The employees at Promega Corporation, a biotechnology company outside of Madison, worked long hours under stressful conditions. They were typical people working in the high-tech world, and perfect subjects to test the hypothesis that a little mindfulness can change your life. And that is how twenty-five employees at Promega—scientists, laboratory technicians, marketers and managers—learned to meditate.
Every week, Jon Kabat-Zinn traveled from Boston to Madison, carrying a boom box, a set of meditation tapes, and his Tibetan chimes.
11
Kabat-Zinn pioneered mindfulness training from his post at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Once a week, for two and a half hours, the employees sat on the floor, practicing “mindfulness.” They were also expected to practice the meditation technique on their own for forty-five minutes a day. They were taught how to look at their thoughts and emotions clinically, like an outsider, and test their external reality. Is this project really killing me? Will winning that account solve all the problems in my life? Mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn told them, could free them from the bondage of their emotions. Sixteen other employees would serve as a “control group,” receiving no training until after the study was completed.
Kabat-Zinn, Davidson, and other researchers wired up all forty-one people to EEGs to determine their brain-wave activity. Before the mindfulness meditation, the employees’ “set point”—or natural attitude—was anxious and worried. That was reflected in their brain activity, which tipped to the right prefrontal cortex, the anxious, worried section of the brain. After eight weeks, however, employees steeped in meditation said their moods had improved; they were feeling less anxious and more engaged at work.When they were hooked up to the EEG again, their brain-wave activity had shifted leftward, to the “happy” part of the brain. In little more than two months, they had traveled from the bleak grays of February to the vibrant colors of May—a seasonal shift that took place not in the weather but in their minds. The control subjects remained in the anxious zone the entire time.
The employees of Promega had rewired their brains and moved their set points, for the affordable price of forty-five minutes a day. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have been persuaded that the brain is “plastic” and moldable, even into late life. But for something as “fixed” as a set point to be neurologically unstuck and moved to a happier zone in
two months
—well, who knew that changing one’s mind could alter one’s brain so quickly?
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Now we are talking about a reasonable time frame, I thought. And when I learned that one of Davidson’s research assistants named Helen Weng was trying to determine if the meditation could change the brain in as little as
two weeks,
I wanted in. In journalism, where a news story has a shelf life of a few minutes, two weeks is a frivolously long time to concentrate on any one subject. I could handle two weeks.
So I signed up. Or I tried to. It turns out that at forty-seven, I was too old to be included in the study. They had set an arbitrary age limit of forty-five. Still, I decided to practice the compassion meditation training every day for two weeks, and see what happened.
For thirty minutes every morning, with the house dark and still, I put on my headphones and absorbed the soothing voice of Helen Weng.
May you be free from suffering,
she intoned gently in a taped message,
may you have joy and peace.
In the first part of the exercise, I was instructed to wish happiness and freedom from suffering on a loved one, noticing any physical sensations around my heart as I did so. Next, I was to shower myself with compassion; then repeat the exercise for a stranger, someone I did not know but saw on occasion; and finally turn my compassionate thoughts toward a “difficult” person. At the end of each session, I wrote down my thoughts and feelings.
I was a poster child for meditative failure. I excelled at wishing well of my loved ones. I recalled wrenching episodes involving my mother or brother or close friend, even cried a few times as I lived their suffering. I enjoyed showering compassion on a stranger, making up elaborate stories about the young lost soul at Starbucks, the mailman, the colleague at work who was diagnosed with cancer. The problem arose during the rest of the session. When I recounted sad events in my life and tried to relieve my own suffering, sometimes I began to sniffle; then I grew ticked off at the person who caused the suffering. By the time I had meditated for thirty minutes, I was feeling sorry for myself, in a foul mood, pouring angry screeds into my journal about the injustice of my life. My husband kept a wide berth during those two weeks. He was visibly relieved when my compassion training ended.
“So, is there a capacity to change my brain if I continue doing this?” I asked Richard Davidson when I met him a few days later. I did not disclose how ill-tempered I had become.
“Absolutely,” he assured me. “I would say the likelihood is that you are already changing your brain, be it very modestly, in ways we may or may not be able to measure.”
I shuddered inwardly.
Davidson smiled. “Keep practicing,” he said.
The Mind and the Brain
In the scores of interviews for this book, I noticed a predictable chasm between people who had experienced transcendence and those who had not. Both would burn at the stake for their positions.
On the one side marches the well-armed, highly trained, battle-tested brigade of scientists who insist that everything is caused by material processes. These scientists—and they are the vast majority of the academic community—believe that thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions arise from the interaction of brain chemicals and electricity. They arrive at this conclusion through observation, using material instruments to measure a material brain. They echo the assertion of Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA with James Watson. In his book
The Astonishing Hypothesis
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he stated, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
On the other side of the debate is a small, underfed, and under-armed guerrilla force lobbing single grenades from the bushes. These scientists insist that cells and molecules do not determine all of human existence. They claim that molecules do not explain love, or willpower, or the occasional glimpse into spiritual dimensions. Significantly, I noticed that scientists who had
themselves
waded into spiritual waters—through prayer, meditation, or a near-death experience—
always
fall into the spiritual camp. Their personal experience trumps the assumptions of modern science.
That is what made Richard Davidson such an enigma. Despite being steeped in meditative practice for thirty years, despite his close friendship with the Dalai Lama, he remains certain that everything boils down to material stuff. Meditation trains the mind to appreciate “the interconnectedness, the sense of there being a larger purpose,” he told me. But in the end, he said, it is nothing more than brain activity.
Okay, now I was really confused.
