Over the past year or so, I have found myself developing opinions about meditation. I am not an expert meditator or a meditation teacher. I acknowledge and respect the long and ancient histories of meditative practice. Even so, I think about meditation a lot, and I believe that modern neuroscience can help people choose how to meditate.
To people newer to the practice, the idea that there are many choices about meditation that need to be resolved might come as a surprise. There are some widespread sets of instructions that make “meditation” feel like a single thing. These instructions usually sound like, “turn your attention to your breath in the present moment; simply observe thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise; approach these thoughts, feelings, and sensations with curiosity and without judgment, while re-directing attention to the breath.” In fact, many great meditation teachers wisely de-emphasize particulars to beginners. When starting a meditation routine, it can be more effective to be curious and build a consistent habit rather than getting bogged down by self-judgment about the quality of practice. However, as the meditator progresses, how one meditates starts to matter more.
In its essence, I think that the idea of meditation could be expanded to be more inclusive to encompass all solely mental practice. We humans can do a fantastic amount of work just inside our own brains. One of the fundamental realizations of meditation is that we can change our minds directly through mental work. A more liberal perspective about what comprises meditation is advantageous because it forces you first to ask what you’re trying to get out of the meditation practice. If I wanted to be a professional chess player, a beneficial “meditation” might be to play a lot of chess in my head. There is plenty of evidence in psychology and neuroscience that mental practice leads to tangible improvements in many areas. Even something superficially non-mental-seeming, like finger strength, can be improved through mental training. For many things (like finger strength), actual physical practice is optimal and leads to more significant improvements than mental practice alone. However, for many other abilities, mental practice can be hugely beneficial or even necessary. These abilities include training your emotional regulation, default thought patterns, imagination abilities, meta-cognition, attention, and mindfulness.
Many traditions of meditation practice — the kind of thing that we more readily recognize as meditation — start by challenging our own minds to be more mindful. The idea of mindfulness is that our thoughts, feelings, and sensations remain in the present more often, rather than wandering off to the past or future. I touched on what I think is some core competition in the brain between attending to the present versus attending to the past/future in a previous post. In that article, I discussed my fascination with a common phenomenon in expert meditators. They report that attending to the present changed from being an effortful exercise to being effortless. This change might reflect a switch in the default direction of information processing in the brain as being either down or up a predictive hierarchy.
There seem to be many excellent benefits of mentally spending more time in the present and less time in the future and the past. For many people, perseverating about past mistakes or anxiety and stress about the future can be debilitating. Learning to spend a lot of time in the present can give people an intuitive sense of the impermanence of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, which can be very comforting. As people pay attention to their arising thoughts, they begin to experience thoughts as separate from themselves and often learn to distance themselves from toxic self-criticism. In general, sitting still and breathing more slowly can be a relaxing break from a stressful and fast-paced life. These beneficial attributes of mindfulness training have led to the great success of meditation in the world today.
But for advanced meditators, building mindfulness is really more of the beginning of the journey. Usually, after meditators achieve this effortless mindfulness or have substantially improved their capacity to remain present, they begin to train in more specific ways. There is a vast diversity of techniques, but at risk of majorly oversimplifying, I would categorize traditional meditation techniques as falling into two major categories. One of those categories is “open-monitoring.” The other category is “focused attention.” Both of these techniques rely on the meditator’s ability to keep their mind attending to the present moment, but they practice directing attention in opposing ways. In open-monitoring, one releases the control of attention, which is possible now that their mind can rest in the present without the substantial effort of attentional control. In this practice, they open up their awareness to all experiences, including sensations, thoughts, and feelings, and strive to just experience these things as they happen. In contrast, in focused meditation techniques, meditators maximize control of attention by attempting to direct all their attention to one object or sensation.
