Be true to the thought of the moment and avoid distraction. Other than continuing to exert yourself, enter into nothing else, but go to the extent of living single thought by single thought.
—Yamamoto Tsunetomo (c. 1710)
When I was in my twenties, I was a member of a kendo club in Japan. “Kendo” literally means “the way of the sword,” and is the training discipline developed by the samurai during Japan’s long feudal period. I loved it. At the club I was the only non-Japanese, and during my whole time in Japan it was the only place where no allowances were made for me being a foreigner. Only there, for example, was I called Hooper-kun instead of Hooper-san, “kun” being the familiar, informal suffix used for younger men and boys. Kendo channels Zen philosophy, and I loved being immersed in an element of the culture that was very deeply Japanese. I learned about the difference between what a European knight thought of his sword—as merely his weapon—and what the samurai thought of it. In Japan the sword was revered. Only the samurai were permitted to carry one; it was their most treasured possession, their heirloom.
Once, in training, I leaned casually on my bamboo sword, called a shinai. My kendo sensei struck me hard on the legs with his, and reproached me. Your sword is your heart, he said. I should treat it with respect. I hadn’t really grasped that my shinai was a stand-in for the samurai sword. I never leaned on it again. Kendo is a state of mind as much as it is a form of physical training for fighting, and it was a privilege to learn from traditional, dedicated teachers.
One day we were visited by a highly respected master from another club. He was an old man, and we were given the honor of facing him in combat practice. He held his shinai carelessly, drooping almost, so it grazed the floor. When it was my turn he seemed to be looking away, lost in thought. I was facing him in the usual pose, shinai raised and poised. Yet when I went to attack him—it would require only a small, fast movement to strike his head with my sword—he moved in a way I couldn’t afterward adequately describe. With insane rapidity yet somehow also with apparent casualness, he raised his weapon and struck my helmet before I could complete my strike. Immediately afterward he took on once more the appearance of a distracted old man. For the merest instant he had revealed his true self.
Okay, the anecdote may say more about my poor technique than it does about the old man’s Yoda-like ability, but when he had left, my kendo sensei said the old master had extraordinary powers of concentration and reaction, honed over many decades of practice. He lived in the now. The old man encapsulates what we’re going to explore in this chapter: the ability to focus, to concentrate, and to react. Attention is a quality like the flame of a candle. It is ungraspable yet needs tending; it is always moving; it changes as you look at it. It is the “now” we live in. This is going to sound like a Zen koan, but those who can master the now will be able to perform at a higher level. Those who can focus their minds can achieve great things. “Concentration” is a faculty that exists on a spectrum. It may be exercised in short, intense periods, like the kendo master as he faced me, or it may be deployed in a sustained fashion, over the long term. We’ll look at both forms, starting with the following example.
• • •
In 2004–5, Ellen MacArthur sailed 27,000 nautical miles around the world, nonstop, on her own. It took her 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds, earning her the world record for a solo circumnavigation of the globe. She was twenty-nine. Many thought she wouldn’t be able to break the record, which itself had knocked twenty days off the previous one and was considered safe for at least a decade. No doubt some of the skepticism voiced before her attempt was because she was a woman. But hers was an extraordinary triumph. In France she’s been compared to Joan of Arc; in Britain she’s been called the finest sailor the country has ever produced, and the first true heroine of the twenty-first century. I’ve come to meet her to find out how she did it. What does it take to focus so doggedly on something? How do you maintain concentration twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two and a half months, on your own, with very little downtime? It really does seem like a superhuman feat.
MacArthur is quite short, five-feet-two, and I remember that the seventy-five-foot boat she broke the record with was designed and built especially for her small frame. The voyage was unimaginably tough. Her boat was a trimaran, because triple-hulled boats are faster, but they are also more unstable. MacArthur had come second in a round-the-world race, the Vendée Globe, in 2001. That race is between monohulled boats with keels: if they go over they will probably come back up. “You flip a trimaran and it’s all over and you’re probably dead,” she says. “At any point during the round-the-world, with a few exceptions, you could capsize that boat any time. You sleep with the ropes in your hands.” For most of the time, sleep, however, is an impossible luxury, and you have to get by on naps.
