do with meditation. It turned out, however, that we actually scored higher and were more accurate and sensitive to the microexpressions than several thousand other people tested previously.29

According to Paul, this capacity to identify microexpressions might have been related to an enhanced speed of cognition, which would make it easier to perceive rapid stimuli in general, or greater attunement to the emotions of other people, which would make reading them easier. In general, the ability to recognize these fleeting expressions represents an unusual capacity for accurate empathy. People who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more interested, curious, and open to new experiences. They are also known to be conscientious, reliable, and efficient.

Wolf:

It could be related to the reduction of attentional blink and simply result from the ability to perceive short-duration events, or indeed it could indicate that your perception of emotions is more refined.

Attention, Rumination, and Open Presence

Matthieu:

That’s different from rumination. Rumination is letting your inner chatter go on and on, letting thoughts about the past invade your mind, becoming upset again about past events, endlessly guessing the future, fueling hopes and fears, and being constantly distracted in the present. By doing so, you become increasingly disturbed, self-centered, busy, and preoccupied with your own mental fabrications and eventually depressed. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment and are simply engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness. You are completely lost in inner distraction, in the same way that you can be constantly distracted by ever-changing outer events. This is the opposite of bare attention. Turning your attention inward means to look at pure awareness and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the freshness of the present moment, without entertaining mental fabrications.

We did some other experiments with Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson at the University of California, Berkeley, that I think relate well to this concept of bare awareness. They involved the startle reflex, which occurs, for instance, when one is confronted with a loud, surprising sound. It triggers a strong expression of surprise in the face, often a strong jerk of the body, and a significant physiological response (changes in heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, etc.). Like all reflexes, the startle reflects brain activity that normally lies beyond the range of voluntary regulation. Usually, the more people react, the stronger they tend to experience negative emotions, such as fear, disgust, and so on.

In our case, the scientists used a sound at the top of the threshold for auditory tolerance—a very loud explosion, like that of a gunshot or a large firecracker going off near one’s ear. In general, some people do better than others at moderating the startle, but many years of studies have shown that out of the several hundred people tested, no one could prevent the muscle spasms of the face and the bodily jump. Some people almost fell off their chair and, a few seconds after the startle, displayed an expression of relief or amusement. However, when we applied the strategy of the meditation of open presence, the startle almost disappeared.30

Wolf:

Even though you didn’t know what was going to happen?

Matthieu:

In some trials you can see a countdown from 10 to 1 on a screen before the explosion, and in other trials you just know that it will happen within five minutes or so. The meditator is asked to either sit in a neutral state or engage in a particular meditation state. Personally, when I used the meditation of open presence, the explosion sound seemed softer and less intrusive. Open presence is a state of clear awareness in which the mind is vast like the sky. The mind is not focused on anything, yet it is extremely clear and present, vivid and transparent. It is usually free from discursive thoughts, but there is no intention to block or prevent the thoughts from arising. Thoughts undo themselves as they arise, without proliferating or leaving traces. If you can remain properly in this state, the bang becomes much less disturbing. In fact, it can even enhance the clarity of the open state.

Wolf:

So it’s not focused attention on any content—

Matthieu:

—but it’s never distracted either.

Wolf:

You open your window of attention—

Matthieu:

—yes, but without effort. There is neither mental chatter nor particular focus of attention except resting in pure awareness, rather than focusing on it. I cannot find any better word; it is something that is luminous, clear, and stable, without grasping. That’s the state of mind in which the explosion creates almost no emotional reaction in the face and no change in heart rate variability.

When we repeated the experiments on two other occasions, I tried to engage in self-induced rumination and imagination, remembering a particular vivid experience from my own life. I became completely taken up by my chain of thoughts.

Wolf:

You call this internal chatter?

Matthieu:

Yes, either internal chatter or mental fabrications. When the explosion occurred as I was purposely engaged in this distracted state, I was much more startled by the noise. My personal interpretation is that the bang suddenly brought me back to the reality of the present moment, from which I was so far away, lost in my thoughts. However, if you remain in pure awareness, you are always in the freshness of the present moment, and the explosion is simply one of these present moments. You don’t have to be brought back to anything because you are already there.

It is understandable that in normal life, when there is a surprising event that requires immediate attention, perhaps even something necessary for your survival, if you are distracted at that moment, the more your mind is wandering somewhere else, the stronger the startle will be.

Wolf:

So the startle reaction would be the result of shifting attention from concrete, remembered, or presently experienced events toward the unexpected new stimulus.

Matthieu:

Yes, or rather shifting from being somewhere else in your mind to the present moment.

Wolf:

Thus, in a state of pure awareness, you are already in the present; attention is there but it is not directed—

Matthieu:

—and yet it’s available completely.

