THE RESILIENT MIND
Thus far, we’ve explored the resilience of large, autonomous systems that are not driven primarily by individual actions and decisions. What happens when we look through the other end of the telescope—exploring resilience through the people and communities that live with and within those systems?
The picture that emerges, at least for individuals, is tantalizingly optimistic. Not only is personal resilience to trauma more widespread than previously believed, but new research suggests there are concrete things we can do to bolster it—to help every person better contend with inevitable disruption and difficulty and, by doing so, amplify the resilience of the larger systems and communities in which they reside.
THE LINGFIELD FOUR
In 1945, following World War II, an orphanage in the village of Lingfield in Surrey, England, arranged to take twenty-four young child survivors of the Holocaust into their care. Most of the children, between the ages of three and eight years old, were either arriving from concentration camps like Auschwitz and Terezin or had been living in hiding. They were already veterans of traumatic stress: Children from the Terezin camp had been present at mass hangings and many of them over the age of six had been forced to pass boxes of human ashes back and forth. The Auschwitz children had been surrounded by the stench of dead bodies, waking to the sight of the crematoria smoke each day. Those in hiding had been betrayed by former friends and neighbors and often forced to take different names and identities from their parents. Their lives had been so plagued by disruption and uncertainty, upon their arrival at Lingfield, one of these children asked, “Will the walls be here tomorrow?”
The four youngest children were only months old when they arrived at the Terezin concentration camp. They had spent the first two and a half years of their lives in the camp’s Ward for Motherless Children, cared for by a string of prisoners waiting for deportation to Auschwitz. One of their inmate caretakers described their environment in a letter in 1946:
There was always too much work and too few people to help me. Besides looking after the children we had to see to their clothes, etc., which took time. We looked after the bodily welfare of the children as much as possible, kept them free of vermin for 3 years, and we fed them as well as possible under the circumstances. But it was not possible to attend to their other needs. Actually we did not have the time to play with them.
These four youngest children arrived at Lingfield severely malnourished and small for their age. They had never received any consistent caretaking and, for the most part, they focused on their own group as a source of attachment and comfort.
Eventually three of these toddlers were adopted, while the fourth, a young boy referred to as Berl, returned to Lingfield after two unsuccessful attempts at living with new families.
In 1979, when all four of them were thirty-seven, an American psychologist named Sarah Moskovitz found these child survivors, originally described in a monograph by Anna Freud and Sophie Dann. She conducted a series of follow-up interviews with them both in 1979 and 1984 to document their progress over time. Berl and Leah, the smallest and weakest of the youngest four, suffered the most. They both struggled socially and academically. Leah was referred to as “the whiner” by the adults at Lingfield and, in her interview with Moskovitz, she expressed deep feelings of shame and anxiety as well as noting that she suffered from sleeplessness as an adult. Berl had refused to stay with his two adoptive families and lived in the institution until, at age seventeen, an aunt and uncle adopted him and brought him to the United States. When Moskovitz found him, he was still living with them, a barely functional thirty-seven-year-old man debilitated by numerous severe pathologies.
Berl and Leah survived but they struggled, riddled with anxiety, shame, and sadness about the past. More surprising were the interviews with Jack and Bella, the other two members of the quartet. When Moskovitz found him, Jack was happily married with a supportive wife and two children. He owned his own taxi in London and he described the pleasure he took in meeting new people and the adventure of each ride. He struggled with depressive bouts from time to time, most often originating from his desire to know more about his mother, but, by all accounts, he was managing life well.
Perhaps most remarkable was the interview with Bella. Upon arrival at Lingfield orphanage, Bella immediately started exploring, finding her way from the dining room all the way across the institution to her room. After living there only a short time, she earned the moniker “Bella-Pick-It-Up” because she managed to coerce all the older kids to pick up her things for her. She “chose” her adoptive parents by marching up to her future father and sitting on his lap. When Moskovitz interviewed her as an adult, she described Bella as sunny, vital, and confident:
Despite her husband’s recent heart surgery she believed that they could come through anything together. She had started a business dealing in art which was doing well and which she enjoyed. She also worked as magistrate on cases involving children.
In spite of everything she had encountered in infancy and early childhood, Bella not only survived, she flourished. Moskovitz called her a model of resilience and encouraged mental health workers to reach out to other child survivors as a means of gaining greater insight into risk and adversity.
How could four children brought up in the exact same traumatic circumstances land in such vastly different places in life? Why do the Berls and Leahs of the world languish while the Jacks and Bellas cope and even flourish?