I ask her how she adapted to the stress. “If you got on that boat and sailed around the world, you would have no choice,” she says. “It’s not about adjusting, it’s about surviving. Literally. The boat is like an out-of-control Tube train, it’s so violent.” Half the time, of course, you’re sailing at night. You can never let go, literally or figuratively, for the whole trip. “Mentally it is absolutely brutal. You get to the point where you feel you have nothing left and then something goes wrong. And you have no choice. No one’s going to come and help you.” It sounds terrifying, I say. “No,” she says. “It’s your home; it’s your life. You do get used to it.”
Where does this drive come from, this ability to maintain such extraordinary focus, the resilience necessary to concentrate on the task? “It all stems from having a goal. For me, from the age of four years old, I wanted to sail around the world.”
As a child she’d been on a boat with her aunt, and had immediately loved it. “I thought this was the most amazing sense of freedom I’d ever felt. A boat can take you anywhere. I was so excited by that, I thought this was incredible: the boat had a little home in it, and you could travel with it.”
I find it extraordinary, instructive—and important to remember when we are dealing with them—that even very young children can have clear and burning passions.
From such a very young age, MacArthur says, she always had the idea in her head that someday, somehow, she would sail around the world. This was no phase she would grow out of. She arranged her life so it would progress toward that goal, little by little. “That really dictates the choices you make in life. At four you’re tiny and your life is dictated for you; you don’t have many choices. But as you develop, you have these points where you have a choice.”
The first thing she needed to do was acquire a boat. The only way of doing that, not coming from a sailing family, was to save up. But she was a child, without pocket money. So she saved her birthday money and Christmas money, and even the money for her school lunch. She ate mashed potato and beans at school every day because it was the cheapest lunch, and saved the rest. “I was totally focused. I could’ve had lunch but I didn’t because I was going to buy the boat that I was going to sail around the world on. I didn’t spend money on anything because I was saving for a boat. I’d even go down to the pub and not have a drink all night because I’d worked so hard to save the money.”
She is keen to assert her normality. “I may have gone off and done some crazy stuff, but I feel completely normal. I don’t feel like I’m any different from anyone else, I just decided that was what I wanted to do.” She is uncomfortable with the idea that she is special, but I try and persuade her that most four-year-olds don’t set out to do what she managed. “You overcome barriers if you have this goal to drive toward,” is about as much as she will concede.
The other key point here is that you need that burning desire in the first place. It might strike some people like lightning at a young age, as it did MacArthur. But most of us have to work toward passion just as we’d set targets and work to a goal. We might get lucky and quickly stumble upon something we love and are good at, but most of us will need to shop around.
I love how Ellen MacArthur takes the pressure off the rest of us. “If you really want to do something, don’t think you can’t,” she says, “but most people don’t really want to do something. And that’s fine. That’s brilliant. Life doesn’t have to be about achieving amazing things. It just happened that I wanted to go sailing and sail around the world and then I went and made it happen.”
Identifying a goal and grasping it firmly seems vital for success, and for fulfilling our potential. We saw it with Hilary Mantel’s long-term projects. It’s something we’ll see throughout this book, and it cuts across different traits and abilities. But what do we know about the brains of people who operate at high level in the now?
• • •
The din of tens of thousands of spectators. The roar of engines. The speed. The smells—the heat of the tarmac, gasoline, oil, rubber, hot metal, adrenaline. The anticipation. The money. Vast amounts of money. Formula 1 is a sport like no other. Hundreds of people work on each team, thousands of hours go in to preparing for each race, and on the day, it’s about one man (it’s still usually a man) driving one car.
On June 25, 2017, Lance Stroll, an eighteen-year-old Belgian-Canadian, was that man. He was behind the wheel of a Williams FW40 car capable of speeds in excess of 200 mph, competing in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Stroll is the youngest driver currently racing in F1 and the son of a billionaire. He had been condemned the week before by Canadian driving legend Jacques Villeneuve as “the worst rookie in F1 history.”1 It’s true he hadn’t secured any points in the previous six races, but he had found something in front of his home fans at the Canadian Grand Prix, and finished in ninth place, earning two points. Then in Azerbaijan he drove a race of great maturity and skill, and finished third.