Wolf:

The spotlight of attention is wide, you are prepared, you don’t have to first disengage attention from some other content, and therefore you are not startled.

Mindfulness and Distraction

Consolidating Learning through Sleep

Wolf:

This theory corresponds well to recent data on the relevance of sleep for learning and memory processes. It is well established by now that you have to go through a repetitive sequence of characteristic sleep patterns to consolidate memories—slow-wave sleep, so-called deep sleep, and the paradoxical sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which the brain is highly active and exhibits electrographic patterns indistinguishable from being awake, aroused, and attentive. These sleep patterns alternate during the night and serve to reestablish the equilibrium of the brain. Because of its plasticity, the brain undergoes changes while it responds to the environment. Throughout the day, new memories are formed, new skills are acquired, and all this is associated with changes in myriad synaptic connections. To maintain stability, the networks have to be recalibrated in response to these changes, and this recalibration seems to occur during sleep. Memory traces become reorganized, the relevant is segregated from the irrelevant, and newly learned contents get embedded in their respective association fields.31

This is the reason that the contents of dreams are often related to events of the preceding day. The sleeping brain reactivates these memory traces to work on them, integrate them with previous traces, and consolidate them. During the early phases of sleep, the activity patterns caused by the experiences preceding sleep are replayed by the brain, often in time lapse (i.e., on a contracted time scale). This could be the explanation for why meditators report that the state they achieve right before going to sleep carries into their sleep.32 However, this experience is not specific to meditation. Many people have experienced that learning the vocabulary of a foreign language is most efficient if one rehearses the list of words just before closing one’s eyes. During sleep, the rehearsed contents are consolidated in the absence of interfering experiences and are usually retrievable with great clarity the next morning.

Matthieu:

Also, when you need to make an important decision and feel a bit confused and uncertain about it, if you clearly put the question of what you should do in your mind before falling asleep, the next morning the first thought that comes into your head seems to indicate the most meaningful choice, the one that is less distorted and biased by mental projections, hopes, and fears.

Wolf:

This is why we say Schlaf darüber, “Sleep on it,” when a difficult problem needs to be solved. Insight often presents itself on awakening.

Matthieu:

I also wanted to mention that it is quite striking that people who engage in long-term meditation retreats—in Tibetan Buddhism in particular, practitioners do retreats that last more than three years—require much less sleep. These meditators come from different backgrounds. Some are monks or nuns, some are highly educated in Buddhist philosophy, others are not, and many are lay practitioners. Of course, all have different temperaments. Nevertheless, in our retreat center in Nepal, for instance, after about a year of practice, almost everyone works their way down to just four hours of sleep. They typically sleep from 10 at night to 2 or 3 in the morning depending on the individual, and they do so without forcing themselves and without feeling any signs of sleep deprivation. They feel fresh during the day and don’t doze off during their practice.

It is true that during the day, they don’t face a great amount of novelty, they are not exposed to stressful circumstances, and they don’t have to deal with all kinds of events and situations. Nevertheless, they are far from being inactive, and the schedule of meditation exercises is quite demanding. It includes intense cultivation of attention, compassion, visualization techniques, and other skills. How would you interpret such a striking physiological change?

Wolf:

Here, several points come to my mind. First, it is known that young children (and this also holds for young animals), who have a lot to learn during the day because nearly everything they experience is novel to them, need to sleep much more than adults. They have to cope with massive changes in the functional architecture of their brains—and presumably not only because they have to learn more than adults but also because their brains are still developing, with new connections being formed and inappropriate connections removed. These massive circuitry modifications require permanent recalibration and therefore long sleep episodes. Actually a positive correlation exists between the amount of sleep you need and the amount of novelty you have to digest. If one enriches the experience of animals or humans during daytime, then it increases the length of sleep, and it also changes the sleep pattern. This correlation between the novelty of experiences (i.e., the amount of disequilibrium inflicted by learning-induced changes in the functional architecture of the brain), on the one hand, and the amount of sleep required, on the other hand, supports the notion that sleep is required to reinstall the brain’s homeostasis.

Complex dynamic systems with a high degree of plasticity, such as the brain, are susceptible to disturbances of their equilibrium and are permanently at risk of entering critical states. When subjects are deprived of sleep for a long period of time, their brains become unstable. One consequence can be epileptic seizures, which are a reflection of supracritical excitatory states. In fact, doctors sometimes use sleep deprivation to diagnose epilepsy because it makes these pathological patterns more likely to occur. Other equally dramatic consequences of sleep deprivation are disturbances of cognitive functions with delusions, illusions, and even hallucinations. Memory functions deteriorate because there is no time to consolidate the engrams and regain equilibrium after the imbalance generated by learning. Moreover, attentional mechanisms deteriorate, which further impedes cognition and learning.

