In 2000, an extraordinary meeting took place in Dharamsala, India. Some of the leading specialists in the study of emotions—psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers—spent a week in dialogue with the Dalai Lama in the privacy of his residence, among the foothills of the Himalayas. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to take part in the fascinating meetings organized by the Mind & Life Institute, founded in 1987 by Francisco Varela, an eminent neuroscientist, and Adam Engle, an American lawyer. The dialogue dealt with ways of dealing with destructive emotions.1
During this meeting, one morning, the Dalai Lama declared, “All these discussions are very interesting, but what can we really contribute to society?” During lunch, after an animated conversation, a proposal was made to start a research program on the short- and long-term effects of training the mind, that is, meditation. In the afternoon, in the presence of the Dalai Lama, this project was adopted with enthusiasm. This was the beginning of a series of groundbreaking research in the contemplative sciences.
A few years earlier, Francisco Varela, Richard Davidson, and Cliff Saron, assisted by Alan B. Wallace, had come to Dharamsala with a portable electroencephalograph and, encouraged by the Dalai Lama, carried out tests on some meditators. But the experimental conditions were far from ideal; we had to wait till the year 2000 for the “contemplative neurosciences” to really take off.
Studies were launched, and I was fortunate to take part in several of them, especially in the laboratories of the late Francisco Varela in France; Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz in Madison, Wisconsin; Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson in Berkeley; Jonathan Cohen and Brent Field at Princeton; and Tania Singer in Leipzig.
It seemed logical to begin by studying subjects who had practiced meditation for many years. They were the ones, in fact, who could be expected to have the most significant brain transformations. If the results of their tests didn’t reveal any change in their brain or behavior, it would have been pointless to observe other subjects who had only meditated for a few months or weeks. If, on the other hand, important changes were observed in experienced meditators, we could then ponder how they had arrived at that state, then study the way a beginner progresses over time.
In the initial phase, Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson studied about twenty individuals—monastics and laypeople, men and women, Easterners and Westerners—who had completed between 10,000 and 60,000 hours of meditation devoted to developing altruistic love, compassion, attention, and awareness over the course of intensive retreats (often lasting several continuous years), along with fifteen to forty years of daily practice. As a point of comparison, at the time of the entrance exam for a leading music conservatory, a proficient violinist has completed about 10,000 hours of practice.
Analysis of the data very soon showed spectacular differences between meditators and untrained subjects. The former had the ability to give rise to precise, powerful, and lasting mental states. The areas of the brain associated with compassion, for example, presented a considerably greater activity in those who had meditated for a long time. What’s more, each type of meditation had a different “signature” in the brain, which meant that meditation on compassion activated a series of areas in the brain (called a “neural network”) different from those activated when the subject meditates, for instance, on focused attention.
In the words of Richard Davidson, “It demonstrates that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.”2 The research also showed that the greater the number of hours of practice were, the greater the change in brain activity was. Since then, numerous articles published in prestigious scientific journals have reported on these studies, making research into meditation respectable, a field which, till then, had scarcely been taken seriously.
During the first series of experiments in Madison, a protocol was established by which the meditator would alternate between a neutral state and several specific meditative states, involving different attentive, cognitive, and emotional states. Six types of meditation were chosen: focused attention, altruistic love combined with compassion, “open presence” (see below), visualization of mental images, fearlessness, and devotion. These spiritual exercises that a Buddhist practitioner performs over many years produce meditation that is increasingly stable and clear.3 Only the first three types of meditation were chosen for the remainder of the research, since they involved qualities that, far from being specifically Buddhist, had a universal value and could be cultivated by everyone.
In the framework of the laboratory experiments, the scientists measured the observable differences between the cerebral activity of a meditator at rest, called a “neutral state,” and the brain activity during meditation. So that a sufficient amount of data could be gathered, the meditator alternated many times between forty-five-second periods of rest and periods of meditation that lasted one to five minutes. An entire session could last up to two hours, during which the subject had to remain completely motionless, lying in a scanner if the recording apparatus used a functional MRI, or seated more comfortably if it used an electroencephalograph. These two techniques were complementary: electroencephalography (EEG) is temporally very precise, but imagery by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is much more precise spatially.