Interconnectedness
and
larger purpose
sound like pretty metaphysical concepts to me. Forget about the “spiritual” realm, I said. Let’s ratchet it down a level: Can one’s thoughts—mind states—affect one’s brain states? Can thought affect matter? Wasn’t that the take-away from the studies on Buddhist meditators and even the biotech employees—that their meditative thoughts affected their material brains?
Apparently not, according to Davidson. “When you say mind states affect brain states, what we’re really talking about is how certain parameters of the brain can affect other parameters of the brain,” he said coolly. “When we engage in the process of training our mind, what we’re engaging in is the process of using our
brain
to change our
brain.
”
A few days later I called Davidson and asked him to elaborate. I could not quite grasp how the three-pound mass called my brain dictated everything I felt, thought, or did.
“Let me give you a simple example,” I said. “I wanted to call you to ask you some follow-up questions. Can you explain how my
brain state
caused me to pick up the phone and dial your number? Where did that intention, the desire, arise from in the first place?”
“It’s fully explainable, based upon the prior conditions and circumstances to which an individual is exposed.” Davidson sighed, for surely I was the dimmest of students. “In the case of the phone call, you have reminders that you’re supposed to make this phone call, you have a calendar, you see these cues, those cues elicit the intention. There’s nothing magical about it.”
Afterward, I kept thinking, I’m just not smart enough to understand that we are wholly material organisms driven helplessly by material interactions in the brain. I know it will all become clear eventually. All the while, my intuition rebelled. This reductionist thesis seems to contradict life as we experience it every day. It ignores free will and choice, the elements that differentiate you from your parakeet, the fact that I chose to marry Devin and not Lee, to force myself to go running in the rain, to spend my vacation revising this book, which certainly had no immediate evolutionary purpose. How could blind molecules in my brain decide those issues?
I put the question to Matthieu Ricard, a scientist who has coauthored some of Davidson’s studies. Ricard is a Buddhist who has meditated for, on average, two hours and twenty minutes a day, seven days a week, for the past thirty-five years. He lives in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama and serves as his translator. Ricard told me that the idea that brain and mind are the same—that we are a bag of molecules and our brains merely react to stimuli—makes no sense to him. Consider free will.
“If you say,‘Okay, just to prove my free will exists, I’ll do something completely against nature and biology. I’m going to sit on my chair until I collapse. I’m not going to go to the bathroom. I’m not going to eat. I’m not going to drink.’ A functional brain—except for a crazy person—would refuse to do that. So where does that free will come from? It doesn’t make any sense from the body’s perspective. The brain has no reason to say, ‘I’m going to sit there and pee in my pants and not eat anything’—it’s totally meaningless, except to prove that I am in charge.”
Listening to Matthieu Ricard, I had a naughty thought.
Maybe the materialists have got it wrong.
Maybe the emperor has no clothes. Maybe we do have a mind, consciousness—a soul—that works with the material brain but is independent of it.
The attempt to explain spiritual experience through neurology alone reminds me of a joke I heard recently from a Buddhist monk. A person loses his car keys. It’s dark outside, and he’s looking right under a streetlamp. Another person comes over and asks, “What are you doing?” And the man replies, “Well, I lost my keys.” And the other fellow says,“Did you lose them here?” And the man says,“No, I lost them way over yonder, but this is where the light is.”
Brain activity, chemical reactions, the functions of the various lobes of the brain—this is where the light is for modern-day scientists. Peering at brain scans and EEGs is something they are really good at. And so they keep on doing it, even though there is a possibility that at least part of the explanation lies somewhere else, just beyond their circle of light.
Since scientists have not presented an airtight case that matter is the sum total of reality, I decided to venture beyond the circle of light, beyond the boundaries of safe, mainstream science. This leads directly to the ground zero of scientific debate: the nature of consciousness. Can a person perceive when her brain is not
functioning
? When the radio receiver is broken, or out of batteries, can it pick up a signal? What happens to consciousness when the physical brain is stilled by death?
CHAPTER 9
Out of My Body or out of My Mind?
THE DILEMMA FOR CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCHERS IS THIS: How do you tease apart the mind from the brain? For most of us, the brain and the mind cannot be distinguished: if the brain stops, so does the person’s consciousness and perception of reality. Little surprise, then, that most scientists believe the physical brain and nonphysical consciousness are two sides of the same coin.
But a healthy number of people say that assumption is flat wrong. No doubt you have met a few of them, perhaps unwittingly: people whose consciousness kept ticking after their brains shuddered to a halt. These people have approached the border of death and lived to tell the tale, and their stories suggest that mind is more than matter.
By his own account, Michael Sabom was an unlikely candidate to launch a methodical investigation into the murky world of consciousness. In 1976, a friend gave Sabom a copy of Raymond Moody’s block-buster book about near-death experiences,
Life After Life.
Sabom, a cardiologist, announced his assessment.
“I said I thought it was hogwash,” Sabom told me.
But his friends challenged him to ask some of his patients whether they had experienced this phenomenon or not.
“I fully expected that they would not report anything like this. I went in and the third patient I talked to had had a classic near-death experience.”
As he related his story, Sabom was sitting in a big brown leather chair in his brilliantly lit, uncluttered office in north Atlanta. His thick gray hair was as unruly as a Brillo pad, and his voice was southern and drowsy. He wore a white lab coat, a reminder that his day job was fixing people’s hearts, not tracking their spiritual experiences. But he had cleared two hours in his afternoon for me. For more than three decades, Sabom has enjoyed a passionate affair with near-death experiences.
As a scientist, Sabom sought some proof of their existence. He realized you cannot verify the drama in someone’s brain during a near-death experience, any more than I can confirm the veracity of the daydream you claimed to have enjoyed yesterday afternoon. Even if you had been lying in a brain scanner at the time of your alleged daydream, I still could not verify it, since we have not developed the technology to peek into your thoughts.