But let’s come back to the question of why meditators in retreat need less sleep. I would think it’s because they do not have to deal with novelty. They work on known and already stored contents, and thus there is probably less to be reorganized. The main task is consolidation, and this can perhaps be achieved even in the meditative state, as the brain is only minimally exposed to external stimulation.

Matthieu:

That’s right. The cultivation of skills and their consolidation is actually the main work of meditation. A study carried out in Madison, Wisconsin, in Giulio Tononi’s laboratory, in collaboration with Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson, showed that, among meditators who had completed between 2,000 and 10,000 hours of practice, the increase of gamma waves was maintained during deep sleep, with an intensity proportional to the number of hours previously devoted to meditation.33 The fact that these changes persist in these people at rest and during sleep indicates a stable transformation of their habitual mental state, even in the absence of any specific effort, such as a meditation session.34

Wolf:

It would be interesting to look at the sleep patterns people display while in retreat. The different sleep phases may have different functions, and it has been hypothesized that one serves consolidation while the other reestablishes equilibrium and orthogonalizes memory traces to reduce superposition and merging of memories that need to be kept segregated.

Matthieu:

Can you explain that?

Wolf:

The brain’s memory is associative; it’s not like computer memory, where you have distinct addresses for distinct contents. In the brain, different memories are stored within the same network by differential changes in the coupling of neurons. The equivalent of a particular engram is a specific dynamic state of the network, a state characterized by the specific spatiotemporal distribution of active and inactive neurons of the network.

Let me put it simply. Assume we have 26 interconnected neurons, A to Z, that can become active in different combinations because their connections have been strengthened and weakened in a specific way through previous learning. The memory trace of content 1 would then consist of the predisposition of neurons ACD to be active simultaneously, content 2 would correspond to the coactivation of neurons AMZ, and so on. Now, if you store more and more contents into this network, you run into problems of superposition. The neuronal representations of different contents may become too similar or merge with one another, such that the representations may become blurred and ambiguous.

Matthieu:

Can you give an example?

Wolf:

The boundaries between the assemblies of neurons representing different memories may become blurred because the same synapses, the same connections, may have to be used for the representation of different contents. The greater the number of different patterns you want to store in this network, the more sophisticated the arrangement of the coupling of the neurons must be to keep these patterns separate from each other and distinguishable.

Matthieu:

Is it like when there are too many images in a mirror?

Wolf:

Or too many different transparencies laid on top of each other. They will fuse and become blurred through interference. So you have to arrange your transparencies in a way that minimizes superposition and thus optimizes discriminability. Here is an example. You try to retrieve a name from memory, but its retrieval is blocked by another similar name that keeps popping up instead. In this case, the neuronal representations of the two names are not sufficiently segregated or orthogonalized. Improving the segregation of overlapping representations is thought to be one of the functions of sleep. One of the mechanisms could be to better bind the two names to their respective association fields, such as the differing contexts in which they have been stored. Whether the two functions, consolidation and orthogonalization of memory traces, are served by different sleep phases is still unknown, but it is conceivable that the one is more associated with consolidation and the other more with cleaning and arranging things properly. Therefore, it would be interesting to investigate the sleep patterns of meditators in retreat to see which phases dominate during their reduced sleep time.

Matthieu:

Well, one indication might come from body movement. I was told that an average person turns over more than 15 times during a night. When His Holiness the Dalai Lama was told this fact by a sleep specialist, he wondered whether we really move that much. I was also a bit puzzled. Some meditators sleep through the night in a sitting position, cross-legged, when they do long retreats. So we would not expect them to move that much. Other meditators traditionally sleep on their right side, with the right hand resting under their cheek and the other one extended along their body.

Wolf:

Is there a reason?

Matthieu:

It’s quite complex. The teachings say that by sleeping in this position, we press down and inhibit the subtle channels of the body that are on the right side, which are said to carry negative emotions, while we facilitate the movement of the energy through the left side channels, which carry positive emotions. It is intriguing that this fits well with the notion that the right prefrontal cortex is related with negative emotion, whereas the left one is activated when positive emotions are experienced. Another reason for sleeping on the right side is not to press down on the heart.

Some years ago, when I was doing an eight-month retreat, I tried to observe myself. Once or twice a night, I would look at the small clock on my table to check the time. Over seven months, I tried to notice my position when I awoke. Every time, whenever I woke up in the middle of the night or when I was about to get up in the morning, I just had to open my eyes to see the clock right there in front of my eyes. I never found myself even once gazing at the ceiling or facing the other way. So I am pretty confident that I didn’t turn much during the five or so hours that I was sleeping.

Wolf:

This would then suggest that you alternate much less between different sleep phases because these turns tend to occur during transitions.

Matthieu:

While you go from a dream to deep sleep and so forth.