Although research is somewhat scarce on advanced meditators, what does exist suggests that both types of meditative practices can lead to very substantial changes to the brain and psychology. However, those changes differ depending on which style the practitioner follows. This is important. If you take meditation far enough, the path you take will lead to non-trivial differences in how your mind works. Meditation appears to lead to trait differences in the brain that go beyond the meditation state. In other words, an advanced meditator’s attentional systems change, even when they are not meditating. For example, focused attention can lead to improved perceptual discrimination, greater perceptual sensitivity, and increased ability to sustain attention over time. In contrast, open monitoring practices can improve distributed attention tasks, such as responding quickly and accurately to an unexpected cue. It is difficult to completely differentiate the two because most expert meditators train using both methods.
An excellent theoretical paper recently came out that discusses meditation practices in terms of hierarchical processing within a prediction framework. In this framework, meditation practice leads to a progressive reduction in predictive processing in the brain. By disengaging automatic predictive anticipatory processes, the meditator dramatically alters their conscious experience. Within this predictive processing framework, focused attention fundamentally increases the precision and perceptual weight of a source of sensory experience. Instead, in open monitoring, all mental objects are assigned low precision. The meditator attempts to let mental objects go by without pursuing them further, which reduces the time allowed to confirm mental predictions. In this process, the meditator experiences a sensory object processed at a lower level of the predictive hierarchy of the brain.
At the risk of alienating some meditators here, many of whom are much more advanced than me, I think there are clear recommendations for proceeding in advanced practice from this hierarchical processing perspective. However, first I should say that I believe all meditative practice should begin by deciding, very specifically, what you are trying to achieve through the method. I have personal biases because of my own beliefs about nature. I find practical reasons for meditating to be mostly laudable and mystical reasons misinformed. By “practical,” I mean things like reducing stress, managing mental illness or dysregulation, boosting compassion, gaining insight into your own cognitive processes, and improving focus and sustained attention. By mystical, I mean things like striving for ego-death, experiencing and interpreting visions, experiencing a lack of distinction between the self and the world, experiencing sensory input without seeing defined objects, etc.
To be sure, these types of perceptual experiences are fascinating. In fact, seeking them out could easily fall into the category of gaining insight into your own mental processes. But I think that many people seek these insights as truths about nature and the universe. These experiences tell us about the brain. I think many of the phenomena can be understood as what naturally happens when you find ways to inhibit or disrupt normal predictive-hierarchical processing. These may be interesting experiences, akin to trying a hallucinogenic drug, but it takes a significant amount of training to push your brain into these states. I fear that it may be dangerous to override such fundamentally valuable features of the brain, such as categorizing sensations into objects or modeling yourself as an agent in the world.
Fundamentally, we can alter the mind to intuitively “know” more or less. This “knowledge,” I believe, is related to the level of hierarchical processing of sensory objects in the brain. As new semantic concepts are composed of smaller sub-concepts and distinguished from related ideas, we learn to intuit more complex and nuanced models about the world. Altering our minds in this way is just regular, good-ole learning. In my infancy, I saw lines; then I learned that those lines formed a building; then I realized that the building was a bank; then I learned the function of banks at varying levels of complexity. When I look at banks now, I have a better sense of their function in society. My emotional response to seeing a bank is equivalently complex. I know more about my external environment.
Sometimes it is beneficial to unlearn things or to see things from a fresh perspective. Although it seems to be harder to do, the predictive framework of meditation suggests that we can also unlearn at an intuitive perceptual level, especially through the practice of open-monitoring. This could be achieved by inhibiting prediction mechanisms. You can get a sense of what this is like by trying a fun exercise that I invented for myself once when I was bored. Try to listen to someone speaking your native language without understanding it, as if it was a language completely foreign to you. It is challenging to do! But after practicing this exercise for some time, I am usually able to do it in short bursts.