These questions began getting serious attention for the first time in the 1960s and early ’70s when a number of psychologists working at the intersection of child psychiatry and developmental psychology began to investigate the early childhood factors that impeded healthy growth and development, including mother-child separations, divorce, prenatal complications, and, arguably the greatest risk factor of all, poverty. Much of this work was predicated on clinical psychologist Norman Garmezy’s pioneering work with schizophrenic patients. In the course of his research, Garmezy came across a curious finding: Even in the face of difficult circumstances, some of the adult schizophrenics he worked with had surprisingly functional lives. They held jobs, managed to keep their activities in order, and even maintained satisfying romantic relationships. These subjects—labeled “reactive” in Garmezy’s study—stood in stark contrast to the “process” schizophrenics, who seemed to live life in a series of revolving doors between institutions, unemployment, and homelessness.
The differences between these two groups piqued Garmezy’s interest, and he initiated a new experiment to study the children of schizophrenic parents. Much to his surprise, he found that 90 percent of the children exhibited normal functioning, including good peer relationships, academic achievement, and purposeful life goals. Garmezy urged his fellow clinicians to focus less on risk factors and more on “the forces that move such children to survival and adaptation.” At his call, a fuller body of work on psychological resilience started to take shape in the early 1970s.
In the initial stages of this nascent field, social psychologists touted the strength and fortitude of their subjects. Phrases like “the invulnerable child,” “superkids,” and “vulnerable but invincible” were picked up by the media and news organizations, creating the impression that such children were endowed with extraordinary coping skills. The reality was more nuanced. As Ann Masten, Garmezy’s protégé, described:
The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena. Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems.
Masten went on to argue that if these basic human adaptational systems are protected and in good working order, most children will meet their developmental milestones, even in the face of great adversity.
Resilience was not the stuff of extraordinary superkids after all. It was commonplace. So much so, in fact, that Masten titled her paper “Ordinary Magic.”
So why don’t psychologists have a more widespread appreciation for our innate characteristic of resilience? The answer, it turns out, is rooted in the history of psychology and in our own cultural responses to adversity and trauma.
In 1991, not long after finishing his PhD, newly minted clinical psychologist George Bonanno was offered a position to study bereavement at the University of California in San Francisco. He originally intended to spend a few years in the field of trauma and bereavement, familiarizing himself with the literature before moving on to what he imagined to be less morose territory. What he discovered, instead, was a body of research that included surprisingly little quantitative analysis.
“I kept arguing that we needed to be more precise,” he said. “We needed to work with long-term prospective data in a way that tracked people empirically, using number crunching to calculate distributions of people. That was the only way to escape the confusion of older, more conceptual models.”
Bonanno has spent the better part of two decades working with just these types of empirical models, studying how people cope with trauma and loss. The results have surprised everyone, most of all himself.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the grieving process was filtered through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud referred to grief as the “work of mourning,” a term he introduced in a piece titled “Mourning and Melancholia,” written at the height of the First World War. The “work of mourning” described the exhaustive process by which the libido detaches from the now nonexistent object of grief. In simplified terms, Freud theorized that if one didn’t process each and every memory involving the deceased and then create some psychic distance from them, the mind would inevitably break down and one would begin to exhibit neurotic behavior.
As with so much of Freud’s work, it’s important to remember the context within which his ideas developed. His theories were rooted in intimate, individual observation, not statistical analyses of populations, and though they obviously reflected his own thinking, they also reflected a cultural backdrop of mass trauma and loss during the First World War.
These ideas exploring grief were relatively nascent in Freud’s writings and they might have remained so if Freud’s followers had not pulled together the threads of the theory. Psychoanalysts who treated patients suffering from grief expanded on Freud’s ideas and, through their reinterpretations, the notion of “grief work” caught hold in Western culture. One of the most influential of these analysts was the American psychiatrist Erich Lindemann. In 1944 he published a seminal paper that proposed that all grief was delayed, festering in the unconscious and wreaking all sorts of havoc on the psyche. Lindemann believed that even if the bereaved seemed outwardly to be coping well with loss, his delayed grief would come back at some future time to haunt him.
Once these tenets of grief work took hold, various stage models started to appear, the most famous of which is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and an ultimate acceptance. While these stages are popularly understood to apply to all types of grief, in actuality, Kübler-Ross developed them based on her work with terminally ill cancer patients who were working to accept their own mortality, not that of another. She had never once tested the model with subjects grieving the loss of another person or experiencing other forms of trauma.
In sum, by the last decade of the twentieth century, the bulk of Western cultural assumptions about the grieving process were based on almost no quantitative research at all. There was essentially one conceptual model for processing grief, and any framework for human experience deviating from it was viewed as apostasy.
This was the world of ideas George Bonanno encountered when he accepted the position in San Francisco back in the early 1990s. Unlike his predecessors using only Freudian theory as a framework, Bonanno wanted to analyze how grief and trauma were expressed in populations, not just in individuals. Much akin to the way the marine biologists monitored the triggering events of coral reefs, Bonanno wanted to investigate people’s psychological response to a short, sharp shock: What happens after a traumatic event pushes us from our everyday state of mind into a state of extremis?