Wolf:

Right, although nowadays people think that you also dream in slow-wave sleep. The structure of the dreams may be different, but the brain is working in both phases, and high-frequency oscillations also occur in the slow-wave sleep phases. These fast oscillations are superimposed on the slow waves, and because fast oscillations are likely to be associated with the recall or activation of memories, dreaming may also occur in these deep sleep phases. It’s a bit difficult to find out because if you wake up people, you don’t know whether what they tell you has been experienced right at that moment or they are remembering dreams from earlier in the night.

Matthieu:

Is there a connection between remembering a dream more or less clearly between these two kinds of sleep?

Wolf:

Again, it’s difficult to say. I think the literature says that if you wake people up during the REM sleep period, the paradoxical sleep phase, then the probability of having a dream recalled is higher than if you wake them out of deep sleep. However, I don’t know how valid the statistics are.

In the morning, you have a lot of paradoxical sleep phases. They increase throughout the night and reach a peak in the morning just before you wake up. Usually you remember the dreams that occur in the morning much more frequently than those that occur in the middle of the night—unless you have a dramatic dream that wakes you up. This finding would suggest that dreams occurring in REM sleep are more easily remembered.

Compassion and Action

Matthieu:

Open presence. Of course, these words are approximate. It is quite difficult to put such experiences into words. But it turns out that unconditional compassion produces even higher gamma activation than open presence.

Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson showed that when one plays recordings alternately of a woman crying out in distress and a baby laughing to experienced meditators in a state of compassion, several areas of the brain linked to empathy are activated, including the insula. This zone is more activated by the distress cries than by the baby’s laughter. A close correlation is also observed among the subjective intensity of meditation on compassion, the activation of the insula, and cardiac rhythm.35 This activation is all the more intense when the meditators have more hours of training. The amygdala and cingulate cortex are also activated, indicating increased sensitivity to others’ emotional states.36 Your daughter Tania and her team have also shown that the neural networks for altruistic compassion and empathy are not the same. Compassion and altruistic love have a warm, loving, and positive aspect that “stand-alone” empathy for the suffering of the other does not have. The latter can easily lead to empathic distress and burnout. While collaborating with Tania, we arrived at the idea that burnout was in fact a kind of “empathy fatigue” and not “compassion fatigue,” as people often say.37

Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues also showed that meditating on compassion for 30 minutes per day for six to eight weeks increased positive emotions and one’s degree of satisfaction with existence.38 The subjects felt more joy, kindness, gratitude, hope, and enthusiasm, and the longer their training was, the more marked were the positive effects.

Compassion, Meditation, and Brain Coherence

Wolf:

As the electroencephalographic data indicate, this state is a highly coherent state. It is associated with a high degree of synchrony of high-frequency oscillations. Now comes my speculation. Maybe the signature of a solution is coherence, a state of synchrony, the moment at which ensembles of neurons engage in well-synchronized oscillatory activity. All the value-assigning systems would have to do to detect such coherent states is take samples of the actual activity patterns present in cortical networks and determine the degree of coherence or measure the amount of synchronicity. This task is not difficult because neurons are able to distinguish between synchronous and temporally dispersed input, the former being much more efficient in driving the neurons. As long as the patterns are temporally dispersed and rapidly changing, the value-assigning systems would not be activated, and the cortical activity would be classified as resulting from ongoing computations that have not yet converged toward a result. If, however, the activity has become highly coherent, the value-assigning systems would become active, signaling that a result has been obtained.

Now, if the signature of a result is the coherence of a state, the transient synchronization of a sufficient number of neurons distributed over a sufficiently large number of cortical areas that lasts sufficiently long to be considered valid or stable, the internal evaluation centers would signal that a result has been obtained and enable learning mechanisms to fix that state in case it needs to be remembered, strengthening those connections that support this particular state.

Let me now extend this: We know from experience that it is pleasant to arrive at results. “Eureka” can be an extremely fulfilling feeling. Thus, activation of evaluation centers appears to be associated with positive emotions—one of the reasons that we sometimes work hard to obtain solutions. Maybe we have an explanation here for the rewarding emotions associated with meditation. As the available data suggest, you generate an internal state during meditation that is characterized by a high degree of coherence, by the synchronization of oscillatory neuronal activity across an extended network of cortical areas. This condition should be ideal for the activation of the evaluation systems that detect globally coherent states and reward solutions with positive feelings. What you practice in meditation is perhaps the generation of such globally coherent states without, however, focusing on particular contents. You generate the state that has all the signatures of a good and reliable solution without any specific content. Extrapolating from how it feels to have obtained a solution to a concrete problem, I imagine that you get a feeling of content-free harmony, a feeling that all conflicts are resolved and everything has fallen into place.

Matthieu:

Inner conflicts go together with a lot of rumination.

