Article originally published in Counter Arts on Medium on July 29, 2024
In Part 1, I introduced the book Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, 2017), by science writer Daniel Goleman and psychologist and neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, and I discussed the general goals of meditation, types of meditation, and health benefits of meditation, some of them arising through lasting changes on the brain.
Here’s Part 2
The authors of Altered Traits are incredibly positive about meditation, and they delve into the neuroscience and other biology behind the above lasting changes with gusto, talking, for instance, about the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and the insula, and how they are involved with emotions and regulating emotions, and with our readiness to help others; and then also discussing how better emotional regulation can also help with pain management.
Disclaimer: The information on This Blog is intended for general informational and educational purposes only—not as medical advice. I am not a medical or health practitioner, and no part of This Blog, or the articles, websites, and products I mention and link to on This Blog, is intended as professional medical or health advice, and should not be considered as such. Consult with your doctor(s) about starting any course of treatment, taking any supplements, or changing any (dietary, exercise, etc.) routines. Meditation, especially if you do it for more than thirty minutes a day, comes with risks, including hyperarousal and dissociation. Dr. Willoughby Britton mentions these risks and others on a podcast with Tim Ferriss titled The Hidden Risks of Meditation, and she also has a virtually comprehensive list of symptoms on the website of the Cheetah House. Here are my Full Terms and Conditions.
A part of the book that I deeply enjoyed — and that also poses many questions — is about the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which is connected to our “monkey mind” and our sense of self. The DMN gets toned down when we experience that state of consciousness called flow, and is also quieted as a lasting effect of long-term meditation, leading to a lightening of the self.
In other sections of the book, the authors point out that the reward system is activated in loving-kindness meditation and dampened in Vipassana, and that the nucleus accumbens, involved in the reward system and in sustaining emotional attachments, has reduced gray-matter volume in long-term meditators.
Finally, another intriguing bit in the book is about gamma waves — how they pervade the brain in experienced yogis, even in sleep, giving them that amazing quality of mindfulness we only experience in super-quick moments of insight, and so on.
Meditation Is Not Always Safe
For all its amazing putative benefits, meditation also comes with risks. As the authors note, many on the contemplative path go through the dark night of the soul, something that seems to be a common fixture in all spiritual traditions — though not everyone experiences it. Dr. Willoughby Britton, whom I mentioned in the Disclaimer after coming across the authors’ comments about her work, addresses these meditation risks in her research — and she also founded and leads a center, called Cheetah House, which deals with adverse effects from meditation. Again, these effects can be quite big. You can listen to her in a podcast with Tim Ferriss.
As Dr. Britton points out, the same mechanisms that gear up at the ingestion of psychedelics can activate when doing meditation, leading to hyperarousal that may include insomnia, anxiety, and psychosis. This is the fight-or-flight reaction.
Another mechanism, that of the prefrontal cortex quieting the limbic system, which can be triggered by hyperarousal, can leave people numb. This is the brain’s freeze response. Dr. Britton mentions, for instance, one practitioner who discovered that, after her experience with meditation, she didn’t have emotions anymore when taking care of her young children. Dr. Britton quotes this woman in one of her papers, and it’s startling to read the words. This woman was trying to feel something, anything, for her loved ones, and she couldn’t.
In the podcast, Dr. Britton mentions how at one conference a Buddhist scholar reacted to her comments about some of these undesired emotional effects. He said that unattachment, including to your family, is what meditation is supposed to help with, so of course you’ll experience emotions of reduced intensity. Dr. Britton responded by emphasizing that we then need to decide our goals with meditation before we engage in it.
That said, there are different styles of practice, and loving-kindness meditation (LKM) is much different from single-focus meditation. Focused attention meditation helps us tone down our amygdala response, while LKM increases that response.