The scientists also added a number of behavioral and cognitive tests to measure attention, emotional balance, resilience, resistance to pain, empathy, and prosocial behavior. In particular, the research explored the changes that can occur in the six main “emotional styles” described by Richard Davidson: resilience, or the ability to recover from adversity; outlook, in the temporal sense, or how long you can sustain positive emotion; social intuition, how adept you are at picking up social signals from the people around you (facial expression, body language, tone of voice, etc.); self-awareness, how well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions; sensitivity to context, how good you are at regulating your emotional responses according to the context you find yourself in; and finally attention, how sharp and clear your focus is.4
From 2000 to 2013, over a hundred men and women, monastics and laypeople practicing Buddhism, and many beginners, volunteered for these scientific experiments at about twenty renowned universities.5 In April 2012, the first International Symposium for Contemplative Studies gathered over 700 researchers from all over the world for three days in Denver, thus marking the arrival of this field of research.
This researche has shown not only that meditation caused major changes, both functional and structural, in the brains of the volunteer practitioners, but also that a few weeks of meditation, at the rate of thirty minutes a day, already induced significant changes in cerebral activity, the immune system, one’s quality of attention, and many other parameters.
The practice of concentration consists of choosing an object on which one focuses one’s attention, which one tries to maintain without letting oneself be distracted. This training aims to pass gradually from an unstable, capricious state of mind to a state of mind in which clear, stable attention prevails, along with the ability to manage emotions and inner peace. Whatever quality you wish to cultivate, it is indispensable to refine your attention; if you don’t do so, the mind will not be available for the training one wants to accomplish. During this exercise, one generally focuses one’s concentration on a precise element; this could be the in-and-out of the breath, a physical sensation, or an external object, a dot of light, for instance, on a laboratory screen. One then lets one’s mind rest attentively on the chosen object, and one brings it back if one perceives it has strayed.
A relatively experienced person (averaging 19,000 hours of practice) can activate zones of the brain linked to attention much better than an untrained subject; on the other hand, among the most experienced subjects (averaging 44,000 hours of practice), less activation of these zones is noted, even when their attention remains stable.6 This observation agrees with certain 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 when he or she was still in the learning phase.
Researchers have also established that three months of diligent training in meditation considerably improved the stability of attention.7 The attention of the subjects studied required less effort, varied less from one test to another, and was less distracted by disturbing sounds, which testifies to better cognitive control.8
Other studies have shown that the practice of attention also allowed meditators to see clearly a complete sequence of words or images that changed rapidly, whereas people usually perceive and identify one image and then fail to identify the next two or three images due to a phenomenon called “attentional blink.”9 Usually the attention drawn by an object turns to that object, sticks to it for a while, then detaches from it. This process takes a certain amount of time, and an untrained person misses the second and third images that follow because his mind is still occupied with dealing with the first one. When an experienced meditator places himself in a state of “open presence,” or full awareness of the present moment, he is completely receptive and welcomes whatever comes to him without clinging to it, which considerably reduces, or may even eliminate, attentional blink.
To meditate on altruistic love and compassion, first you think about someone close to you; you give rise to unconditional love and kindness toward them. Then you gradually extend this love to all beings, and you continue in that way until your whole mind is filled with love. If you notice this love diminishing, you revive it, and if you become distracted, you bring your attention back to love. For compassion, you begin by thinking of someone close to you who is suffering, and you sincerely wish for that person to be free of suffering. Then you proceed as you did for love.