“It’s a terrific result for Lance to become the youngest rookie in history to score a podium. He’s had a brilliant weekend,” said Paddy Lowe, the chief technical officer at Williams. “He’s been faultless in every session, he’s stayed out of trouble, didn’t have any incidents and that carried into the race. He kept it clean, had good pace and managed the car and the tires well.”2
I had no idea of the breadth of the skill set required to drive Formula 1 before I started researching this chapter. F1 drivers race for up to two hours. A Formula 1 circuit is between 4.3 km and 6 km (2.7 to 3.7 miles) long, and it takes about a minute and a half to complete one of the seventy or so laps. Drivers have to maintain intense concentration the entire time under conditions that would cause most of us to panic, spin off, and wipe out. They need incredible reactions, of course, because they are moving so fast, keen spatial awareness, and the ability to process everything that is coming in. Even professionals, on first driving a Formula 1 car, are amazed at how little time there is to think. Drivers need to be able to feel the car—it almost becomes an extension of their bodies. They need to be athletes to cope with the forces that go through their bodies. Racing exerts high g-forces during turns, putting a lot of pressure on the head especially. This goes on for lap after lap, so they need endurance. They need race-craft: an ability to know when to overtake, how to use other cars to their advantage, how to bide their time. It is a kind of patience, but one conducted while driving at high speed. Technically the cars are not easy to drive: they are some of the most complex machines in the world. And there is, of course, real risk involved. A mistake at this speed could be life-threatening.
Very few of us will ever get to race an F1 car, but we all have shorter or longer periods in our lives where we are required to concentrate hard, when we need to focus. “Sustained attention” is how psychologists talk about it. Perhaps if we could do this better, we could improve various aspects of our lives and our performance. The ability to maintain attention is linked to better outcomes in education and employment, and the converse—lapses in attention—blamed for a range of accidents.
I want to find out from those who represent the peak of potential for this trait, so I’ve come to the headquarters of the Williams F1 racing team in Oxfordshire, to talk to Stroll and Luca Baldisserri, formerly sporting director at Ferrari and now mentor to Stroll at Williams.
Motor racing has an incredibly high rate of attrition. Partly because it’s an expensive sport, but also because intense natural selection culls drivers at all stages, from karting, through Formulas 4 and 3, to Formula 1. It is perhaps the most elite of sports, and Stroll is elite in two senses. First, his father has given $80 million to Williams. This has led to claims that Stroll has bought his place in the car, but Lowe and the team hope the performance at Azerbaijan will start to lay those criticisms to rest. Second, to drive in Formula 1 you first have to earn an FIA (International Automobile Federation) Super Licence, and Stroll was also a Formula 3 champion in 2016. Sure, $80 million doesn’t go amiss, but, says Williams, Stroll has earned his place on merit.
I’m entering an exclusive world here. I clear security and steer my jalopy to the vast car park, which is thankfully not full of high-performance vehicles, then meet my chaperone for the visit. I am not allowed to see the 2017 car Williams are racing this year, but I get up close to the 2016 model. I’ve never been a particularly ardent fan of motor racing, but there’s no doubt that this is a beautiful piece of engineering. The steering wheel is baffling—it looks like all the controls in an aircraft cockpit have been condensed onto it. I was hoping to have a go on a driving simulator, but I’m not allowed to even see it. Both the 2017 car and the simulator are fitted with proprietorial, sensitive technology that the Williams engineers do not want leaking. The simulators, by the way, cost many millions of dollars. They are set up by a team of dedicated engineers who monitor parameters such as tire contact, downforce, and engine performance during the simulated race. Drivers sit in the same cockpit as they do when they drive for real, wearing a helmet. It’s as close as you can get to racing an actual F1 car. Most teenage boys have PlayStations; Lance Stroll has a full F1 simulator of his own in his apartment in Geneva.
Stroll is tall, taller than I imagine is optimum for a driver, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. He’s relaxed. He says he lives in the moment, as any eighteen-year-old son of a billionaire ought to. But he is grounded, and there’s nothing of the playboy racing driver about him. He seems more astute and mature than I was at that age, that’s for sure, but then he’s had media training. When he says he lives in the moment he’s referring to when he’s driving. Far from being distracted by all the noise and vibration and the mayhem of the track, he relishes it. It’s when he’s in the cockpit that he performs best. “When I’m behind the wheel and I have my helmet on there’s no distraction, there’s nothing bothering me, nothing getting in my way, it’s the real me,” he says. “I’m very competitive, I’m an attacker and I love speed and I’ve always loved motor sport.”