To investigate these ideas, in 2002, Bonanno joined a project called Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC), initiated at the University of Michigan. The CLOC team conducted interviews with approximately 1,500 married people in the Detroit area over the course of a decade. Bonanno wanted to identify the participants who exhibited psychological resilience after the loss of a spouse.
This is not to say that he was looking for people who were completely unaffected by the death of a loved one or incapable of feeling sadness. Rather, Bonanno wanted to ascertain how many people actually experienced the delayed grief, denial, or theoretical stages of mourning that made up the bulk of our cultural understanding of bereavement.
To conduct his research, Bonanno needed to reach out to the CLOC subjects who lost a spouse throughout the course of the study. This narrowed the initial group of 1,500 down to 205 participants. After conducting a series of interviews with subjects after their loss—augmenting the information gathered from interviews conducted before the loss—Bonanno was able to the break responses down into five main patterns: (1) chronic depression, (2) chronic grief, (3) depressed-improved, (4) recovery from grief, and (5) resilient. As indicated by the pattern names, the chronic depression group suffered from pathology both before and after the loss. The chronic grief group functioned well preloss but were paralyzed by grief both immediately after the loss and several years later. The depressed-improved group experienced depression before the loss but reported a positive affect after the loss. The recovery from grief group experienced feelings of grief like yearning, shock, and anxiety that eventually subsided. And, last but not least, the resilient group experienced no significant trauma either immediately or several years after experiencing the loss.
The fact that these five patterns emerged did not surprise Bonanno. The real shocker was their relative distribution across the group. If the Freudians were right, then every one of those people suffering a loss could be expected, in the absence of grief work, to become dysfunctional. But only 25 percent of the CLOC subjects were debilitated with chronic grief or depression, and the number of subjects exhibiting delayed grief was so small—3.9 percent—that it registered as barely a blip in the statistical results. Of the remaining cohorts, 20 percent of the grieving participants recovered on their own while 45.9 percent reported no debilitating grief at all. This was the group, almost half of the population, that Bonanno labeled resilient.
It bears repeating that Bonanno was not defining resilience as a lack of feeling or absence of sadness. He used the term “resilient” to identify people capable of functioning with a sense of core purpose, meaning, and forward momentum in the face of trauma (echoing our own definition: “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.”) By all accounts, the resilient cohort felt great sadness after their loss, and they were seriously challenged by the navigation of a major life change. But they described moving on—adapting and even growing from the loss—without experiencing the stages of grief or the consequences predicted by failing to do Freudian grief work.
In short, they bounced back.
These same patterns and sizes of cohorts have been identified in the wake of traumatic events like natural disasters and terrorist attacks. After the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, Bonanno and his research team did large-scale surveys with various groups of New Yorkers. The cohort that experienced the greatest difficulty, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised those who had both witnessed the attacks firsthand and lost a loved one. Bonanno found that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was higher in this cohort than in his randomly sampled groups—approximately 30 percent—but still didn’t exceed a third of the group.
Over and over again—in natural disasters, after the SARS epidemic, following the loss of a child or spouse—Bonanno’s longitudinal studies on loss and trauma revealed the exact same pattern at the population level. No matter how bad the trauma, rates of PTSD never exceeded one-third, and rates of resilience were always found in at least one-third and never more than two-thirds of the population.
“This pattern of response is so ubiquitous, and so consistent, it begs the question: Why are we, as a species, designed this way?” asks Bonanno.
One possible answer is that the design ensures that there is always at least a sizable minority, or even a majority, to take care of those deeply affected by a trauma.
• • •
Personal resilience has a dizzyingly long list of correlates. Although it would be impossible for us to give adequate treatment to all of them here, it is worth taking some time to go over a few of the more salient ones. Among these, innate personality traits like optimism and confidence have emerged as some of the most protective assets against life’s stressors. Think of Bella and Jack at Lingfield orphanage: According to Moskovitz’s study, they were able to charm the adults and function with self-agency at the orphanage, creating a positive feedback loop with the staff and their families that resulted in better and better care. This ego-resiliency—defined as the capacity to overcome, steer through, or bounce back from adversity—was first noted by developmental psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block in 1968, in a highly regarded longitudinal study documenting the lives of one hundred young adults over more than thirty years. In addition to ego-resiliency, the Block study measured a characteristic they called ego-control, or the degree to which an individual has the ability to delay gratification in service of future goals. Subjects exhibiting the combination of ego-resiliency and ego-control were better able to adapt flexibly to different circumstances and succeed in the midst of challenges.