My concern about long-term open monitoring practice is that practitioners may incorrectly come to believe that they intuitively know more about the world rather than correctly perceiving that they know less. For a concrete example, let’s say some area in the brain generates the sense that you are localized within your body. With large amounts of practice, perhaps you can suppress the functioning of this area, and your intuitive, conscious perception of yourself is that you are not inside your body. Instead, you are floating outside of it. A neuroscientist would find the experience disconcerting, to be sure. But they would probably think, “well, some area of my brain has to generate the sense that I am inside my body. It’s not like that embodied sense just happens automatically.” The experience would be weird, but nothing in their previous worldview would be fundamentally violated. However, to a non-neuroscientist, who perhaps has never pondered deeply about the origins of their perceptions, it may be much more tempting to believe that they have learned something true and essential about themselves. Despite all their previous experience, they are not tethered in any way to their body. This experience may give them a powerful, intuitive sense of dualism. They might think, “I am clearly outside of my body. Therefore, the soul must be separate from the body.”
To me, it seems like many meditative insights fall into this category — experiencing “no-self,” perceiving the world without distinct object boundaries, perceiving thoughts and emotions as separate from the self, experiencing dramatic and powerful visions and sensations in the body. Some of these insights can be empowering. Someone educated in neuroscience might not be surprised that you could achieve such states, but even so, intuitively experiencing them could leave a lasting impression. However, I’m worried that people seek these states as ways of experiencing deeper truths about nature and, in some cases, strive to make these perceptual changes permanent. I do not see the value in this at all. It seems like that would introduce impairments that would ultimately cripple someone’s ability to interact with the world.
Focused attention practice seems both less dangerous and more useful to me. Let’s go back to thinking about meditation as a class of specific mental training exercises. Focused meditation trains brain mechanisms involved in perceptual clarity and sustained attention, which strike me as handy skills. Open monitoring meditation is harder to pinpoint but seems to primarily train non-prediction. This can lead to “improvements” in some rare experimental circumstances, but I am much more skeptical that this will sharpen a mind in ways that are very useful in the world.
I’m glad that expert meditators exist, and I would hesitantly advocate for studying that population much more closely. Advanced meditators have spent tens of thousands of hours investigating their own minds. They can presumably describe their mental states in more accurate and subtle ways than us normal folk. I say “hesitantly” because of the history of psychology. Experimental psychology began with a very similar paradigm pioneered by Wilhelm Wundt. He would train expert introspectors to learn about the secrets of the mind. That period taught us that it is hard to remove the bias of our education in introspection. Even so, the potential to learn about cognitive mechanisms through this population seems underutilized.
However, I think for most people, before we pursue an intense meditation practice, we should seriously think about why we are doing it and what our goals are. There is a rapidly growing application of meditation for the treatment of undesirable mental conditions. Just like other medicine, perhaps we should be more concerned about what dose is too much.
There is sort of a profound underlying philosophical question here about what we should be striving for. Let’s imagine that advanced meditation practice is guaranteed to lead to extreme equanimity, peace, and bliss. That sounds pretty good! But let’s also imagine that these affective states come along with profound changes to the mind: that you have no self and have no sensual desires. Those side-effects would undoubtedly be detrimental to my current relationships and life. Pursuing that state would be entirely out of accord with my current goals.
Opioids also lead to peace and bliss, but most people understand that taking opioids all the time can disrupt the lives that they want in negative ways. I don’t think that many people similarly view meditation. Probably, part of the reason for this is that it is hard to achieve these profoundly altered perceptual states without extreme devotion to practice. Most people don’t devote so much time and effort, so for most people, meditation is only beneficial. What makes me nervous, though, is that it seems like the goal of many meditation practices is to achieve these “enlightened” states of “insight.” Thus, many forms of meditation practice, and especially open-monitoring methods, are geared towards this goal.
With so much hype around meditation, it may be helpful for meditators to take a moment and ask themselves why they are meditating. Are the mental practices that they are engaging in ideal for their goals, or are the practices designed with different goals in mind? I hope that by putting more thought into the range of mental-work that could be reclaimed as “meditation,” new practices can be designed to represent the full diversity of peoples’ goals.