I speak to James Hewitt about what it takes to perform at Formula 1. Hewitt is head of science and innovation at Hinsta Performance, a company that works with athletes and professionals, including F1 drivers, to optimize their capabilities. Previous clients have included former F1 world champions Sebastian Vettel, Mika Häkkinen, and Nico Rosberg. Hewitt says there is always a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in drivers. The rewards of winning are huge, and the young ones especially feel the pressure to justify the massive investment their supporters have made in them. But there is also huge hedonistic pleasure just in driving at great speed. For most of us, driving so fast would cause stress under which we would buckle. “But for these high performers,” Hewitt says, “they interpret that stress as pleasurable.” An average person’s best performance comes with a moderate level of arousal, but in motor sport the driver’s optimum performance comes at a higher level. “The world is coming at you at three hundred kilometers per hour, it’s also very loud, there’s a lot of vibration, so your body is being highly stimulated,” says Hewitt. “The most successful drivers I’ve worked with, you ask them what they feel and they love it, they absolutely love it.”
Stroll’s love of it comes through when I ask him what he gets out of it. “I get to be myself on the racetrack,” he says. “In the car, I’m not doing it for anyone, it’s just me, the car and the track, and that’s my passion. I feel alive and I feel that’s my drug.”
Various experiments have been conducted to test the effect of this kind of motivation on our powers of concentration. Michael Esterman is cofounder of the Boston Attention and Learning Lab, and a psychologist at Boston University. “The science shows that when people are motivated, either intrinsically, i.e., they love it; or extrinsically, i.e., they will get a prize,” he says, “they are better able to maintain consistent brain activity, and maintain readiness for the unexpected.” Motivation means this consistency doesn’t fall off over time.
Esterman’s team has performed several experiments to test this. In one, participants were shown a random sequence of photographs of cities and mountain scenes, one every 800 milliseconds, while in an fMRI brain scanner. They had to press a button when they saw a city scene (which occurred 90 percent of the time) and avoid pressing the button when a mountain scene appeared (the remaining 10 percent). Sometimes they took part in trials where they were rewarded. In that case, participants earned 1 cent for each city scene they responded to, and 10 cents for not responding to a mountain scene. They were also penalized for getting it wrong. Other trials had no reward or penalty. The results of their brain activity showed that without the motivation of reward, the participants acted as “cognitive misers”: they didn’t bother engaging the brain’s attentional resources until their performance had dipped. Until, in other words, they had dropped out of the zone. When they were motivated by reward, however, the participants were “cognitive investors,” happy to engage their brain and concentrate in order to stay focused on the task.3
“Motivation,” Esterman says, “plays a big role in maintaining optimal attention and focus.” When people are in the zone, they use attention brain regions more efficiently, he explains. “There is greater connectivity, communication, and information transfer in the brain, and they process sensory and visual information with higher fidelity.”
This is what’s happening when Stroll is driving. It’s almost as if everything in his head is working faster, so perhaps to him, driving at 200 mph is like me driving at 100 mph. Of course, racing a Formula 1 car is a different proposition to pressing a button in response to photographs. But the experiments support the idea that a reward helps motivate focus. “Researchers used to believe that attention was a finite resource that could be drained and then had to be replenished,” says Hewitt. “But it’s more complex than that, and it has a deep relationship with our motivation.” When reward and motivation are added to the already world-class talent demonstrated by drivers who make it through to F1, you get exceptional results. “Having that incredible prize on offer coupled with the selection process results in this incredible sustained attention that we see,” says Hewitt. Their attention is such that F1 drivers typically have an uncanny ability to remember what’s going on in their environment in high-definition. Hewitt calls it a superpower and gives the example of a driver in a simulator. “If you pause the simulator, the driver would be able to describe the cues they’re looking at.” For example, drivers will use buildings as cues for braking, but they’ll also be able to tell you about what’s happening on the track: the location of their competitors, as well as data on how the car is performing. Hewitt says an F1 driver’s working memory can hold more discrete items than can that of a normal, untrained driver. F1 these days is very strict about allowing races to continue if weather conditions get too bad, but not so long ago drivers sometimes raced in torrential rain, with visibility essentially zero. “One driver said if you’re driving in the rain at 300 kilometers per hour, you essentially have to determine your braking point and when to turn on intuition and experience and what you remember,” explains Hewitt. The driver in question described being on the straight and counting. When he reached a particular number—one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, say—he would brake and turn.