Such personality traits are rooted in belief systems that allow one to cognitively reappraise situations and regulate emotions, turning life’s proverbial lemons into lemonade. Social psychologists refer to this as hardiness, a system of thought based, broadly, on three main tenets: (1) the belief that one can find a meaningful purpose in life, (2) the belief that one can influence one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and (3) the belief that positive and negative experiences will lead to learning and growth. Considering this, it should come as no surprise that people of faith also report greater degrees of resilience.
Psychologist Kenneth Pargament has spent the lion’s share of his academic career investigating the links between religion and resilience. In addition to offering all of the benefits of a community—including support groups and coping methods for people financially or socially disenfranchised—Pargament attributes the power of religion to its invocation of the sacred. His work specifically distinguishes between secular coping mechanisms and sacred ones, those that work in direct collaboration with a god by either creating a partnership or relying on the utter relinquishment of control. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in his seminal essay “Religion as a Cultural System”:
The strange opacity of certain empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all—no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniable—that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon the just—but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is unendurable, and that justice is a mirage.
This connection between religious faith (or, more broadly, a personal spiritual cosmology) and resilience presents an intriguing rejoinder to atheist critics of religious beliefs. While such beliefs may or may not be true, they may nonetheless be adaptive. That is, religious belief persists and thrives, in part, not because it necessarily guarantees persistence of one’s soul in the next life, but precisely because it confers a measure of psychological resilience upon its possessors.
Of course, religious practitioners are not the only group that exhibits a high degree of resilience. Cultural identity also plays a role. For example, researchers found that Hispanics deemed at high risk by all the standard indicators appeared healthier as a group when they expressed a strong attachment to their Hispanic heritage. Such a finding suggests that members of a culture affirming strong in-group loyalties will exhibit greater personal resilience, a point we will revisit in greater depth in our coming discussion of cooperation.
The ability of members from certain communities to bounce back from adversity is also aided by high-functioning social networks—friends, family, religious and community organizations, satisfying jobs, and access to government support and resources. A seminal forty-year longitudinal study by researchers Emmy E. Werner and Ruth S. Smith, published in 2001, followed nearly seven hundred children growing up in Hawaii with risk factors like poverty, parental discord, and prenatal stress. Werner and Smith concluded that social factors—such as the support of an adult role model in the community—buffered the effect of adversity and appeared to predict positive outcomes in anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of their high-risk population. In 2000, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, showed that access to social resources like a supportive relationship with a teacher and a variety of well-organized extracurricular activities correlated with high academic achievement. Conversely, their studies suggested that children’s exposure to violence—primarily intrafamily and neighborhood—had significant negative effects on their mathematics and reading performance on a standardized exam.
Social resources are the oil that greases the wheels of well-functioning social networks. And a flurry of new research suggests that these networks can even have a physiological impact. Psychologists Sarah Pressman and Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon found that college freshmen with larger social networks had a stronger immunological response to getting a flu shot, while Alexis Stranahan, David Khalil, and Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University found the converse: that social isolation can reduce the physical benefits of exercise. Socially isolated rats sprouted fewer new neurons and neural connections as a result of wheel running than rats living in groups. Social isolation is not just bad for our psychological well-being. It appears to leave its trace at the cellular level.
All of these, and many other, correlates to personal resilience are rooted in our beliefs and our experiences. Whether cultivated through wise mentors, vigorous exercise, access to green space, or a particularly rich relationship with faith, the habits of personal resilience are habits of mind—making them habits we can cultivate and change when armed with the right resources.
This brings us to another, less appreciated aspect of personal resilience: the influence of genetics. The sequencing of the human genome in the last decade has led to a flurry of speculation that scientists would one day identify genetic triggers for undesirable traits like a depression gene or an alcoholism gene. Today our understanding of behavioral genetics is more nuanced. We recognize that the emergence of traits and behaviors is informed by the dynamic interplay between genes, lived experience, and triggers in the environment. Behavioral geneticists call this framework genes-environment interaction (GxE).
About thirty-five years ago, researchers from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, initiated a longitudinal study with more than one thousand infants across New Zealand. This birth cohort was then assessed every two years or so on many different life factors, creating a data set that, like Bonanno’s CLOC study, was a gold mine for behavioral scientists doing population studies. In 2003, researcher Terrie E. Moffitt and her husband and co-investigator, Avshalom Caspi, used the Dunedin study to investigate the impact of a gene called 5-HTT, which helps regulate the transmission of serotonin, a neurotransmitter implicated in a wide variety of mood disorders. (Antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft, for example, target serotonin and its ability to transmit nerve signals in the brain.)
The 5-HTT gene has two variations, called alleles, and each allele occurs in either a long version or a short version in a wide variety of species, including human beings. In previous studies with mice and monkeys, animals with two long 5-HTT alleles coped better with stressful situations than those with two short alleles or one short and one long. The mice with two copies of the short allele were much more fearful when encountering loud noises, and the monkeys with short alleles had impaired serotonin transmission when raised in a stressful environment.