When the subjects participating in a study conducted by Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz meditated on altruistic love and compassion, a remarkable increase was observed in the synchronization of brain wave oscillations in the gamma frequency, usually associated with increased connectivity and coherence between different areas of the brain.10 The level of synchronization achieved by expert meditators was of a “magnitude that has never been reported earlier in the neuroscience literature,” according to Richard Davidson, and the intensity measured in the gamma frequencies increases according to the number of hours (from 15,000 to 60,000, depending on the subject) devoted to meditation practices that give a preeminent place to cultivating altruistic love.11
More precise brain imagery showed that the areas strongly activated during meditation on altruistic love were already known for their association with empathy, positive emotions, maternal love, sense of affiliation, reward and a sense of wholesomeness, and preparation for action in general (the premotor cortex).
In two subsequent studies, carried out in the same laboratory, Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson showed that when experienced meditators in a state of compassion listened to recordings alternating between that of a woman crying out in distress and of a baby laughing, activation of several areas of the brain linked to empathy was observed, including the insula. This zone is more activated by the distress cries than by the baby’s laughter. A close correlation is also observed between the subjective intensity of meditation on compassion, the activation of the insula, and cardiac rhythm.12 This activation is all the more intense when the meditators have more hours of training. The amygdala and the cingulate cortex are also activated, indicating increased sensitivity to others’ emotional states.13
It seems, then, that cultivating a meditative state linked to positive emotions like altruistic love and compassion modifies the activity of brain regions and networks known to be associated with empathy.14
Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues also showed that six to eight weeks of meditation on altruistic love, at a rate of thirty minutes per day, increased positive emotions and one’s degree of satisfaction with existence.15 The subjects feel more joy, kindness, gratitude, hope, and enthusiasm, and the longer their training was, the more marked were the positive effects.
At Emory University in Atlanta, Chuck Raison’s team also demonstrated that meditation on altruistic love reinforces the immune system and diminishes inflammatory response. These researchers notably proved as well that reduction of the levels of a hormone linked to the inflammatory process (interleukin-6) in the blood was proportional to the time devoted to meditation.16
Other studies, summarized in an article by Stefan Hofmann17 of Boston University, confirmed that meditation on altruistic love and compassion not only increases positive moods but also diminishes negative moods.
Meditation on open presence consists of letting your mind rest in a clear state, at once vast and vivid, and free from discursive thoughts. The mind is not focused on any particular object, but remains completely present. When thoughts arise, the meditator does not try to block them, but simply lets them vanish on their own.
In this meditative state, self-centered feelings slowly fade away, thereby favoring the spontaneous blossoming of altruistic love and compassion. According to meditators who have cultivated open presence, without the barriers of selfishness and attachment to ego, love and compassion arise spontaneously and are free of discriminations.
It turns out that like meditation on altruistic love, the practice of open presence also gives rise to a notable increase of brain waves in the gamma frequencies, accompanied by increased connectivity and synchronization between various parts of the brain.
What we have described up to this point shows that meditation entrains major functional changes in the brain—that is, modifications in the activity of certain areas of the brain due to meditation are observed during well-defined cognitive and emotional processes. It is also important to demonstrate that these changes are accompanied by modifications in the structure of the brain.
An initial study directed by Sara Lazar and her colleagues at Harvard established that among longtime meditators who had on average a dozen years of experience, the volume of the cerebral cortex had increased.18 More recently, Britta Hölzel has shown that structural changes were already occurring after an eight-week training period of meditation on mindfulness. She observed an increase of density and thickness of gray matter in the left hippocampus (the area linked to learning and emotional control), as well as in other areas of the brain.19
In Paul Ekman’s laboratory, meditators took part in an experiment that measured the ability to identify correctly facial expressions that convey various emotions. A series of faces appeared on the screen, expressing joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, or surprise: six emotions that are universal, biologically determined, and expressed in the same way throughout the world. First a neutral face was shown, then the same face expressing an emotion and remaining on the screen for a mere thirtieth of a second. The emotive expression was again followed by a neutral expression. The images showing the emotion went by so quickly that you could miss them by just blinking your eyes. The test consisted of identifying, during that thirtieth of a second, the facial signs of the emotion just glimpsed.
These “micro-expressions,” as Paul Ekman calls them, are in fact involuntary movements that occur constantly in our daily lives and that are the uncensored indicators of our inner feelings. The ability to recognize these fleeting expressions indicates an unusual aptitude for empathy.