As to why Stroll loves it so much—why he feels more himself when he’s driving—that’s because he has achieved the state of flow, and flow is a desirable place to be. This is the concept introduced by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow—what Esterman calls being in the zone—is when you are absorbed by a challenging task such that you are completely concentrating on it. The task isn’t so challenging that you panic and are unable to perform, but neither is it so easy that your skill is too great to make it interesting. This is the state F1 drivers enter for two hours when they race. I have a small sense of what this must be like. When I’m snowboarding sometimes I can get into a rhythm of carving turns that is incredibly meditative and transportive. Even cycling to work through London traffic can be pleasurable because my mind is diverted from the normal worries.
Stroll explains what is most difficult, mentally, about racing: “The hardest thing is going a bit beyond your comfort zone in the qualifying lap. To get that extra two-tenths of a second. You know you can get them. But the risk of completely losing it is high.”
I ask if there’s fear, already knowing that he will say there isn’t. Hewitt told me that typically the young drivers won’t even think about the dangers, or if they do, they very quickly pass on and dismiss them.
“It’s not scary, it’s risky,” says Stroll. But the risk he’s talking about is not the possibility of real bodily harm, it’s about not making the maneuver you intended, and losing time. “It’s easy to say in qualifying ‘this is the time I can do,’ but you have to push yourself to get there. It applies in tennis. You want to hit a shot across court. It’s risky but you can do it. That’s what’s enjoyable.”
If it works, you get a great lap in, and that’s the reward. “Your body takes over and you’re completely free and it’s overwhelming,” he says. “It’s quite a feeling.”
• • •
Stroll’s current driving coach Luca Baldisserri was for many years a race engineer at Ferrari, where he worked with Michael Schumacher and Kimi Räikkönen before developing Ferrari’s young-driver program. He sees many young children who can drive, he says, but what he looks for at this early stage—what he considers most promising in a kid—is not driving ability. It is whether they have a goal. It’s what we saw with Ellen MacArthur. Young people, he explains, are very easy to distract, they easily lose concentration. “So the main thing you’re looking for with a child of thirteen is if he or she has a target.”
He met Stroll when the latter was twelve, and could see he was special. Stroll was winning races in karting in North America, but Baldisserri wanted to know if his target was to become a Formula 1 driver.
That was the case with Stroll, even as a child. Like all racing drivers, he was and is super competitive. I ask him about his goals. “You have to live in the moment,” he says, “but my goal is to be Formula 1 world champion and that’s what I work toward.” I suppose you might as well aim for the top. “I want to be the best possible driver I can be,” Stroll says. “I take it day by day. And win the day every day. Win the day. That’s what your focus has to be toward.”
“Win the day” sounds like a line from a psychology-of-performance manual if ever I heard one, but it develops a mind-set of progression, and that’s Baldisserri’s job. “We build intermediate targets, moving up gradually, moving step-by-step,” he says.
He breaks down the training program for a driver into three main components: physical, technical, and mental. He sees the driver as an athlete, who has to train to be physically prepared, while equipping himself technically to drive the car. “You have to deal with the weather, the temperature. You have to understand how the tires are behaving.”
As well as the ability to maintain focus, you need mental strength.
“It’s different to team sports like football. A driver is alone when he’s driving. The family, sponsors, fans, all are watching. Then the drivers have to deal with all the comments.” Stroll has had a lot of negative comments. “It’s in your face when you look at your phone,” says Baldisserri.
“The drivers need to stay concentrated on their objective. You need to create a target for them and help them cope with stress.”
Just as we say some singers are naturally gifted, the same is said of some racing drivers. Lewis Hamilton in particular is often spoken of as having huge natural talent. Baldisserri believes real talent can be seen in the way that a driver judges the battle during a race, assessing how to overtake or protect himself from being overtaken. He needs, too, to have a vision of the race. “You need to have the car in your hand, completely. That’s the main difference between a talented driver and an average driver. The technique of driving you can learn.”
He illustrates this by explaining what he means by having the car in your hand. There are sensors in the car that log in detail all the movements of the vehicle. They can measure the delay between when the car starts to move and when the driver makes a correction. “And if you see shorter delays it means the driver has a lot of feeling. And this is a way of judging if a driver will be able to cope with cars that are faster.”
We’ve seen the power of long-term goals with Ellen MacArthur. And we’ve seen how reward and motivation can help Formula 1 drivers to maintain intense focus. But what’s happening in the brain? To understand that, we need to look at people who are experts at inhabiting the now. We need to find them and put them in fMRI machines. Fortunately, there are many such people, and they’ve been studied extensively.