Moffitt and Caspi were curious about how this gene might be distributed in the New Zealand birth cohort and analyzed 847 members for stressful events like a death in the family, job loss, and romantic breakup. Out of those subjects who met the criteria for recent stressful events, a whopping 43 percent with two short alleles reported experiencing depression versus only 17 percent for subjects with at least one long allele. Caspi and Moffitt concluded that the shorter variant of 5-HTT rendered subjects vulnerable to adversity, while the long allele acted as a buffer. Without the environmental trigger, however, they speculated that the difference between short and long alleles mattered little in the subjects’ lives.
Geneticists call this theory stress diathesis or genetic vulnerability—the idea that certain gene variants can increase a person’s propensity toward depression, anxiety, and any number of other pathologies like antisocial and sociopath behavior, if—and scientists make a point of emphasizing this if—the subject encounters potentially traumatic or stressful life events. Caspi and Moffitt’s study emphatically did not prove the existence of a depression gene. Rather, the study used empirical analysis to show how GxE might create depression vulnerability.
Subsequent meta-analysis (i.e., studies of the studies) of the correlation between personality traits like neuroticism and depression and variations in the 5-HTT gene have been mixed (due perhaps to differing methodologies of the underlying studies involved), suggesting that the correlation may be smaller than originally found. Yet research continues to find some persistent correlation between 5-HTT and specific traits like optimism and happiness, which suggests that the long and short allele variants may be among a host of many hidden factors that cause the Berls and Leahs of the world to have a different life experience than the Jacks and Bellas.
So what can we do for them? Genetic correlates to resilience are illuminating from a scientific perspective but they don’t offer tangible benefits to the cohort suffering from trauma in Bonanno’s studies. After all, we can’t control our own genes. And even if we could, it’s impossible to say what triggers might set off our as-yet-untested vulnerabilities.
The standard tool kit for treating trauma includes pharmacological intervention and intensive therapy. These are important tools, often essential to the healing process, and we heartily endorse their appropriate use. But they may not be accessible—financially or logistically—to everyone. They also may not be the right intervention for every circumstance, and, we hope it’s uncontroversial to say, it would be better if other interventions could obviate their need in the first place.
Current research in neuroscience is revealing the effectiveness of one tool in particular that can complement other forms of intervention: This tool is portable, teachable, free, and it’s been on the market for more than two thousand years. It’s called mindfulness meditation.
EMOTIONS AND RESILIENCE
Before we look at how we might use this tool, we need to slightly adjust the way we conceive our own emotions. For most of us, emotions are things that happen to us. We might be going happily about our day when, in the presence of some small social injustice or irritant, we’re hit by a wall of anger. Boom! We feel upset. The relationship between the event and our emotion is one of causation: The event causes us to feel a certain way. It’s not like we have any choice in the matter. Other times, our emotions creep up on us, but no less involuntarily. We might wake up in the morning feeling bright and cheerful until, slowly, throughout the day, a veil of sadness descends upon us. These things—our emotions—seem to function of their own accord. When they strike, we feel little control over them.
Researchers who study mindfulness and attention often conceive of our emotions differently. In their view, emotions are not things that happen to us. Rather, they exist—metaphorically, of course—as a kind of psychic currency, held in reserve. When we waste this reserve—giving over our attention to every single distraction from the outside environment—it dwindles down into an empty account, and we are left feeling fatigued or, worse, in a downward spiral of negative affect like anger or despondency. With practice, on the other hand, we can train ourselves to spend deliberately and judiciously, keeping us from draining our own emotional coffers.
Mindfulness meditation training is the tool that lets us do so. It allows us to take more intentional control over our emotions. Some of this training is drawn from Eastern religions—specifically Buddhism—but we present our findings with a completely secular intent: These tools of meditation, mindfulness, and increasing awareness have been proven to aid in resilience training. And, unlike other tools that depend on innate characteristics, genetics, and social resources, these training exercises are entirely under the control of the individual using them.
There are many systems of meditation, so the following examples are by no means exhaustive, but they provide a framework for discussing the different ways in which our brains regulate attention. Meditation experts often refer to two different styles: focused-attention and open monitoring. Focused-attention meditation maintains attention on a specific object of concentration; when thoughts and sensations arise, the mind allows them to pass without clinging to them and then brings itself back to focus on the chosen object. This process—what we will refer to later as “detachment”—cultivates the presence of an internal witness observer, capable of stepping back and disassociating from the environment, focusing instead on the chosen object.
In open monitoring, on the other hand, the object of focus recedes and a sustained awareness of all sensory experience is cultivated. Open monitoring—what we will later refer to as “attending”—is characterized by an open, present, and nonjudgmental awareness of stimuli in the environment.