Studying thousands of subjects taught Ekman that those most gifted at performing this task are also the most open to new experiences, the most curious about things in general, and the most reliable and efficient. The two experienced meditators who took this test did much better than the others at recognizing these fleeting emotional signs. Both obtained higher results than those of the 5,000 subjects previously tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officers, judges—even Secret Service agents,” a group that till then had been shown to be more precise. “It seems that one benefit of some part of the life paths these two have followed is becoming more aware of these subtle signs of how other people feel,” Ekman observed.20
It is interesting to note that, according to other studies, people who have more control of their emotions behave more altruistically than those who do not. A free, serene mind is more likely to consider painful situations and the suffering of others from an altruistic point of view than a mind constantly disturbed by internal conflicts and preoccupied with its own reactions (fear, anxiety, anger, etc.).
Other scientific experiments have shown that it was not necessary to be an extremely well-trained meditator to benefit from the effects of meditation, and that twenty minutes of practice a day over a few weeks led to significant changes.
Helen Weng, a researcher at Richard Davidson’s laboratory, compared two groups: in one, the participants meditated for just two weeks on altruistic love for thirty minutes a day, and in the other, they took part in “cognitive reevaluation.” Weng observed in the first group an increase of prosocial behavior. What’s more, in only two weeks of meditation on altruistic love, a diminution of the activation of the amygdala, an area of the brain linked to aggression, anger, and fear, was observed.21
By using a prosocial game created at the University of Zurich, which gives people an opportunity to help another participant surmount an obstacle at the risk of earning a lower score for oneself, Susanne Leiberg, Olga Klimecki, and Tania Singer showed that participants who received a brief training in meditation on compassion helped more than those who had received a training to improve memory (in order to compare the effects of this meditation with another type of active training having nothing to do with altruism). These researchers showed that increase of prosocial behavior toward strangers was proportional to the period of time spent training in compassion, carried out two to five days before.22 The fact that a relatively brief training can have a lasting effect presages good possibilities for putting such training into practice in schools and hospitals.
This was recently demonstrated by Paul Condon and Gaëlle Desbordes, who followed three groups for eight weeks. One group was trained in meditation on loving kindness, the other in meditation on mindfulness, and the third, the control group, was left without any training. After eight weeks, the altruistic behavior of the participants 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 and 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) who don’t show the least bit of interest in the standing patient (which accentuates the “bystander effect” mentioned previously, known to inhibit helping behavior). Strikingly, on average, the meditators offered their seat five times more often than non-meditators.23
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) devised through a cooperation between scientists from Stanford University and Thubten Jinpa Langri, the main interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, is developing an eight-week Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) course designed to develop compassion, empathy, and kindness for oneself and others, which combines traditional contemplative practices with contemporary research. Hooria Jazaieri and colleagues have shown that CCT resulted in significant improvements in three domains related to compassion—the capacities to generate compassion for others, to receive compassion from others (which is difficult for people who suffer from anxiety, depression, and self-criticism), and self-compassion (feelings of caring and kindness toward oneself).
Having social connections is a fundamental need for humans, and many studies demonstrate the benefits of social bonding on mental and physical health. In the contemporary world, however, societal changes linked to individualism, with an increasing number of people living alone, have led to greater mistrust and more alienation.
Is it possible to reinforce our feeling of belonging and our connection with those around us? We know the importance that trusting other people has on social harmony. The diminution of this trust is accompanied by prejudices against those who are not included in our close circle. Various methods have been used to reduce these prejudices. Some stress the harmful consequences of discrimination;24 others favor positive personal contact with members of a group against which one has prejudices.25 Researchers are now interested in methods that would not only lead to a reduction of negative attitudes, but also increase positive attitudes.