• • •
When Yi-Yuan Tang was six, he was a schoolboy in Dalian, a relaxed seaside city in Liaoning Province, northeast China. It was here he started contemplative practice, a cousin of meditation, during which you reflect upon your behavior, and train yourself to enter a quiet, thoughtful, peaceful state.
As a boy he started running and found he was good at long distances, especially 3,000, 5,000, and 10,000 meters. “I won all these competitions in my middle and high school years,” he says.
Children are introduced to meditative practice at an early age in China. Tang realized that the practice of narrow-focus meditation—where you focus inwardly, usually on your breathing—was helping his running. Then he started practicing open-focus meditation. This is often performed with a view to optimizing the level of attention you bring to bear on something. Imagine being Lance Stroll driving in that Azerbaijan race. You don’t want to focus too much on what you’re doing, because that could lead to overthinking. At an elite level, this will be to the detriment of your performance. At the same time, of course, you need to be completely focused on the task at hand. This is what mindfulness and meditative practitioners call the balanced attention state but is perhaps best understood as being in the state of flow. Decisions are made swiftly, correctly, and often without conscious thought.
Tang found that meditative practice and running had much in common. More than that, they interacted, so as he became more adept at meditation, he found his running benefited. “It significantly improved my performance because this effortless attention and action reduced my stress and facilitated my flow state during running. In my opinion, a peak performer should use both open- and narrow-focus strategy in meditation or sport.”
Tang maintained his interest in the training of the body and the mind, and the interaction between the two. In the 1990s, borrowing from traditional Chinese practice, he developed a form of mindfulness meditation called integrative body–mind training (IBMT). It emphasizes acknowledging internal and external distraction, for example, awareness of a sore back, or noticing the noise of people talking around you. It is, he says, about accepting these things with equanimity—a concept we’ll come back to at the end of the book. But Tang also became a scientist. He currently holds the Presidential Endowed Chair in Neuroscience at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. And he is a professor in both Texas Tech’s department of psychological sciences and in the department of internal medicine at the university’s Health Sciences Center.
Tang’s work has done much to demonstrate scientifically the effects of meditative practice on the brain. In 2015, with Michael Posner at the University of Oregon, and Britta Hölzel at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, Tang published a review of the evidence in the prestigious journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The trio concluded that more than twenty years of research into meditation supports the idea that it is beneficial for physical and mental health, and that it improves cognitive performance.4 It improves brain power, basically.
For example, Joshua Grant at the University of Montreal in Canada scanned the brains of Zen practitioners who had racked up more than a thousand hours of practice. These seasoned meditators showed less activity in a few areas of the brain than nonmeditators: in the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus.5 These areas are respectively concerned with (among other things) awareness of pain, the processing of emotions such as fear, and memory storage. But some parts of the brain that process pain were thicker in the meditators.6 There’s no contradiction here: meditators process the pain but let it bother them less.
Another study shows how meditators may have a better connection with their subconscious. It follows a famous experiment first carried out in 1983 that suggested we had no free will. The late Benjamin Libet, then a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, measured brain activity as volunteers first decided to press a button, and then actually pressed it. The shock result was that the parts of the brain that control movement become active before the volunteers think they first make the decision to move their finger. This probably just means that our conscious awareness of making a decision lags behind a bit, not that we don’t have the ability to make decisions at all and don’t have free will. Still, in 2016 Peter Lush at the University of Sussex repeated the experiment, but this time using people who regularly meditate. There was a longer gap between when the meditators felt they decided to press the button, and when their finger moved to press it, than in nonmeditators. Lush suggests this means that if you meditate, you have heightened awareness of your brain activity.7 You could say it means you know yourself better.
• • •
On a whim, once, I attended a four-day residential course on Zen Buddhism, held at Engakuji temple in Kamakura, Japan. The temple was founded in 1282 and we stayed in a wooden building on the grounds that was almost as old. At four each morning we were roused by the monks to do morning meditation. It was March, still chilly, and I was seated facing an open window. A complete novice, I had no idea what we were supposed to do, so I sat there cross-legged for hours and my mind wandered. Occasionally a monk farted and I tried not to giggle. I remember suddenly noticing that my thoughts were flowing through my mind and I was watching them, like I was watching fish in a stream. It was like hypnagogia, the weird state between being asleep and awake (we’ll come back to this in Chapter 10). My other vivid memory from that morning has nothing to do with meditation but everything to do with Japan. We sat for hours and gradually dawn broke, and I could start to make out the branches of the plum trees in the temple garden, and then the plum blossoms. If not for the flatulent monks, it could’ve been a scene from a Yukio Mishima novel, but I cherish the memory all the same.