There is a third type of meditation that will play the pivotal role in our story of personal resilience. It is often referred to as “loving-kindness,” or a practice of compassionate meditation. This is the technique of cultivating greater empathy through meditation, beginning first by focusing on loved ones and then expanding the focus of compassion toward all beings. Such practices, performed by meditation masters, produce significant activity in the insula—a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion—as well as the temporoparietal junction, an important part of the brain for processing empathy. One man in particular has been fundamental to bringing more attention to this, as well as other practices, casting his scientific lens on the contemplative arts so that researchers might appreciate meditation’s ability to radically alter our brain chemistry.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is tall and lanky. If you squint while looking at him, you might even mistake him for a graduate student with that slightly disheveled hair and suede-elbowed jacket. In fact, Davidson is sixty years old, and he is both a distinguished scientist and an avid practitioner himself of mindfulness meditation. When Davidson was at Harvard in the early 1970s, he became interested in incorporating these and other contemplative studies into his graduate work in psychology and neuroscience.
“When I approached my advisers with the idea,” Davidson said, “they told me, in so many words, that I would never have any kind of career with that focus. They felt that I would never be taken seriously as a scientist.”
Instead of tossing aside his research interests, Davidson took a life-changing journey to India in 1974. He immersed himself in contemplative traditions through a meditation retreat and then returned to Harvard to complete a doctorate in biological psychology. He has been at the University of Wisconsin in Madison ever since, and today he directs both the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
In many ways, Davidson’s journey as a researcher mirrors that of George Bonanno. Before the 1990s, his field of study—psychology—was primarily interested in negative emotions. The research was slanted toward emotions like fear, anxiety, and disgust. But Davidson was interested in looking at positive emotions like kindness and compassion.
“Twenty or thirty years ago, compassion wasn’t on the scientific map whatsoever. And yet, compassion is in our repertoire of behavior and in the repertoire of nonhuman primates as well. It appears to be something fundamental to who we are. To not have a serious inquiry into that fact was very limiting.”
In 1992, the Dalai Lama invited Davidson to India to meet with monks with extensive experience in the contemplative arts. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration between Davidson’s lab and a rotating cast of Tibetan Buddhist monks—the gold-medal champions of meditation practice—who regularly visit him in Madison and participate in his experiments.
In June 2002, Matthieu Ricard, a monk from the Shechen Monastery near Kathmandu, entered Davidson’s lab. Having spent tens of thousands of hours in meditation practice, Ricard is a mindfulness expert. But he is also a scientist, a graduate of the Institut Pasteur with a PhD in molecular genetics, as well as the son of famous French philosopher Jean-François Revel. His unusually diverse background gives him the tools to bridge conversations between the scientists in Davidson’s lab and practitioners of the contemplative arts like his own community of monks.
Ricard was instructed to meditate on unconditional loving-kindness and compassion while his brain waves were analyzed with fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, the first experiment to ever use such equipment in service of analyzing meditation’s effect on the brain. What followed continues to awe Davidson and his fellow researchers. Ricard’s brain waves started oscillating at approximately 40 cycles per second, indicating powerful gamma activity. Gamma waves—underlying the highest of our mental activities, including consciousness—are usually difficult to detect, but Ricard’s were prominent. Even more remarkable, the EEG output also showed a synchronization of the oscillations throughout Ricard’s cortex. As this is a common phenomenon in patients under anesthesia, it suggests that Ricard is able to block out sensations of pain through thought manipulation alone.
Lest we forget, Ricard’s brain was not commonplace—he has been rigorously training it over the course of several decades. Like body builders who decide they need to work on their biceps, Ricard and his fellow monks have spent most of their lives intentionally changing their conscious thoughts through contemplative practice. The results in Davidson’s lab showed unequivocal changes in the physiology and behavior of the monks’ brains. Monks with more than ten thousand hours of practice showed significantly greater activation of their limbic systems, indicating that their brains had changed to reflect their focus on empathy. Lab results also showed that their baseline brain functioning was altered even when outside of a meditation practice, suggesting that the brain changes were permanent.
For Davidson, the research was empirical confirmation of something he had been trying to investigate for years: the transformational powers of meditation on the brain. Until recently, the thrust of most psychological research on temperament held that once an individual reached the post-adolescent, young adult period, he or she was relatively static. Whether the person was categorized as fearful, angry, or shy, psychologists theorized that these characteristics would be constants. But the EEG scans coming out of Davidson’s lab served as a corrective to arguments for fixed traits and attributes.
“Our brains do change,” Davidson explained. “This is a concept we now know in neuroscience as neuroplasticity. But the possibility of transformation, even radical transformation, has always been implicit in the Buddhist traditions.”
