VOX
We’re laying out the latest science of what meditation does to your mind. The better we understand the common mechanisms across how different meditation practices affect the mind, the more meditation science can contribute to broader understandings of human psychology.
More relevant for us non-scientists, we’ll get better at developing and fine-tuning styles of practice that can help us get the most out of whatever we’re looking for in taking up meditation. (It’s possible, after all, that there are improvements to be made on the instructions we received a few thousand years ago.)
There’s a lot to get into here, but if you walk away from this with anything, it should be that in the past few years, a breakthrough has begun sweeping across meditation research, delivering science’s first “general theory of meditation.” That means very exciting days — and more to the point, scientifically refined meditation frameworks and practices — are not too far ahead.
Don’t we already know what meditation is?
Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.
Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.
One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.
But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.
Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there.
Which might leave you wondering why it’s mindful relaxation that gets all the attention. For one thing, there’s how much time we imagine deeper meditation practices will take — we’ll get into that later in this course. Another obstacle blocking advanced meditation’s path into the mainstream is that a critical mass of Americans aren’t exactly itching to become full-on Buddhists. But if you turned to science instead of religion for guidance on these meditation practices in the past few decades, you’d mostly find a bunch of scattered neuroscience jargon that doesn’t all hang together.
Buddhism can paint a really elaborate picture of what’s going on with meditation, with ancient models of meditative development still being used today, like the four-path model. Science has struggled to do the same. We know some interesting but scattered things: Meditation makes parts of your brain grow thicker. It changes patterns of electrical activity in key brain networks. It raises the baseline of gamma wave activity. It shrinks your amygdala.
The problem, as Shamil Chandaria, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, put it to me, is weaving it all together into a story that shows us the big picture. “In terms of all these neuroscience results,” Chandaria said, “there’s this problem of what does it all mean?”
In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.
A general theory of meditation
Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.
Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm.
“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.
Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)
And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.
Pete Gamlen for Vox
You can think of this progression as four rungs on a ladder that lead from the surface of the mind all the way down to the bottom. Or, from the beginner stages of meditation, all the way through to the very advanced. You can place a huge variety of meditative practices — though not all — somewhere along this spectrum.
And just about everything that’s grown popular under the label of mindfulness is in that first group of focused-attention practices. The idea that meditation can make you “10 percent happier” is talking about these introductory practices that settle the mind.
But the idea that meditation can make you 10 times happier, like meditation teacher Shinzen Young claims, references the next stages: practices that open up once the mind begins to settle.
Once more, with science
Now, bear with me. We’re going to retell that story, but using Laukkonen and Slagter’s innovation — the general theory of meditation. The key to this framework is a theory that’s risen to dominate cognitive science in the past decade or so: predictive processing.
Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals. These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls.
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