The amygdalae — one on each side of the brain — are involved in our reactions to stress and our feelings of anxiety, as these brain areas amplify both attention and emotions. According to the authors, people who work up to seventy hours a week in stressful jobs show both larger amygdalae and less regulation of the amygdalae by the prefrontal cortex. As a result, in a test where such participants view images of negative emotions, they can’t bring down their affective response on cue — they can’t downregulate.
But the amygdalae deal with both negative and positive emotions, so quieting down the amygdalae could leave us more even-tempered — that desired quality of equanimity — while also, depending on the case, more or less cut off from emotions we want in our life, which, in extreme cases, looks like anhedonia.
The Brain’s Default Mode Network and Our Sense of Self
There’s a lot in the book about studies researching meditation’s impact on attention, but more of an interest to me were the connections between contemplative practice and the brain’s default mode network (DMN), since meditation seems to dampen the latter much like flow states — only with meditation this can become a lasting change.
In essence, studies show that meditation weakens the neural paths that come together to form our sense of self — i.e. the DMN that, incidentally, gets stronger when we are passive. This is something that flummoxed Marcus Raichle in 2001: how come, he wondered, that some brain regions are more active when we are resting and deactivate when we are engaged in a difficult cognitive task? Through self-reports from study participants, researchers eventually gathered that when we are passive, various brain circuitry gets busy creating our sense of self.
Meditation, with its emptying of the mind, is then, the authors write, a lightening of the self. This is achieved through a stronger connection between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the DMN, with the former regulating the latter. Long-term meditators seem to have the DMN similarly activated before a test as during meditation — which shows this to be an altered trait: they have achieved the condition of higher baseline mindfulness.
As a side note, the authors single out the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in the DMN, but the exact makeup of DMN is not established: various other areas are proposed, including the angular gyrus, which is part of a network involved in memory recollection.
Research by Prof. Davidson also shows that in experienced meditators with an average of 7,500 hours, the nucleus accumbens is diminished in volume, which in turn reduces connectivity between this region and various circuits in the brain that bring together our sense of self.
The nucleus accumbens plays a role in both the reward system and that of emotional attachments. Less gray matter in this region, the authors write, may suggest a weaker narrative self as well as point to the path of achieving both compassion and a lighter sense of being — and, eventually, that touted emptiness.
Our Sense of Self, Again
Goleman and Prof. Davidson talk positively about meditation lightening one’s sense of self, but Dr. Britton warns that this can come not only with a quieting of the monkey mind but also with all kinds of changes to your narrative self, your identity self, and your connection to your body, emotions, and thoughts, as well as to the ways you relate to others and the world — or how you can’t relate if those boundaries fade away. Those changes in the sense of self and symptoms of dissociation can be drastic and destabilizing.
You may feel ungrounded to the point of disconnecting from your emotions so that you have emotions but they don’t feel like they’re yours, or, alternatively, you may feel numb and experience an affective flattening, and you can feel so far removed from your emotions and thoughts that nothing seems to matter anymore. Your mind may feel blank and you may have trouble making decisions and using your executive function in general. Then some people experience a loss of sense of agency with regard to automatic or intentional actions. You may also experience a loss of sense of ownership of your body or changes in your sense of embodiment, which can feel distressing and disorienting. And the list continues.
You can learn more about symptoms in all categories on the website of Cheetah House. These symptoms belong to the affective, cognitive, somatic, perceptual, sense of self, conative (motivational), and social domains.
In a decade-long Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, which led to many papers on meditation, Dr. Britton worked with people whose impairment from meditation lasted from a few days to longer than a decade, averaging one to three years for all participants. In the case of the cited woman experiencing anhedonia, her hell, as she calls it, lasted a year.
So it’s not all a bed of roses, but at the same time, Dr. Britton mentions that the adverse effects they have studied tend to happen to people doing more than thirty minutes a day of meditation — which is all the more reason to start small, as Prof. Davidson also advises.