Over the last twenty years, countless studies have emerged illustrating the ways our minds change in response to activity and life experiences. Brain scans have shown that taxi drivers in London have a larger-than-average hippocampus—the part of the brain associated with navigation—compared with bus drivers, perhaps because they have to hold so many routes in their minds. And professional musicians have been found to have higher volumes of cortical matter—areas of the brain that engage while playing an instrument, including motor regions, anterior superior parietal areas, and inferior temporal areas—compared to nonmusicians.
But what about the rest of us? If meditating monks—experts at mindfulness—can train their brains to focus on positive emotions like compassion after years of practice, is it possible for novice practitioners to gain the benefits as well? Can meditation serve as a resilience booster, inoculating the brain against anxiety and stress and, possibly, genetic influences like the variants of the 5-HTT gene?
In January 2011, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Dr. Sara Lazar, reported a suggestive finding. Lazar took magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the brains of novice subjects, who then participated in an eight-week meditation program. At the end of the eight weeks, after using a form of open monitoring meditation for an average of twenty-seven minutes a day, Lazar and her team scanned the subjects again. They found measurable changes in the regions of the brain associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection, including increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, as well as decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Control subjects who did not receive the training had no meaningful changes in their brain physiology.
“These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent brain plasticity associated with meditation practice,” reported Lazar. And, unlike the meditation experts studied in Davidson’s lab, these subjects were entirely new to the practice of meditation, suggesting that the brain can change relatively quickly.
Lazar’s research on meditation and neuroplasticity is mirrored by provocative research that suggests a complementary link between meditation, well-being, and physical longevity at the cellular level.
Each cell in your body except your sex cell has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes; one set each from your mother and father. These chromosomes package your genes—the long-form instructions, written in the language of DNA, for making you. A cooking metaphor is incomplete but instructive: You can think of each base pair of DNA molecules as a single line in a recipe for a specific dish; each gene is equivalent to the completed recipe; each chromosome is akin to a cookbook of such recipes; and all the chromosomes together like a complete library of French cooking.
At the end of these chromosomes are telomeres—stubs of DNA that, like the protective endpapers at the joints of a cookbook, keep the spools of DNA they contain from unraveling. Each time most of the different types of cells in our bodies replicate in order to make new copies of themselves, the telomeres guarding their chromosomes lose a bit of their DNA. After many replications, the telomeres are worn away entirely; soon after, the cell dies.
In 2004, University of California, San Francisco, brain researcher Elissa Epel and her colleagues found that chronic stress also chips away at telomeres, reducing the maximum number of times that a cell can reproduce and accelerating the aging process.
Epel’s team studied women aged twenty to fifty who had experienced the lasting stress of taking care of a child with a severe chronic illness, such as autism or cerebral palsy. They also studied a control group of women whose children were healthy. The research team found that the longer a woman had been caring for an ill child, the shorter her telomeres and the lower her level of telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the length of telomeres. In addition, the greater each subject’s perception of her stress, the worse she scored, across the board. Women with the highest perceived stress had the telomeres of a woman a full decade older. (This might be why so many U.S. presidents, for example, leave the office looking like they’ve taken an accelerated aging pill.)
In 2010, a group led by UC Davis researchers Tonya Jacobs and Clifford Saron, and which included Elissa Epel, concluded a study that suggests a possible reverse correlation—between meditation, mind-set, and enhanced longevity. In the study, a group of thirty subjects were each given six hours of meditation a day for three months. During the training, subjects were instructed in techniques of focused attention—attending to the mind’s activities in a nonjudgmental way—and the generation of benevolent mental states, such as compassion, empathy, and equanimity.
After the meditation training, the subjects were compared to a control group of subjects matched for age, sex, body mass index, and prior meditation experience who had been waitlisted for the same meditation training (and then subsequently received it).
The subjects who had meditated were found to have a dramatically increased sense of mindfulness (being able to observe one’s experience in a nonreactive manner), purpose in life (viewing one’s life as meaningful, worthwhile, and aligned with long-term goals and values), perceived control (over one’s life and surroundings), and decreased neuroticism (negative emotionality) when compared to the control group.
All of this might be the expected, natural psychological consequence of meditation. However, when the retreat group’s blood was analyzed, it was also found to have substantially increased telomerase—that enzyme responsible for maintaining telomeres. Telomerase activity was about one-third higher in the white blood cells of participants who had completed the retreat than in the matched group of controls.
This was particularly strongly correlated among subjects who reported that, during the retreat, they found an increased sense of their purpose in life. “The take-home message from this work is not that meditation directly increases telomerase activity and therefore a person’s health and longevity,” says Saron. “Rather, meditation may improve a person’s psychological well-being, and in turn these changes are related to telomerase activity in immune cells, which in turn has the potential to promote longevity in those cells.
“In other words, activities that increase a person’s sense of well-being may have a profound effect on the most fundamental aspects of their physiology,” he adds. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be meditation per se; it’s really about creating conditions in which you can flourish and your purpose can come into being.”