Wolf:

Yes, but we ignore the nature of the activity patterns representing conflicts and ruminations. Maybe it is a condition where mutually exclusive assemblies compete for prevalence, thereby causing instability, a permanent alternation between metastable states—

Matthieu:

—we simply call that “hope and fear”—

Wolf:

—if no stable state is reachable, if the internal model of the world that the brain permanently has to update by learning continues to be in disagreement with “reality.” If the brain is striving for stable, coherent states because they represent results and can be used as the basis for future actions, and if pleasant feelings are associated with these consistent states, the one purpose of mental training could be to generate such states in the absence of any practical goals. However, to generate such states right away, detached from any concrete content, may be difficult. This is probably the reason that you initially imagine concrete objects—why you try to focus attention on specific, action-related emotions to evoke positive feelings such as generosity, altruism, and compassion, which are all highly rewarding attitudes.

Matthieu:

As opposed to selfish behavior.

Wolf:

Exactly. So you use this imagery as a vehicle to generate coherent brain states, and if the contents are pleasant, then a joyful condition is created. Then, once you gain more expertise in controlling brain states, you learn to detach these states from their triggers until they become increasingly free of content and autonomous.

Altruism and Well-Being

Magic Moments

Matthieu:

“I am anxious to know whether this will happen or not.” “What should I do?” “Why do people behave like that with me?” “I am so worried that they people are saying things about me.” Such streams of thought lead to unstable states of mind. That feeling of insecurity is reinforced by hiding in the bubble of self-centeredness to protect oneself. In fact, within the confined space of self-centeredness, rumination goes wild. Thus, one of the purposes of meditation is to break the bubble of ego grasping and let these mental constructs vanish into the open space of freedom.

When in daily life people experience moments of grace or magic, when walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside or on top of a mountain, what happens? All of a sudden, the burden of inner conflict is lifted. They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world. They feel good, and so the inner conflict disappears for some time. It is great to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they felt so good: pacification of inner conflicts and a better sense of interdependence with everything, rather than fragmenting reality into solid, autonomous entities, a respite from mental toxins. All of these are qualities that can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This practice will lead not to just a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness. It is a satisfactory state because the feelings of insecurity gradually give way to a deep confidence.

Could Feedback Replace Mind Training?

Wolf:

But in this case, you first generate the characteristic activation patterns associated with these emotions and learn something about the quantitative relation between activity and the intensity of a feeling. My question was whether you consider it possible to enhance by trial and error certain brain states that are displayed to you via a feedback loop and then, step by step, get more and more familiar with these states until you can generate them intentionally.

Matthieu:

It may not be impossible, but I don’t think it’s the best way to proceed, and I don’t really see the point of doing so. Simply getting feedback on one particular skill may not help beginners because all of these skills—attention, emotional control, empathy—need to be developed simultaneously, and that is what meditation techniques do. Also, the continuous, long-term use of these techniques, what we call meditation, is based on wisdom, on a deep understanding of the way the mind works, and on the nature of reality (as being impermanent, interdependent, etc.). Feedback techniques may lack the richness of contemplative methods used to develop empathy, altruism, and emotional balance. However, for therapeutic purposes, such feedback training might have great virtues and help people who lack a particular skill, such as attention or empathy, to focus more on developing that skill. They also might help us understand better how the brain functions.

Further, mere feedback or, even worse, direct stimulation may not result in changes in ethical behavior, as in the case of meditation. Stimulating areas of the brain that induce nice sensations, for instance, or taking drugs that make you feel high all the time is unlikely to make you become a more compassionate and ethical human being. It might even leave you feeling more dependent and powerless than ever once the stimulation has ceased.

Wolf:

Some drugs seem to directly activate the structures in the brain that normally would become active only as a consequence of brain states that we addressed as the “good” states—the states free of conflict, the states corresponding to solutions, the coherent states. The drugs obviously do not generate these complex states but act directly on the systems that evaluate these states. They fool these value-assigning systems.

Matthieu:

That is why generating one pleasant sensation after another just to feel good would be at best an impoverished version of mind training and could even have opposite effects. It is impoverished in the sense that the entire idea of the wholesome flourishing of a human being comes from cultivating a vast array of qualities ranging from wisdom to compassion that are meant to achieve genuine happiness and a good heart, which can be said to be the goal of life.

Wolf:

Since the flower power era, psychoactive drugs have often been advocated as a means to open doors toward a better understanding of oneself, by widening one’s realm of experience and creating altered states of consciousness that can be remembered and even cultivated once the drug’s effects have faded. Since around the same time, biofeedback has been propagated as a technique to enter states of relaxation. If you are in a relaxed, idling state, with eyes closed, large regions of the brain engage in synchronized oscillatory activity in the alpha-frequency range around 10 Hz. This activity can be measured easily. If its amplitude is converted into a tone and subjects are asked to try to increase the intensity of that tone, then one observes after some time that subjects are indeed able to increase their alpha activity—and they also report entering states of relaxation.