The psychologist Cendri Hutcherson, who became interested in Buddhist meditation on altruistic love, has shown that a single, seven-minute practice session increased feelings of belonging to the community, social connectedness, and kindly attitudes toward strangers.26
Similarly, Yoona Kang at Yale demonstrated that six weeks of meditation on altruistic love considerably reduced discrimination against certain groups (people of color, the homeless, etc.).27
We know that anticipating what we are about to feel plays a large role in the experience of pain. In general, we can more easily bear pain whose duration and intensity are foreseeable. We can less easily endure unexpected pain, whose intensity risks increasing, and whose duration is unknown. Assessment of pain, then, depends in a large part on our mental state. For example, we accept the painful effects of a medical treatment when we have the hope of getting better, or a painful physical training in order to excel at sports. Many people are willing to donate their blood or an organ to save the life of someone close to them.
Can meditation influence our perception of pain? Several research laboratories have focused on this question. Studies carried out by David Perlman and Antoine Lutz at the University of Madison showed that when experienced meditation practitioners placed themselves in a state of open presence and were then subjected to intense pain, they perceived that pain with the same clarity and acuity as untrained subjects, but the unpleasant aspect of the pain was considerably diminished.28 Moreover, trained meditators don’t anticipate the pain with anxiety, whereas untrained subjects do. After the painful sensation, they return more quickly to a normal emotional state. Finally, they become more accustomed to the pain than beginners do.29
Fadel Zeidan and Joshua Grant at the University of North Carolina showed that after only four days of training at twenty minutes a day, the subjects who entered into a mindfulness meditation and then were exposed to pain rated this pain on average 57% less unpleasant and 40% less intense than the subjects in a control group who hadn’t undertaken any training.30
Studies by Tania Singer’s team at the Max Planck Institute that are currently under way show that when experienced practitioners undertook meditation on compassion for a suffering person and were simultaneously subjected to physical pain (an electrical shock on the wrist), compassion for others considerably attenuated the unpleasant quality of their own pain.
Telomeres are segments of single-strand DNA situated at the end of chromosomes. They ensure the stability of genes during cellular division but are shortened every time the cell divides. When the length of a telomere diminishes below a critical threshold, the cell stops dividing and gradually enters into a state of senescence.31 Telomeres are nevertheless protected by an enzyme called telomerase.32 Thus, the aging of cells in our body, our health, and our longevity are affected by the activity rate of telomerase.33
Cliff Saron at the University of California at Davis studied thirty meditators who had practiced meditation on focusing the mind, as well as on altruism and compassion. The meditators had practiced an average of six hours a day for three months over the course of Alan Wallace’s Shamatha Project. The study revealed that telomerase activity was considerably higher after the three months of practice among meditators than among members of the control group. This study is the first to highlight a link between positive and altruistic psychological changes induced by meditation and telomerase activity.34 The researchers also showed that the practitioners benefited from better mental health and found more meaning in their lives.
Secularized and scientifically validated, these meditation techniques could, for example, be usefully integrated into educational programs for children—a kind of mental equivalent of physical education—as well as into the therapeutic management of emotional problems in adults. When Daniel Goleman asked the Dalai Lama what he expected from these experiments, the Dalai Lama replied:
Through training the mind people can become more calm—especially those who suffer from too many ups and downs. That’s the conclusion from these studies of Buddhist mind training. And that’s my main end: I’m not thinking how to further Buddhism, but how the Buddhist tradition can make some contribution to the benefit of society. Of course, as Buddhists, we always pray for all sentient beings. But we’re only human beings; the main thing you can do is train your own mind.35
The practice of mindfulness, based in particular on the method of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), developed with immense success by Jon Kabat-Zinn over the last thirty years, has been gaining worldwide recognition and interest, not only in the clinical world where it was first applied, but also in educational systems and in the corporate world. Properly practiced, mindfulness meditation will naturally give rise to altruism and compassion. However, in order to avoid any risk of using mindfulness as a mere tool to increase one’s concentration for achieving goals that might be ethically questionable, we feel that embedding a clear component of altruism from the start, in what could be called “caring mindfulness,” might offer a very potent, purely secular way to cultivate benevolence and promote a more altruistic society.