It’s important to note that these findings are suggestive—not definitive. Jacobs, Saron, and their research team undertook a snapshot in time, not a longitudinal study. But the results are tantalizing.
While Davidson’s lab continues to study the cultivation of compassion and kindness through meditation, Lazar’s lab finds evidence for its physical impacts on the brain, and Jacobs, Epel, and Saron uncover links between the meditating brain and the mechanisms of cellular aging, research scientist Raffael Kalisch at the University of Hamburg is interested in using detachment techniques as a potential tool for pain management. In one of his experiments, he attached subjects to wires before telling them that they would receive a painful electric shock at some point in the next fifteen seconds. Normally this kind of announcement would instigate physiological and psychological responses: increased heart rate, perspiration, maybe difficulty breathing, perhaps even a sensation of panic. Imagine that moment at the doctor’s office, right before you get a shot: “Now this won’t hurt a bit . . .”
Kalisch and his team, however, trained their experimental subjects in the practice of detachment, based on mindfulness meditation exercises.
“We encouraged our subjects to imagine themselves in a geographically distant position, to look at the situation as if they were standing outside of it,” Kalisch said. “They were instructed to tell themselves that the stimuli did not concern their inner core self.”
The detachment thought process—involving cognitive reframing of the situation—goes against most of our primal instincts. In the face of an imminent attack on our body—pain, shock, violence—most of us feel threatened. Kalisch trained his subjects to reframe the painful shock as irrelevant and to conceive of their core selves as unaffected.
The intervention worked: His team showed that the detachment techniques reduced anxiety (reflected by physiological measures like heart rate and skin conductance) when compared with control subjects immersed in the experiment. Such results suggest that we can utilize withdrawal and detachment exercises when we feel threatened in daily life or overwhelmed by stress. Much like Matthieu Ricard’s brain was able to achieve a state similar to an anesthetized subject’s, these kinds of detachment techniques can form the basis of long-term pain management strategies. Once these habits of mind are firmly established, they are that much easier to maintain due to their well-trodden neural pathways in our brains.
Such findings offer promise for those looking for a long-term strategy for pain and anxiety management, but certain jobs and situations are so extreme that detachment is not a viable option. Imagine you’re a firefighter or an ER doctor: You’ve been working for eighteen hours without a break and you may not have anything left in your emotion account to reframe the situation. There is no time to try to find a mental health worker—much less sit down for a session with one—and many of the psychopharmaceuticals on offer have side effects that might impede your cognitive functioning. These are the moments when a meditation practice like attending confers an advantage, bringing support to places that other interventions simply can’t reach. Amishi Jha, professor of psychology at the University of Miami, is teaching these techniques to workers who struggle with on-the-job stress every single day: United States military personnel.
Jha’s project, entitled the STRONG Project (Schofield Barracks Training and Research on Neurobehavioral Growth), is working with a small group of Marines both before and after deployment. She is looking for an alternative to mindfulness training techniques like detachment that exhaust both the emotional coffers and executive functioning skills like decision making and spatial recognition, what she refers to as the “working memory capacity.” In a combat soldier, Jha argues, this capacity becomes impaired through stress, lack of sleep, physical duress, and anxiety. Her training techniques help exhausted soldiers stay mindful and present without asking them to reappraise their experience or detach from their current situation.
“All of the cognitive reframing required for other meditation practices involves tapping into an already drained tank, further depleting them,” Jha said. “It might actually make things worse.”
Jha’s research suggests that the practice of attending will better help soldiers maintain emotional control in the midst of a cognitively demanding set of circumstances like warfare. And, although the sight of men in army fatigues sitting in the lotus position and staring at their nostrils does not call to mind a warrior’s pose, Jha maintains that it is the very foundation for every soldier’s effectiveness on the battlefield.
“I keep telling the generals, look: the things you want these guys to do—use their weapons appropriately, find the right route, etc.—are the exact same things that will require them to regulate their emotions. They can’t do these things if they’re freaking out and shooting each other. This kind of training will, we hope, bring together the two sides of the same domain: emotions on the one hand and the hard-core mission skills on the other.”
Whether choosing long-term meditation practice or attention-focusing techniques in moments of high stress, mindfulness serves to bolster an individual’s psychological resilience with a tool that’s portable, teachable, and free. Most encouraging of all, it has been proven to work, over and over again, not only with the relatively healthy cohort that Bonanno identified throughout his studies—the Jacks and Bellas of the world—but with those susceptible to or already suffering from trauma. For the Berls and Leahs in our communities, individual resilience can become a habit of the mind.
Yet even the hardiest individual cannot go it alone—our resilience is rooted in that of the groups and communities in which we live and work. In turn, at the core of social resilience are two factors that we’ll now explore in some detail: cooperation and trust.