Matthieu:

Interestingly enough, a preliminary study with meditators trained in Tibetan Buddhism indicated that when one suddenly clears the mind of all mental chatter, alpha waves all but disappear for a while. After the detonation that normally triggers a startle response, the meditator’s mind is left in a crystal-clear state devoid of mental constructs and discursive thinking. So, if these results are confirmed, then a meditator would relate alpha waves to mental chatter, the little chaotic conversation that seems to be going on most of the time in the background of our mind.

Wolf:

Certainly alpha is suppressed when you focus your attention on something. It is reduced when you open your eyes and engage in scrutinizing the environment, an observation which suggests that the alpha a rhythm is incompatible with the engagement of attention. It appears to serve the suppression of potentially distracting activity. However, other evidence suggests that alpha serves as the carrier rhythm for the coordination of higher frequency oscillations and thereby might play a role in the attention-dependent formation of functional networks. I would predict that there is little alpha when you are engaged in your type of meditation because you produce this massive gamma activity, and high gamma activity usually excludes alpha activity.

Matthieu:

As mentioned earlier, we should correct the naïve image of meditation that still predominates in the West as sitting somewhere to empty your mind and relax. Of course, an element of relaxation is present, in the sense of getting rid of inner conflict, cultivating inner peace, and freeing oneself from tensions. Also, an element of emptying your mind can be seen, in the sense of not perpetuating mental fabrications or linear thinking and resting in a state of the clear freshness of the present moment. However, this state is neither “blank” nor dull relaxation. It is a much richer state of vivid awareness. Also, one does not try to prevent the thoughts from arising, which is not possible, but frees them as they arise.

Wolf:

When you say “linear thinking,” you mean serial thinking, going from one item to the next, the typical feature of conscious deliberation.

Matthieu:

I mean discursive thinking, chain reactions of thoughts and emotions, which results in constant mental noise.

Wolf:

Rumination, then, is endless spirals of thoughts.

Matthieu:

Yes, it’s a nonstop proliferation of thoughts based on self-centeredness, hopes, and fears that are mostly afflictive.

Wolf:

It would be interesting to perform a thorough study of the electrographic signature of this chattering or mind wandering. It would perhaps be feasible if it were possible to deliberately switch between chattering and nonchattering states. It would be nice to know the signature of these states of serial processing that make you go from A to B to C in search of a solution. It should be the signature of the states that precede decisions.

Matthieu:

When people are lost in their thoughts, that automatic process may go on for quite some time, and suddenly they find themselves somewhere else completely.

Wolf:

That can be agreeable. It sometimes happens when you read—at least that happens to me. You read and then discover that your eyes continue to go through the lines, but your mind is somewhere else, following a different path. This experience is not necessarily unpleasant, and on occasion it may even spark a creative moment. It may, all of a sudden, provide you with new insights, with unexpected solutions.

Matthieu:

That could be, if you evoke wholesome memories or situations, but still it pertains to the wandering mind, which creates an obstacle to clarity and stability. If you want to evoke particular states of mind, then it would be best to do it with a sense of direction, which contributes to inner flourishing, rather than just drifting along with your thoughts.

Wolf:

Unstable states need not be unpleasant, and I suspect they could even be an indispensable prerequisite for creativity.

Matthieu:

Research done by the neuroscientist Scott Barry Kaufman has indicated that brain states favorable to creativity seem to be mutually exclusive with focused attention. According to him, creativity is born from a fusion of seemingly contradictory mental states that can be limpid and messy, wise and crazy, exhilarating and painful, spontaneous and yet arising from sustained training.41

Wolf:

I wish to come back to discussing the virtues of aversive brain states. As mentioned already, there must be brain states that are identified as desirable and are associated with positive feelings. Likewise, there must be states that the brain tries to avoid—that are associated with or lead to aversive feelings. The latter are certainly as important as the former in guiding our behavior, promoting learning, and protecting us from running into dangerous traps, just as pain is as important as satisfaction. The aversive states motivate the search for solutions that resolve the conflict. Now, aren’t there two complementary strategies to avoid the aversive feelings associated with conflicting brain states? One would consist of taking drugs that dampen the systems causing the aversive feelings—it is like taking painkillers to avoid pain. Along the same lines, you can repress the bad feeling using distraction or attending to something else or you learn to tolerate the aversive state. These strategies allow you to cope with the symptoms but don’t address the cause.