One of Tang’s studies shows you don’t have to be a monk with a thousand hours of experience to get the benefits. Tang and colleagues recruited eighty-six Chinese undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two groups. Half undertook five days of his integrative body–mind training. They spent twenty minutes per day on the exercises. The other half spent the same amount of time in relaxation training, which meant they learned how to voluntarily and progressively relax their muscles. All the students were assessed before and after the five days using the Attention Network Test, a computerized assessment that measures alertness and the ability to resolve conflict. They were also scored for their emotional state using the Profile of Mood States test. The results indicated that the students who had taken the IBMT meditation classes showed greater improvement in the Attention Network Test, and exhibited lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale.8 The IBMT classes were run by experienced coaches, but still, it cuts against the assumption that you need to meditate for years before you get the benefits.9
Meditative practice leads to changes in the very structure of the brain.10 Two areas of the brain known to be key to our ability to focus attention, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insula, a deep fold in the cerebral cortex, both grow in people who meditate. These regions, along with parts of the front midline of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, are activated during cognitive tasks. The ACC, for example, aids in the maintenance of focus by preventing other systems in the brain from barging in and demanding attention. When we are performing tasks that have been practiced over and over, such as adjusting the sails on a trimaran or changing gears in a racing car, the autonomic nervous system plays a big part in carrying them out. That’s the part of the nervous system that acts automatically, performing functions such as regulating the heart rate and digestion. When we are in an effortless state of flow this occurs below the level of conscious awareness, and the ACC and the insula together help the autonomic nervous system achieve it.11
“We have examined training in mindfulness meditation, which involves holding attention rigidly fixed in the present and provides a task of high concentration,” says Michael Posner, referring to the narrow-focus kind of meditative practice. “We have shown that such training increases activation of the ventral ACC and changes white matter pathways surrounding the ACC.”
How does this relate to elite athletes and people at the peak of performance, who have to make decisions fast and under pressure? Perhaps their brains work differently than those of average performers. “One of our working assumptions is that intentions can be unconscious, and that decisions can be made unconsciously, too,” says Peter Lush. “However, once intentions become conscious, they probably become available to other processes.” When this happens, he says, it becomes a hindrance to peak performance.
Lush’s intuitive understanding of flow is that it works not by engaging with our intentions but rather by allowing us to be a nonjudgmental observer of them. For Formula 1 racing, or round-the-world sailing, that would involve sustained concentration on the present moment, which is similar to some aspects of mindfulness, and equates to Tang’s narrow focus, but it also requires open focus, a switch to a global view, and the ability to return to dynamic flow.
It might be that the brains of Lance Stroll and Ellen MacArthur are naturally effective, poised to act as conduits to provide high levels of focus. “Your hypothesis might be correct, although we don’t have clear supporting evidence yet,” says Tang. But probably, too, their relentless pursuit of a clear goal, and their long years of repetitive training, their expertise in their chosen sport, while not overtly influenced by mindfulness and meditation, had a similar effect to meditative practice and structurally changed their brains. Tang agrees: “Activities such as exercise by an athlete can also lead to brain plasticity.” He is now able to meditate himself into a state of “static flow,” in which his mind is beautifully focused, and transfer this to a state of “dynamic flow” when he runs. “In this situation, my body and mind work together perfectly and optimize my performance.” The good news from all this is that the benefits are available to anyone, and it can be easily practiced at home.
Now when I think back to how the old man in my kendo club so easily beat me, I feel I understand much better. It’s not that I’m still smarting because I thought I was so good, but that now I understand how he was so good. Kendo training is strongly influenced by Zen meditative practice, and we’ve seen how the brains of Zen practitioners change as a result of their training. On top of this there’s what I’ve learned from Tang about physical training, the autonomic nervous system, and how those skilled in meditation and sport are able to transition between a static and a dynamic state of flow. The old master had spent decades practicing kendo, and even standing still I guess he was holding his mind in a perfect state, in the moment, poised but in flow, ready.