Then once we move to longer durations or maybe retreats, Dr. Britton and Ferriss caution that it’s important to look for an environment that feels right: one that, as Dr. Britton and Ferriss emphasize, has experienced and flexible teachers, and precautions and safety measures in place. And then, of course, it’s important not to do what Ferriss did, and what Dr. Britton says is the temptation for many young males, in particular. In a recent retreat experience, Ferriss combined the difficulty of the sustained meditation itself with fasting, lack of sleep, and psychedelics! He was lucky that Jack Kornfield himself led the retreat he was on, and he was able to help with Ferriss’s hyperarousal symptoms — loops of fast thoughts and a deluge of visualizations — , which he feared would lead him to loss of executive function.
Awareness, Insight, Connection, and Purpose
In the conversation with Dr. Mayim Bialik, Prof. Davidson, in contrast, talks about Awareness, Insight, Connection, and Purpose (ACIP), his favorite framework for well-being, which, he says, guides his research on meditation. To thrive as a human, he says, to be fulfilled, we need all these four elements.
And yet research on meditation has not caught up to this four-pronged concept, Prof. Davidson goes on to explain. There are a great many studies on awareness, followed by a lot on connection as well — when researching loving-kindness meditation, a trend that, by the way, started later than research on mindfulness meditation. Unfortunately, he says, researchers haven’t considered insight in experiments, and while they have done some studies on purpose, they haven’t spent time analyzing the matter of how to train purpose, which is so important. And, as he explains in the interview with Dr. Williamson, by purpose Prof. Davidson means purpose in doing the little things as well.
As for insight, in this instance it means seeing through the ruses of our narrative self. Prof. Davidson says that we can change our relationship to this narrative, which will then push it to a different place, if we accept that it’s only a mesh of thoughts. The key word is accept it — we need to work with it and through it.
Of course, there’s so much more to consider at the intersection of meditation, psychology, biology, and neuroscience, but I’d like to leave you with some thoughts on happiness, inspired by Dr. Britton’s TEDx talk of 12 years ago. In this talk, she unpacks Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert’s now-famous 2010 study of how happiness is linked to attention.
I’ll write more about how meditation helps with attention in a different piece, but for now, here’s a little about this research. Participants using an app would get notifications to write about their state of mind — thoughts, feelings — as well as their activity at certain times of the day. The app gathered 250,000 data points from 2,250 volunteers aged 18 to 88. The conclusions? People spend almost half their time — 46.9% — thinking about other things than the task at hand, and they’re less happy when they do that than when they’re paying attention.
The title of the study is “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”
Which, I guess, essentially means that meditation, by strengthening our mindfulness, could, indeed, make us happy — if only because, if we choose a style that’s right for us and all goes well, we’ll be more in touch with the present and the world.
But then, is that enough? Wouldn’t we also need inner peace? Well, for some of us, happiness doesn’t have to include equanimity. Some people are addicted to emotional intensity, whether it does them good or ill. They like to love big and there are many who love them back for that, even when they may get hurt by them.
Other people live for moments where sparks of joy brighten up a rather grayish life. They, too, find like-minded lovers, friends, and family, and if they manage to have enough cheerful events and moments of delight in their life, they’re happy.
And then there are people who want the smallest of things fresh — unwilted, unfaded. They aim at an even temper that would let them appreciate the quiet but moving beauty of each moment. They can be delicate or heavier in mien, but they all want a continuum of being content and an easiness in their heart. And they want and try to give of themselves, too, even if others sometimes expect them to act differently.
For the ardent cats, the steady horses, and the dreamy caterpillars who are willing to work hard to be able to float on the wind (and for all humans who want to better their nature), there’s sustained meditation — done daily over a long time — , contemplative practices of different styles, different approaches, and different rhythms that can take us on a journey of discovery, one fraught with risks but also one that can be most rewarding.
Thank you for reading! I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. As always, pins and shares are much appreciated!
To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
HappierHealthier.Blog 