Or, and this is the second strategy, you try to go to the root, find out what the problem is, and then try to resolve it. This strategy may require rumination and inflict temporarily even more aversive feelings, but it may eventually lead to the elimination of conflicting causes and converge to a solution. Both strategies have their virtues. Clearly, the elimination of causes is always preferable. However, if the conflict is not resolvable, if the costs for its resolution are too high, or if it is an illusory conflict, drugs, repression, or learning to cope may be more appropriate than striving for a final but unattainable solution. To which of the two strategies do you think meditation comes closest? Could it be that it is a technique to resolve conflicts by simply dissociating the aversive feelings from the problem, by dissolving the feeling and not coping with the problem itself? If this were the case, then I would assume it is a practice ensuring well-being only in a highly protected environment like a monastery or some other similarly ideal circumstances.

Then there is a third state that I would like to call the idling state, which is associated with neither good nor bad feelings. The brain hovers above ground, ready to engage but not yet engaged in any goal-directed activity.

Matthieu:

We call that a neutral or an undetermined state. It is neither positive nor negative, but it is still imbued with mental confusion.

Wolf:

Every human being is familiar with these three states—positive, neutral, and aversive—because our brains are built that way. We have all developed strategies to avoid the negative states and to stay as long as possible in the former two—and I assume that evolution programmed us that way to ensure our survival in a complex, uncertain world. Now you claim that with mental training, we can reprogram our brains so that we can spend more time in the positive states, with the dual effect that we feel better and at the same time behave more in a way that reduces conflicts in our interactions with the world. This would indeed be the key to heaven on earth, and to me it sounds too good to be true. Where then are the limits of this seemingly golden way to global happiness?

Are There Limits to Mind Training?

Wolf:

We take this for granted because everyone can do this. Think about the memory capacity that is required to store all the scenes that you have perceived in your life. It is gigantic! You know how much memory is required to store a simple picture taken with a digital camera. We go through the world and store all the scenes that we perceive. We do not and cannot recall them at any time, but if the association cues are provided, we realize that they are stored quite reliably. So we all have this memory capacity, but it is not economical to use this brute force strategy of remembering everything to solve problems. It’s much more economical to derive a rule and remember the rule, or just remember where you can find the information. It is more elegant to conceptualize and store a reduced, abstracted representation. Why store a complex situation with all the details if you can represent it with a single symbol, a single word?

Young children have less access to this economical strategy because they still have to acquire the ability to form abstract descriptions and use symbols. Therefore, they rely more on the brute storage strategy, and this is the reason that they always beat you in games like Memory. If the acquisition of the strategy relying on concepts and symbols is impaired because of a brain injury or genetic disposition, then the brute force strategy to remember everything in detail is cultivated. It helps to some extent to cope with life, but many of those autistic savants struggle with normal life because they have difficulties in representing complex relations.

Wolf:

These examples illustrate impressively that brains are capable of performances that go way beyond the imagination of most of us and that, at first sight and without proof of the contrary, we would have judged as impossible. Maybe the same holds for achievements that can be accomplished with intensive mental training. I would not know, however, how to quantify the magnitude of compassion because it is hard to measure phenomena that only exist in the first-person perspective.

The question of whether there is an upper limit to human qualities such as compassion and lovingkindness is not easy to resolve. Let’s assume for a moment that these emotions are encoded in the intensity or salience of neuronal responses. In principle, there are three ways to increase the saliency of neuronal responses. One consists of increasing the discharge rate of the neurons. This strategy is applied for the encoding of sensory stimuli: The stronger the stimulus, the higher the discharge frequency of the encoding neurons. The second strategy is to recruit more and more neurons: The stronger the stimulus, the more neurons will respond because even the less excitable neurons will become active. The third strategy is to increase the synchronicity of the neuronal discharges because synchronous activity drives target neurons more effectively than temporally dispersed input, and therefore synchronous activity propagates more easily and more rapidly within neuronal networks.

Apparently, the brain can use the three strategies interchangeably, as we have recently been able to show in a study published in Neuron.43 We exploited a visual phenomenon called contrast enhancement. The perceived contrast of a grating pattern can be enhanced if it is displayed on a background grating that differs from the target grating either in its orientation or by the relative spatial offset of the stripes. In both cases, the perceptual effect of enhanced contrast is exactly the same, but recordings from the neurons in the visual cortex that respond to the target show that in the first case neurons become more active, whereas in the second case their activity stays the same but becomes more synchronized. Still, there should be an upper limit. Once all neurons in the respective structure discharge at their maximal frequency and in perfect synchrony, no further increase in saliency is possible. So, I would predict that there is a limit to the intensity of an emotion.

Matthieu:

I should add that when I said that one can always conceive of a fuller and deeper compassion, I did not refer only to the emotional aspect of compassion. Understanding the deeper causes of others’ suffering and generating the determination to alleviate them also arises from wisdom and “cognitive” compassion. The latter is linked to the comprehension of the more fundamental cause of suffering, which, according to Buddhism, is ignorance—the delusion that distorts reality and gives rise to various mental obscurations and afflictive emotions such as hatred and compulsive desire. So this cognitive aspect of compassion can embrace the infinite number of sentient beings who suffer as a result of ignorance. I don’t think we have to worry about the magnitude of such cognitive compassion exhausting the capacities of the brain.

Meditation and Action

Matthieu:

To come back to one of your initial questions, I should reply to the accusation of selfishness and indifference that is sometimes leveled at hermits and meditators. Such opinions reflect a deep misunderstanding about the Buddhist path because freeing oneself from the influence of self-centeredness and ego clinging is precisely what makes you more concerned with others and less indifferent toward the world. Meditation is a key process for developing and enhancing altruistic love and compassion. You could argue that it would be even better if the hermit left his hermitage to go and help people. Otherwise, what is he contributing to society? How would he learn about human interaction when remaining alone in his hermitage? This argument makes sense at first glance. Yet there are simple answers to these questions. You need time and concentration to cultivate a skill. While thrust into the often hectic conditions of the world, you might be too weak to become strong, too weak to help others and even to help yourself. You don’t not have the energy, concentration, and time to train. So this developmental stage is necessary, even if it does not appear to be immediately useful to others.

When you build a hospital over a few months or years, the plumbing and electricity works do not cure anybody, yet when the hospital is ready, it provides a much more powerful tool to treat patients. It is worthwhile taking the time to build such a hospital, rather than just saying, “What’s the point in waiting? Let’s operate in the street.” Hence, the idea is to develop skills in an environment that is conducive to mental training, so that one becomes strong enough to display and maintain genuine altruism and compassion even in the most trying and adverse circumstances, when it is most difficult to remain altruistic. I have now been exposed to the world of humanitarian activities for a number of years, and I have seen over and again that the main problems that plague the humanitarian world—corruption, clashes of ego, weak empathy, discouragement—stem from a lack of maturity in human qualities. So the advantages of spending dedicated time to develop human qualities are obvious. You thus gain inner strength, compassion, and balance before embarking on serving others.

Developing the right motivation is a crucial factor to everything we do. The famous Tibetan saint and poet Milarepa said that during the 12 years he spent in solitary retreats in the wilderness, there wasn’t a single moment that wasn’t dedicated to others. By this he meant that he was dedicated to developing the qualities needed to truly benefit others. In the Buddhist path, the core motivation of the apprentice bodhisattva is, “May I achieve enlightenment in order to gain the capacity to free all beings from suffering.” If such an aspiration is genuinely present in your mind, then your practice is the best investment you can make for the benefit of others. This is not the result of indifference but of the sound reasoning that you have to prepare yourself and build up the necessary strength to be of use to humanity.

Matthieu:

People who are gifted might be able to develop all these qualities in the midst of many other distracting activities. However, for most people, it does help to gather all one’s strength from time to time to nurture human qualities with single-pointed dedication. It is quite possible that someone who naturally has a good heart would immediately succeed in helping others, more than a meditator who starts with a grumpy, selfish mind. The point is that they should both continue to improve themselves further, and cultivation does help vastly.

We should not underestimate the power of the transformation of the mind. We all have the potential for change, and it is such a pity when we neglect to actualize it. It is like coming home empty-handed from an island made of gold. Human life has immense value if we know how to use its relatively short time span to become a better person for one’s own happiness and that of others. This requires some effort, but what doesn’t? So let’s end on a note of hope and encouragement: “Transform yourself to better transform the world.”

Earlier, you also alluded to the periods between meditation sessions. This is a central topic in meditation praxis. We call them “postmeditation periods.” These two phases, meditation and postmeditation, should reinforce each other. In fact, this idea was recently demonstrated in a real-life experiment by Paul Condon and Gaëlle Desbordes, who followed three groups for eight weeks. One group was trained in meditation on lovingkindness, one was trained in meditation on mindfulness, and the third, the control group, was left without any training. After eight weeks, the participants’ altruistic behavior was put to the test by observing the probability that they would offer their seat in a waiting room to someone standing against the wall with crutches, showing signs of discomfort. Before the suffering individual enters, the participant is seated on a bench next to two other people (accomplices of the experimenter, along with the “sick” person) who don’t show the least bit of interest in the standing patient (which accentuates the “bystander effect” that is known to inhibit helping behavior). Strikingly, on average, the meditators offered their seat five times more often than nonmeditators.44

So postmeditation activities and attitudes should reflect and express the qualities developed during meditation. There would be no point in achieving some fine meditation state of inner clarity and stability if you drop it completely the moment you stop meditating. Ideally, at some point, the meditator’s skill and experience should be such that the two states begin to fuse.

Wolf:

The same might apply for our discussion. Maybe we should rest and let our brains reorganize what we have learned and continue tomorrow.

Notes